Not ONE word out of any of you.

Liz Buchanan -- [adjective]: Banshee-like 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

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!

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

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."

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)

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.

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

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?"

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!

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!

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

"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.

A Time to Reflect

10 years ago... It was 1997

1.) How old were you?: Fourteen

2.) Where did you go to school?: JL Mitchener Public School

3.) Where did you work?: I babysat occasionally

4.) Where did you live? 23 King St, York

5.) Where did you hang out? There aren't really places to "hang out" in Cayuga

6.) Did you wear glasses? Nope

7.) Who was your best friend?: Chris Jaic

8.) How many tattoos did you have? Aside from some rub-ons nodda.

9.) How many piercings did you have? two

10.) What car did you drive?: Go-Kart

11.) Had you been to a real party yet? Unfortunately I had.

12.) Had your heart broken?: I think the more appropriate term is having your hormones broken.

13.) Single/Taken/Married/Divorced/Bitter: Single and not bitter. One of the few times in my life that I was really quite content on my lonesome.

14.) Favourite band: No Doubt

15.) Favourite movie: The Rock


5 years ago... It was 2002

1.) How old were you?: 19

2.) Where did you go to school?: Cayuga Secondary School

3.) Where did you work?: Subway. This particular day as I recall >:(

4.) Where did you live?: Still York, later that year Peterborough.

5.) Where did you hang out?: Work and school

6.) Did you wear glasses? Still no

7.) Who was your best friend?: Sutor and Tammy

8.) Who was your regular-person crush?: I refuse to admit on the grounds that it is WAY too embaressing.

9.) How many tattoos did you have?: none.

10.) How many piercings did you have?: Same old, same old, though I had a fake nose ring I liked to wear on occasion.

11.) What car did you drive? I sort of gradually took over the Intrepid by placing my empty pizza boxes and gym clothes in the back seat and reprogramming the radio stations to 102.1 the Edge.

12.) Had you had your heart broken? At that age it's more like having your brain broken.

13.) Single/Taken/Married/Divorced/Bitter: Single til the summer

14.) Favourite Band: The Dave Matthews Band (in fact I was just about to see them in concert for the first time as a B-Day present)

15.) Favourite movie: Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail

Presently

1.) How old are you?: 24 today :)

2.) Where do you work? Zellers and Signature Group Creative Marketing

3.) Where do you live? Sudbury, in my professor's house!

4.) Do you wear glasses?: Nope (PS: Andrew aren't you SUPPOSED to wear glasses?)

5. Who do you hang out with most? :P The Zellers staff, the Dooly's staff, Joe and Andrew.

6.) Do you talk to your old friends?: Zach and Yvonne for sure!

7.) How many piercings do you have?: My earring holes have grown over.

8.) How many tattoos?: I want a tattoo of a lizard crawling up my back.

9.) What kind of car do you drive? Sudbury transit is my ride.

10.) Has your heart been broken?: At this age you realize that the Tin Man was right. That's how you know you have one.

11.) Single/Taken/Married/Divorced/Bitter: Single, occasionally bitter :p

12.) Favourite band: Too many to chose from. At the moment I'm grooving on Arcade Fire, Bright Eyes and Feist.

13.) Favourite movie: Still a Python fan. Truthfully I am a huge sucker for Big Fish. It probably has my all-time favourite half hour of movie-making in the history of cinema (from him arriving at the circus, through to him arriving home from the war).

Her favourite flowers are daffodils

Don't forget to support that Canadian Cancer Society, this week (and I think next) they are selling daffodils!

Because one can never have too many...

Oh Geez

You have a mission. It is to go to the Rainbow Showcase Theatre and see the movie Fido. Not only is it the only thing worth watching at the movies right now (so far as I can tell) but I get the distinct feeling that it will not be at these cinemas for long. After all how can it compete with the likes of Norbit and Saw VIII?

It is satire at it's finest: both subtle and ridiculous (occasionally at the same time). It has all the makings of a cult classic. Possibly a cult of the living dead.




How else to describe it? It's like Dawn of the Dead meets Pleasantville, meets Bubba Ho-Tep encounters a cousin of The Stepford Wives and has a long distance relationship with Death Becomes Her.

What? I'm making observations about movies I've seen. I think it's healthy.

What am I doing?

Seriously. What am I doing with my life? If I get hit by a train tomorrow what will I have accomplished? Today I dealt with this woman complaining to me that at 80,000 HBC points for a $10 gift card at Zellers it "Isn't worht it". Isn't worth what? Pulling a card out of your damn wallet when you buy something? Shopping a huge cheap discount store and getting free crap for doing so? I mean I know it's made out to be more phenominal than it is, but the points are effing FREE people, what do you expect?! At 10 points you get a $50 gift card, congradulations we're out of business. Like what other place are you getting such sensational points from? Canadian Tire money? Airmiles?

You know what's "not worth it"? $8.25/hour to listen to you bitch about how your points aren't worth enough.



If I don't get into Grad school don't be surprised if my next production is "The Assasination and Persecution of Jean Paul Marat as performed by the inmates of the Assylum at Charenton under the direction of Liz Buchanan".

Lyrics for the day

Hey, I ain't never coming home
Hey, I'll just wander my own road
Hey, I can't meet you here tomorrow
Say goodbye don't follow

FREE ALCOHOL ON ST PATRICK'S DAY!

Now that I have your attention...

FREE ALCOHOL ON ST PATRICK'S DAY!


Seriously! On March 17th at the Algonquin Rd LCBO I am doing a tasting for the new Starbucks Cream and Coffee liquors. Come out and give them a try! I seriously don't care if you buy it or not, but I may need a little positive support as I attempt to sell a cream liquor on St Patty's day that isn't Baily's :S

Anyhow, come on out and see me at the Algonquin Rd liquor store on Saturday between 12:30 and 4:30 and get free booze and cookies.

And Liz Came Tumbling After

Yesterday I took a little tumble down my hill. I was always amazed that this didn't ever happen at Pearl St. I was rushing down the hill to get to the bus station in time for a quick Tim's break when I wiped out on some invisible ice. I went for a good two metre or so slide and knocked many numerous parts of my being around. I immediately got up and kept on going hoping that I wasn't hurt. After a short time I felt fine and rejoiced in my fabulous Wolverine-esque healing strength. It is possible that this was premature.

I woke up this morning and my whole body hurts. It's like I got run over by a train or something. I couldn't get a good picture of the bruise in the small of my back (chalk that up to a low megapixel digital camera and being too sore to twist my body around into good lighting). So here's my elbow bruise which was way cooler this morning:



I'm actually a big fan of bruises. I figure if it hurts you might as well have something to show for it.

Things I could watch if I got.... Satalite!

The music might be going down-hill, but a new career may be in the works...

Having said that I couldn't find an acting clip from the show that lasted long enough, so I went with the cool piano scene with Hugh Laurie: