Stains: 2; Shirts: 0

One of the things I like about doing theatre is that a lot of times the costumers don't want an element of my costume back, and I end up with a nice article of clothing. I have a pair of nice shoes coming to me when the show's done. Which is great, because I need nice shoes.

We're entering into tech week next week, which in theatre is also known as Hell Week, because it's traditionally the time when stress levels are at their highest, and the production staff of a show practically lives at the theater*. Luckily, actors are often encouraged not to live at the theatre, since working ourselves sick the week before the show opens would just lead to lots of sniffling and vomiting on opening night. Which is rarely the sort of thing that endears you to an audience (you rarely hear an audience leave a show saying, "My, what a good show! And the cast was so pallid! I just love that!"). Anyway, Hell Week is hellish enough to us actors, what with remembering our lines and incorporating elements like lights, sound, a stage, which we didn't have before.

With the stresses of Hell Week looming over me, I decided now was a good time to take a couple of personal days from work (read: "play hooky"). So I did. Yesterday, I went and saw the Body Worlds exhibit, which was every bit as fun and interesting as it had been when I saw it in Berlin, although a few of the more interesting plastinates had been left out (such as the woman turned into a chest of drawers, who opened her belly like a cabinet door to reveal the fetus inside of her), and the comments some people left behind were asinine to say the least. Including such gems as, "The exhibit is really great, but does it have to be so graphic? Do you have to have genitals on every single corpse? Especially the male genitals. Females shouldn't have to look at it and vice versa."(one guess: was the person who left that a man or a woman? I'm guessing it was a guy) Why would that surprise someone enough to be worthy of comment? Short of presenting a touring exhibit of plastinate eunuchs (which I would pay to see), I can't really imagine a way to show human corpses without showing their genitals. Perhaps the commentor wanted them to be dressed in the traditional zombie loincloth.

Last night before bed, I brewed up a bit of the Xsnanian national drink, which is coffee brewed with whiskey in a stove-top espresso pot. This time, I mixed a little raw cocoa I had into it and cooled it off. The result is a nice coffee/chocolate liqueur (currently filtering through a coffee filter at home). Unfortunately, as the cocoa portion brewed, a particularly gooey bubble exploded, leaving big brown spatter marks on my new white shirt. Then, today, I spilled coffee on my green sweater. Not bad, but still. I need to marry a dry cleaner. Or invest in more coffee-colored clothes.

Back to work tomorrow. I think I'll go enjoy the day.

*A note on the spellings of the word "theatre" versus "theater": Merriam-Webster doesn't recognize the "re" spelling of the word, but within the theatre industry--among people I know, at least--there is a distinction made between the British "re" and the American "er"; the distinction being that "theatre" refers to the artform, while "theater" refers to the building. Thus, if I start a theatre company, I'm making art, while if I start a theater company, I build buildings. Some people have argued to me that this is a fundamentally pretentious distinction, but I disagree. I think it serves a real and valid purpose of separating an abstract from a concrete. More importantly, pretentious or not, I've encountered it from enough perfectly intelligent sources that I feel justified in continuing it. That is my footnote for this blog entry.