QUACK! QUACK! QUACK! QUACK!!!!

Yeah, the Mighty Ducks is on one of our 4 channels. Thanks for that warmup, Tyler. Hah. Too bad I can't stay and watch it, its a high stakes high energy movie :-).

BUUUUUT I am busy! Yesterday I lighting "designed," teched, operated and ran a cue2cue for my first show as all mighty lighting god! The play is called "Haters," by Susan Pak, for the 10th annual Midtown International Theatre Festival or (MITF). There are three shows, today (Tuesday), Friday and Sunday at "Where Eagles Dare", Studio Blackbird, on 36th and 8th. Not that anyone who reads this is in town or available to come see it. "Sometimes the best friends make the best enemies," is a little soap opera-esque, but the cast and director do a great job. There are four characters, Mo Shin and Laura, best friends paired against each other, Mark - Mo's fiance and Laura's lover, and Glen - the IT dork that the girls prank on online. Aaannnnd of course Laura had a kid at nineteen by her stepfather, we find out later in the play. But my wonderful roommate is a wonderful director, and everyone living in my apartment is involved. Brian, Erin and I are working on a show again for the first time all together in 5 years! So we all walk in to the space for the first time and I'm looking around for the lightboard and can't find it :-). It's a small but decent space, reminding me a lot of the Jovennes 98 space in Puerto Rico. The tech guy shows me the light board which is a simple, manual, two preset, 8 channel board. No recording cues! So everything is a crossfade, one preset at a time! I play around with some looks, get the basics down and we start running, with my fiddling, learning, creating as I go. I ended up with about 20 cues for an hour piece. Now that I've done my first program and tech, I know what to do differently next time. You HAVE to be super organized! I re-ordered and clarified all my work after on a magic sheet of sorts, but it would have definitely helped to have been more prepared with a system while running. Now I know! I gained a lot of confidence from this experience, and it was fun!! Don't know how I would hold up with, say 50 lights and different colors and whatnot, but... I suppose in that case I wouldn't be setting all the levels for each channel and each look manually. :-)

The next show I'm involved in THIS WEEK, is "T.A.B." or "Trendy Asian Bitch," also written my Susan Pak. This is a re-mount reading of the original full piece, aslo directed by Erin. She has been working directly with the playwright for these two plays, getting them shown as much as possible. Her work deals with a sort of "American/white versus Asian" dynamic, dealing with girls' identity challenges. I am taking over Julia's original role of Kathy, the girl next door type, that apparently "was Julia" so I've got big shoes to fill :-P. We're throwing together some rehearsals in between Haters for TAB to go up on Saturday at Barrow Group Theatre, Studio B. The script for T.A.B. is very interesting with a lot of "special effects" and surreal writing. I like it a lot, I wish I could have seen the first production.

WELL, I'm off to my first time at S'MAC! with Cait! WOOHOO!

Catchya on the flip side.