where it's happenin'

My acting resume

With all the acting & working going on, this sad little blog has been very lonesome lately. (Not nearly as lonesome as my virtual pet on Facebook, but let's not go there.)

I did recently update my acting resume, and am frankly putting a post here about it in hopes of getting some search engine love. So you can follow the link or not, totally up to you, and no hard feelings if your answer is "Feh!" Recent updates include a page with photos and some anonymized comments from others ... kind of fun for ME to read if nobody else! :o)

I'm a Miracle Worker!

... or, a little more accurately and a lot more humbly, I've gotten a role in the classic play The Miracle Worker! As Helen Keller's mother. It's not the lead, to be sure, but the lead needs someone who looks like she's twenty, and they found someone MUCH closer to that age to play Annie Sullivan. But Kate, Helen's mom, is a complex character and on stage a great deal of the time, and I'm delighted at the opportunity.

I don't mind not being the lead as long as I'm not spending most of the night backstage, twiddling my thumbs and waiting to go on. It's not a comfortable sort of waiting for me. If I relax too much, I risk not getting on stage on time or falling so far out of character that my acting suffers. If I keep my energies / nerves too revved up, I'm either hyper or exhausted when I finally do get on stage. Best to just be on stage, in character, all night long, as far as I'm concerned!

I also have signed up for a weekend-long acting workshop in mid-June, and am currently reading the text book, "The Power of an Actor" by Ivana Chubbuck. Good stuff. She has twelve steps (doesn't everybody?) that you apply as you prepare for a role, and while I'm waiting to learn what scene I'll be applying them to for the purposes of the workshop (I know it will be from "The Secret of My Success" but I haven't gotten the script yet), I've been trying to analyze the MW role. It's a whole new way to approach acting for me; up till now it's been pretty much acting by instinct ... and that only gets you so far. I feel like I'm stretching my acting muscles and so far it feels pretty good!

Anyway, the show goes up late July, rehearsals don't start till about 5 weeks beforehand. And more good news, friend Betsy has accepted a small role in the play, so we can commute to rehearsals together! Betsy is famous for being a scene-saver. If someone "goes up on" (forgets) their lines, Betsy is so quick-witted that she'll figure out a way to help them get back on track. An extremely valuable person to have around! We acted together in my first acting experience two years ago ... look for pictures of Nurse Ilsa here.

Chard Stems, Acting, and Birds

I keep promising to post follow-ups, and it's gotten to the point that I have a list now of things to update you about! So here goes ...

Chard Stems

In a follow-up to my posting on Roasted Garbanzos with Garlic & Chard, here's the recipe using chard stems. And, by the way, the last time I went looking for chard, it was simultaneously a bit peaked and overpriced the last time I was in the store, so I substituted collard greens in the original recipe for roasted garbanzos. It was OK, but chard was better.

This recipe comes from a book you've heard me mention before, Jack Bishop's Vegetables Every Day. If ever there's a cookbook that's guaranteed to get dog-eared from regular use, it's this one. Mine's a well-loved mess! Kalyn informs me that he has a new book out, A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen, oriented toward helping us eat what's in season and thus as locally as possible. It's on my Amazon wish list with a priority of "highest", which means I'll probably have it by next Christmas at the latest. My family are very good about buying me books because they know it makes me so happy.

Most chard recipes call for cutting out the stems and discarding them. The recipe below is a tasty (albeit decidedly not diet-friendly) way to use them up instead of tossing them. In a recipe this simple, using a good quality cheese will make a big difference in the results. And Jack reminds us to be sure to cook the casserole long enough so that the edges start to brown.

Baked Chard Stems with Butter and Parmesan

1 pound chard stems (about 12 large), any bruised parts trimmed
Salt
3 T unsalted butter (I used a little less)
3/4 c grated Parmesan cheese

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Bring 4 quarts of water to a boil in a large pot. Lightly grease an 8-in-square baking dish.
2. Add the chard stems and salt to the boiling water. Cook until the stems are almost tender, about 8 minutes. Drain and reserve the stems.
3. Lay three or four chard stems in the prepared baking dish in a single layer, cutting them as necessary to make them fit. Dot with a little of the butter and sprinkle with some of the cheese. Repeat this process three or four more times, alternating the direction in which you place the stems for each layer, until all the chard, butter and cheese have been used.
4. Bake until chard is very tender and the top of casserole is lightly browned, about 25 minutes. Serve immediately.

