"Play On!" Update and Auditions

I know, it's been a few weeks since I blogged.  I'm still getting used to this.

"Play On!" had a large preview audience and an energetic opening night audience, then a couple of small houses the next two performance nights.  For a comedy, this is hard as the actors really do feed off the audience's energy.  Thankfully, we had a good crowd last Saturday night who laughed for twice their number.  The cast really needed that audience, and I am both grateful for them and proud for their performance.

PS, if you're in Houston, "Play On!" has three more weekends at Theatre Suburbia! You should go. Go to the website for details and call for reservations.

In the meantime, I had one round of auditions and I have two three more in the coming weeks.  The first was for "Don't Drink the Water" at Country Playhouse. I was a little worried for I heard that the director was going to move the setting to China -- and my 6'6" height would clearly put me out of the running for Крожак and Father Дровни.

Unless they made it a basketball game.

I did get a small part though, which is great! It's a foot in the door in a new theatre!  I'll be playing Mr. Burns - our read-through is tonight.  The other nice thing is that I think I won't be needed for every rehearsal.

Last week when I saw Proposals, an actor friend of mine suggested I should audition for CPH's upcoming Frankenstein. It's the next audition, though rehearsals won't start until September.  This is one where my stature finally plays an advantage, but the director is definitely looking for how I will act.  I'm going to need to really search for the truth within the Creature, to turn the phrase that Dr. Berger says, and prove I'm worthy of my theatre degree for that one! And I only have two weeks to prepare!

And remember, this is for posterity so be honest. How do you feel?

Just as DDTW goes into tech, I have two auditions I'm looking at on the same weekend.  The first is for the new Ohana Theatre Company, which sets itself apart from most other Houston troupes by being FOR profit.  As in actors hired as employees, 1099's and all. Then it's back to Suburbia for The Psychic. The director for this sent me the script last year, back when I was doing A Murder Is Announced and Murder at the Howard Johnson's.  I fell in love with the script, and I really think I can do a lot with the main character.  We'll see, though.

There's a fourth audition I'm aiming for - the summer mellerdrammer at Suburbia.  I wasn't thinking of this one either, until Suburbia's former villain (for ten years!) said that he recommended me for the part. Now, the director isn't the type to put too much stock in just a recommendation; it's still, "I have to earn the part", not "it's mine to lose."

Plus, I'll have to be evil and not nice.

But yow. Two recommendations by fellow actors this year! :)

We have a set!

On Saturday, Theatre Suburbia's previous show, "Deadly Murder", closed.  I worked the house twice during the run, and both nights had a lot of people - around 50-60, which is great for Suburbia's 100-seat stage.  If the other nights are comparable, it was a great run.

But the closing of the show means the next day, we start work on the next show -- "Play On!" of which I'm stage managing.  It was a little difficult imagining some of the set before yesterday. Suburbia has only the one space - rehearsals have to share with the current production. Suburbia is also designed "in the round": audience members sit at the four corners of the space, with an entrance at each of the four sides.

Look at my crude, not-to-scale Excel drawing! :)

Suburbia has a summer mellerdrammer that always uses the round. More often, during the season directors will opt for the thrust configuration. In this, the section closest to backstage (C) gets removed and the seats distributed on the wall between B and D (and among the remaining three sections).

My other crude, not-to-scale Excel drawing!

We're using the thrust ourselves.  The long wall has to hold three entrances (including the 'wings' entrance), space for a missing flat, and a wall safe.  With the previous set in place, we've had to tell our actors rough generalities of where they will be - it also was difficult to articulate on paper.  Sunday, we tore the previous set completely down, then started building it up from scratch.

It took a little bit of figuring out, but we managed to get most of the set in place! We need a few items out of offsite storage, including a 3'x4' flat that will be part of the raised upstage area, and we'll need to build the wall flat that will house the wall safe that the theatre already has (Yay!), but now we can point our actors to specific places! Plus, the theatre already had an outdoors mural that will be the 'garden backdrop' that actors will 'accidentally' run in front of several times.

Complete with director and assistant director measuring furniture.

Are you who Google thinks you are?

So in reading my news feed from Business Insider today, I found out that Google allows you to see the demographics that it gathers about you based on your browsing and search habits. If you are already signed into your Google account (and if you're reading this off my Google+, you are), click this link to go straight to it.

There's also a video explanation of this works, and what it doesn't collect in order to discover this information. (Basically, the "Ads by Google" that you see on other websites registers the category for the website you're on.) The video also tells how to opt-out -- but the preferences and opt-out information is stored only on the local computer! So the presenter does warn you, if you clear your cookies, you will need to opt-out again.

Just because I haven't yet played with embedding videos, here it is.

Personally, I'm good with the interest-based ads, and it picks up the categories pretty well based on my work (IT Desktop support and Infosec interest) and play (games, role-playing games, acting).  They let you edit your preferences too. Which means I'm going to knock out that "Beauty & Fitness" and swap "Arts & Entertainment - Performing Arts - Opera" for "Arts & Entertainment - Performing Arts - Acting & Theatre".


And I guess I look young online as well as in real life:

This is totally going on my acting resume.

I remember Stage Management! Honest!

I actually do.  Of course, it's been a few years, but my memory lets me utilize old skills like they were just-learned. It's just that this is my first time in the wild as a full Stage Manager, and as the norm where "I haven't done this before," I have stage-fright.

One nice thing about being a SM at Theatre Suburbia is that the scope is a lot less than it was at the University of Houston. There's a lot of autonomy: Tech calls its own cues, costuming is a cooperative effort between the actor and the theatre's costumer, and the AD writes down all the blocking. :)

The other nice thing is that the board is very appreciative of anyone willing to stage-manage.  That helps a lot in quelling those butterflies in my stomach.  Not that I'll be given a free pass to mess up (which I won't), but they make me feel welcome in the position.  Mind, I don't know if that will change when I ask to rummage through props for do-fers for the play. :)

Last night's rehearsal went pretty well. Play On! has a play-within-a-play, Murder Most Foul. No, not that one. This one's by a local playwright who's willing to let the theatre players put it on for free.  Our director blocked out the "ideal" of Murder's third act, because the players proceed to butcher it with all their stops and starts. We've got some fun stuff here, and I might even have foley work backstage.  It might be tricky, though: we're talking about having the set somewhat open so the audience can see some of the backstage hijinks.  I don't yet know if that means we'll have a back wall to hide the real backstage or not.  I actually imagine we will;  the current set has one built (from Dear Santa and Deadly Murder.)

On Midgarn's Tales

Or, what do I want out of my GI Joe diorama-comic fan fiction site?

I dunno. Using the basic Blogger blog may work for Midgarn's Tales, but I don't think it will ultimately work out.  It shows the pictures sequentially, and I can group them all together one post per comic, but I can foresee that in short order, the site will get hugely cluttered.  Plus, I use a lot of custom figures for the work that sometimes are in gear that are not the most iconic version of the character.

That's Airtight? Where's all the yellow?

On my old site, I created a Dossier page that would bring up all the basic info about the character, my best guesses as to the real-life MOS / ratings for that character, plus any other deviations I made from the canon regarding the person. We'll use Airtight as the example again:

(OK, really. The mouse is down here. Why does the newly-inserted pic appear at the top? I'll just switch to HTML, cut and paste the div.. Hah. Showed you, interface!)

So, yeah, about 100 Joes have a dossier, with the Cobras and other characters to follow. I'd like to have that again, and I really don't see an elegant way to do that in the blog.

I'd also like to have a person click on a particular "issue" (these are comics after all), and then flip through it like a gallery. You know the kind that gray out the page, and have left and right arrows to move fore and back through the pages pictures?  A blog post gives me that 'here's the link to the new issue' requirement, but the page seems to show every recent post, so it's a stream of picture after picture.

Why not just put up the old page? Because it was clunky. And old. I wrote it up in ~2004, but I used 1990 html technology -- it used FRAMES to navigate.  Shudder.  It also wasn't the easiest thing to point readers to the newest issue. The home page of my site was elegant: www . midgarnstales . info .  But for a given comic? That / Issues / bpscene1.htm . Granted, who looks at the gibberish up in the URL field any more? (Hackers.)  But still, I'd kinda like it to be elegant. Easy to maneuver, and easy to provide just an issue link.

And that dossier? a hundred separate html pages. At the time, I didn't know the first thing about SQL.  Now, I don't know the second thing about SQL, but I do know the very basics about creating a database.  I may not yet know how to create a field that can have 0-x entries in it (like that "Vehicle Qual" field in the Airtight "record" above), but it can't be that hard!

Finally, there's the gravy: the visual look. I mentioned having the issues come up one panel at a time. I'd love to have a frame around the main screen, maybe like the PIT's main screen a la the Sunbow cartoons, or something akin to GI Joe #1, where we saw the small monitors with the Joes' dossiers beneath a larger screen. The small monitors would be the controls: "Dossier, Comics, Minis, etc" for the main menu would switch to say "Joes, Cobras, Noks, Red Shadows, etc" if Dossier was pressed, would switch to "First, Previous, Dogfight, Duke, Dusty, Faces, Falcon, Fast Draw, Next, Last" or something similar. Clicking on the name would then change the main screen to the dossier.  A similar path for the comics.

Anyhow, I'm eager to hear suggestions on what may already be out there to do what I want.

Is this thing on?

This turns out to be a treatise on how to experiment and find the way to make something work. Welcome to my diagnosis process.

So, I go and connect my new Blogger blog here to Klout. Seems pretty easy: I click Connect, it bumps me to my Google Accounts page asking to confirm. I confirm, and the Blogger icon now lights up under my name.

You do know that you can get to any of my connected networks in Klout by clicking the network icon under my name, right? Plus, I do so love the Windows 7 Snipping tool. :) Okay, tangent over.

Thing is, you click on that Blogger icon and get a fail page:

I click the link, it informs me that I'm using my Google profile, and I should change it there. Again with handy links, but now, I'm suddenly editing my Google+ profile. I go to the Gear > Settings > Profile and Privacy > Sign into Dashboard, log in, scroll down to Blogger, and "Edit Blogger Profile".

Guess where that takes me?

Yep, step 3 again. Experiment time.  I delve back into the Profile FAQ and revert to just a Blogger profile. I unlink, relink in Klout and voila, my blogs appear! Along with an unfinished profile. Well. We don't want that!  So I return once again to the Profile FAQ, connect my Blogger to my Google+, and hit the trigger.  Not only do I get the profile filled in, but I also get a page prompting me to add my blogs to my Google+ profile page as "Contributor to:" ... Aha! The Blogger icon in Klout brings me to my Google+ profile, where the blogs are listed. (Which in hindsight is totally superfluous, but I suppose at one time, Blogger was not Google, so there you go.)

So, the trick is to add your blogs to your Google+ page. "How do you do that? That 'Add custom link' doesn't tell me squat." Here's a final snippet so you can see what a completed link looks like:

By the way, that X doesn't quit the editing for that link, that deletes it. 

Anyhow, it would be nice if the runaround gets fixed, a note that says, "Hey dummy, just add your blog here!" go into the Google+ blog area, or a simple checkmark option in the Blog settings to "add this to my Google+ profile". 

Eh, they're visible now. Is this thing on?

BoB

Influence, Wahooly, and XeeMe

I'm experimenting with my influence, getting more involved with stuff, and maybe, just maybe, organizing the disparate segments of my life. (What, acting and tech support and family and gaming don't just mesh together? :) )

Through Klout I came into a group of fantastic networkers in the inaugural group at Wahooly.  It's from them that I am learning a lot more about networking.  

Such as this item: A Social Network congregate profile service called XeeMe.  Bob's XeeMe


The Infosec guy in me says "don't use their password storage feature", and they do warn against filling in passwords for those who are wary.  

At first glance, the interface to add new contacts doesn't impress me either. 

However, I like being able to point to one link and say, "Everything about me is here."  That's how I will use it: a central location for the pages that are already publicly visible.

And if you want to create your own congregate social network portal, feel free to use my referral link: http://xeeme.com?r=x0*p14BtEC5B