Saturday, April 28, 2007

Friday, April 27, 2007

Snoopy vs The Medium Sized Baron

A bunch of Zellers Graphic Tees went on sale this week, but the largest size I could find for any of them was medium. I thought I would try my luck with an adorable blue shirt with Snoopy and Charlie Brown (it has them cuddling and reads "All You Need Is Love"). But unfortunately it was a little too tiny for my upper-half :S

Dismayed I do what I do with every piece of cool clothing I find that doesn't fit me. I gave it to a friend. But today I thought I would try my luck again and tried on another medium shirt. For reasons I'll never comprehend this one fit.

Behold the world of Peanuts in all its glory!

Thursday, April 26, 2007

In case you didn't get the email

Hello All,

This year's summer Shakespeare (or "Shakespeare on the Grass" as I believe it is called), will be As You Like It. This is a casting call! I will be holding auditions next Monday and Tuesday. They are cold reads (so don't try to memorize a two page soliloquy between now and then). Please let me know if you can't make it and still want to be involved, I understand that this is very short notice.

Here's the skinny: Rehearsals will be from 6-9 on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I will likely add some Sunday evening rehearsals closer to the show (transportation permitting). This will make the rehearsal process intense as the show will go on as is tradition on the final full weekend of June. The dates are June 21-24. I wish I was kidding, but I'm not. That's seven weeks people, but we CAN and WILL do it and it will be awesome!

I'm looking for 6 males and 4 females who are committed, hard working, love to act and have a decent grasp of classical text. Don't sweat the auditions. All I'm looking for is if you can read Shakespeare and take direction.

Please forward this on to everyone you think will be interested. Post it on Facebook and your blogs. I will be thankful.

Hope to see as many people out as possible, and if anyone is interested in SMing for a Theatre Practicum, please let me know ASAP. Also you can use an acting role as a Practicum as well.


Lots of love,

Liz

Sunday, April 22, 2007

While my guitar gently weeps

Recently I have been picking away at my guitar. I learned a couple of new simple songs, and I have been using it to aid in my singing. Part of my York audition was to sing an unaccompanied song, but I find that practicing with my guitar helps my voice find where it's supposed to be.

But not twenty minutes ago a tragedy occurred. I had leaned my guitar against my laundry hamper hastily last night before conking out for some much needed sleep. This afternoon I carelessly hopped into my computer chair and rolled back. This was the result:




Gentle Ben!

For those unfamiliar with the tradition of guitar naming, generally a male names his guitar after a woman who broke his heart. Since no men (or women) had broken my heart to this point I went for the next closest thing: I named the guitar just after Ben Affleck had begun to date Jennifer Lopez. Plus the name has a lovely ring for a soft accoustic "classical" guitar.

I have had the guitar since I was 11. It was a Christmas present. At the time I was in the Seneca Central guitar club (which largely consisted of myself, Chris Jaic, Willy Harris and Kassandra Killman trying to get out of recess by hanging around inside pretending to learn to play guitar). I took lessons for a short while and then kind of put the guitar aside for a number of years, forgetting virtually everything aside from how some of the chords looked.

A few years ago I picked it up again and started to learn a few songs, with some encouragement from my fella, brother and a few guitar-saavy friends. Gentle Ben has been an easy guitar to learn on with his nylon strings and small body. I will miss him. As a tribute to Ben (not, I promise, as a punishment to anyone else) I am putting up one of the videos I took of myself singing and playing so that I could hear how I sounded.

My singing is its usual shakey self and I kind of screw up during the chorus, but in the immortal words of Mr Burns: "We did 35 takes, and THIS was the best one."


Friday, April 20, 2007

0 Frames per Second

I am off to the camera repair shop (Black's) because I cannot retrieve my photos from Montreal or the rest of my trip. I am fairly certain that my camera or memory card has malfunctioned and erased the entire trip. Bah humbug. Thus I cannot leave you with any lovely pictures or movies of my adventure :(
The good news is that you have yet another opportunity to acquire free booze from yours truly. This time around I'm giving away rum, and I'm at the Algonquin road LCBO from 4 to 8 tonight.



**************************


Also of interest:


"It is widely accepted that in 1971, a group of teenagers at San Rafael High School in San Rafael, California, calling themselves "The Waldos", used to meet every day after school at 4:20 p.m. to smoke marijuana at the Louis Pasteur statue. The term became part of their group's salute, "420 Louis," and it eventually caught on more widely. Many cannabis users continue to observe 4:20 as a time to smoke communally. By extension April 20 ("4/20" in U.S. dating shorthand) has evolved into a counterculture holiday, where people gather to celebrate and consume cannabis.

There are also many apocryphal urban legends attempting to explain the origin of the term. Two of the most common of these are that 420 refers to the number of active ingredients in cannabis (in actuality, there are around 315 active chemicals in cannabis, varying depending on the exact plant used), or that it is a police dispatch code related to cannabis. The San Francisco Police Department use "420" as a dispatch code for juvenile disturbances,and while this explains the origin of the urban legend, does not account for the origin of the term."
- (Wikipedia)

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Blog Therapy


To a young man I don't love,

When I saw you tonight, for the first time in five years I got a feeling that I did not expect. You smiled at me and said that you knew I would do great at my audition. Suddenly I was eighteen again.

I was not in love with you. I also did not so much love the "idea of you" but the idea of what you COULD be. I would look at you when you smiled warmly at me and see something that I didn't think anyone else saw. You were the most popular guy at school, good looking, funny and athletic. Every girl had a crush on you and every teacher fawned over you. You acted like a typical jock and were a cocky sarcastic jerk. You were lazy and took advantage of your popularity and status.