This recipe is my entry for Sweetnick's ARF (anti-oxidant-rich foods) Tuesday. I've been absent from food blogging for so long, it's really good to put my oar in the cooking water again!

Acting

As a result of auditions previously mentioned here, I'm now in rehearsals for a brand new ten-minute play called "Pre-Nup," to be performed in the context of a ten-minute play festival two weekends in February. It's a plum role, as a wily aging Hollywood diva (think Faye Dunaway). I'm having a ball being "Delphina."It's been really interesting to be in the first cast to perform a play. The script is being modified as we act it and discover that certain lines don't work or motivations are unclear -- which admittedly makes it a little hard to memorize your lines, but it allows you to be part of the creative process, too. Pretty cool!

The playwright is directing her own play, not by choice but because her favorite director is unavailable. I've heard that this arrangement can make for problems in cases where the writer is too in love with the words they've written to be able to allow the acting creative process to take place. That certainly hasn't been the case here. She's been wonderful to work with and, as a former actor, very respectful of and interested in her cast's insights.

My co-actors are engaging and well cast. We have an amazing number of rehearsal hours logged and planned for only ten minutes of theater, and I have to admit the rest of my life is getting a bit squooshed as a result. In some senses it's fortunate the Huz is away till Wednesday so he's not feeling neglected. In another sense, though, it's very UNfortunate, because there's snow coming down out there and there's a long, steep driveway between my car in the garage and the street and no Huz muscles to clear it for me. Sigh.

Also am in rehearsals for a murder mystery weekend, but with much less intensity right now so I'll have to make another of those promises to update you more later!

Birds

No more sightings of the pine grosbeaks, I'm sorry to report. But here's a cute picture of a chickadee silhouetted against a blue, blue sky.

And I think that catches me up with all the updates I promised. Hope your Sunday is going well, and don't forget to check in at Anna's Cool Finds later today to get her roundup for Weekend Herb Blogging. She's offering a cookbook as a prize, in hopes of garnering the largest roundup so far. Will she make it? Stay tuned!

audition update

Yep, I was offered a part. One for sure. May be contacted for more later this week. More details later.

I'm all Sally Fields at the Oscars: "you like me, right now, you like me!"

hi, guys!

My friends, I'm gradually coming to the realization that I'm just going to be a blogging dilettante for the nonce. Life is happening! And it's all good, I'm a happy summer-into-fall camper, but I just have to live it and not worry about blogging it, you know? The briefest of summaries in classic IT project manager bullet points below are:

• I did get a part in the show with the director! But not the first show of his season, his second, which begins rehearsals mid-October with shows the weekends of November 30 and the 2 weeks following.
  
• It's a new, startup theater and I offered to create him a website. It's in the infancy stages, but I think it's going to be just about the nicest site I've ever done, which makes me think it's time to hang out my own web-related business shingle (I mean site) one day soon. Anyway, I'll try to remember to post a link to the Shaker Bridge Theater site when it goes live. [See it here.]
  
• Am also building a site for a friend who's a physical therapist, and doggone if that doesn't look pretty nice, too. Ditto re: the link. [here]
  
• My real work (IT project management) continues to be busy and gratifying.
• Simba is doing well!
• So is The Huz!
• Got to do some travelling for a couple of weeks in August. I'm not an Orlando fan, but I was down there for a conference and I'm still raving about the hotel there. See previous post. After that the Huz and I went to a nice Christian camp called Camp of the Woods with some friends who go there every summer. It was great!
• Next weekend we leave for a few days to visit my sis in Seattle for her [cough]ty-eighth birthday, looking forward to fresh seafood and lots of family time and perhaps, perhaps, even a few games of pinochle with her pals!
• Pal Robin and I are continuing to work our way through every doggone season of Buffy & The Vampire Slayer sequentially, a show that I missed entirely (purposely) during its run and which I've surprised myself by enjoying lots!
  

And I guess that's about it for now. Life is good here in the soon-to-be-golden Northeast. I hope you're feeling similarly blessed.