But every once in a while I would sit with you in class or on the bus and you would talk to me like you were a real person and I thought I somehow saw the real you. You had something in your eyes that went much deeper than all of this. I saw a potential for you to be something kinder, smarter, more interesting and thoughtful. I then romanticized the day that you would leave your crazy-controlfreak-abnoxious girlfriend and we would run away from Cayuga and all the stupid crap at CSS.

I confused this with love, but in reality it was just a romanticized ideal of your potential. I looked at how hurt you were when you lost your bestfriend and wanted you to be happy again. I looked at the path you were headed down and thought you could do better.

I am glad that even through my starry eyes and distorted adolescent notion of love... that I was right. Way to go.

Monday, April 16, 2007

Overheard in Montreal

Le Fille D'Ontario Est Stupide!

Francophone #1: ????
Francophone #2: ????
Francophone #1: (laughs) ????

---Notre Dame de Grace

Overheard by Ignore_ant_anglo

Alright just kidding. I think I had to pull out the "Parlez vous Anglais?" about three times, and probably only SHOULD have once. Mostly it had to do with my slaughtering of the French language beyond the comprehension of native speakers.


Anyways, what you really wanted:

Overheard in New York

Suit: I was up in Toronto last week. It was nice, but it was really cold.
Guy: Yeah, it's beautiful up there, but they get winter really early. It's like that Shakespeare line, 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.'
Suit: [Befuddled silence.]

--LIRR into Penn Station

Sunday, April 15, 2007

I'm so worried about the baggage retrieval system they've got at Pearson

Section B- Problem Solving

1. Liz departs from Montreal at 8:00pm on Saturday to Toronto. The luggage she checks does not accompany her. At 10pm in Toronto she is told that her luggage will arrive at 11pm that night and shipped to her in York the next day by noon. At 5:45pm the next day (Sunday) she receives a telephone call telling her that her luggage has "just" (assume "just" is an undefined variable) arrived in Toronto. The Lester B Pearson International Airport in Toronto is 59.92 Kilometres North East of York. How long will it take for Liz to be reunited with her luggage?

a) 2 hours (assuming light Sunday traffic and an average of 30kms/hour)
b) 24 hours
c) 48 hours
d) "Well probably sometime late Tuesday. You don't have anything important in there do you?"


Thursday, April 12, 2007

Something New

I'm off to Montreal for the weekend. I will be auditioning for the Drama and Development program which, theoretically, I will use to qualify for their MA in Drama Therapy.

This path is not so much the hard-core acting path as it is the "combining all things Liz and hoping that works out somehow" path. I would like to work with kids with disabilities doing drama games and puppetry, or at-risk teens doing Shakespeare and Classical productions to buiild character and team work skills.

But part of me still wants to just act. To just follow the dream, move to TO, get an agent and work the theatre/film/TV circuit. I suspect along with a part time gig at the Hudson's Bay Company :S yay.

For that reason I'm auditioning for York's MFA in Acting next Wednesday. I am doing a piece from Waiting for the Parade and Hamlet for my audition. I love both pieces and hope that my off-beat takes on them will play well.

Aside from that I just keep my fingers and toes crossed and pick up as many pennies as I can find.

Here's to a career in the Theatre Arts! (chugs glass of wine)



High diddily dee, an actor's life for me!

Friday, April 06, 2007

As if South Park wasn't enough

And this is why a bunny SHOULD be the Pope. It's the way Jesus would have wanted it.

Bunnies Rule!

Thursday, April 05, 2007

A Very Special South Park Easter

After a day of dealing with hundreds of jerks at Zellers who decided to observe Easter by swarming our stores to buy thousands of dollars worth of chocolate it was refreshing to find out that there was indeed a reason.

This is actually beautiful... in a weird way:


http://www.allabout-sp.net/?p=season11/1105

Monday, April 02, 2007

"Can't talk coming down"

I had another unfortunate mental lull amidst the dates surrounding my Birthday. Some of this was probably due to an anaphylactic reaction, being sick to my stomach and over working myself. Still- no excuses- I apologize for any disgruntled nature that came anyone's way. I'm a tool. Probably a wrench.

Despite working on my Birthday I had many high points. I got calls from all of my loving family with varying degrees of our traditional "Happy Birthday wailing". I got some B-Day cash which allowed me to purchase a camera I have been eying for sometime that went on an incredible sale. With it I have thus far taken taken a couple of blog-worthy from the premiere of my first ever professional acting gig-







Thanks also to Brian for the singing & guitar playing Mexican cats... that was what was in the ecard right? I hope I didn't hallucinate again...
Also I got some lovely presents from the likes of Joe MacDonald, in the form of a Gameboy Advance :D. And I got the brand-spanking new Modest Mouse CD and an iTunes card from the Rootman and Hazel-nut, and Stephie got me a book called "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Amatuer Theatre" (which I'm pretty sure was the alternate title for Peter Brooke's "The Empty Space). Mr Root also treated me to a Banana split full of empty vitamins. Many thanks all about!!

Anyways, something fascinating discovered on my Birthday:

On March 31st 1981 (two years before my birth! *hint hint* alibi) Ronald Reagan was shot. Not such a shocking piece of trivia until you know that my brother Scott was born on November 22nd, 1985... for non-history buffs... 23 years after JFK was assasinated! Tell me that isn't a little weird.





Sorry for the poor sync-up, but I feel it's worth it.

That's all from the new 24 year old for now.