Reflections on Easters past

Easter is one of those holidays, like Thanksgiving, that I typically don't get to spend with family.  Consequently, I have enjoyed some incredibly random Easter celebrations.

In college, right before the Easter break, there was a party that was so epic that I doubt anyone who ever attended said party would ever be able to run for elected office because of incriminating photographic evidence.  It was called the Saint to Sinner party.  You came to the party dressed as your favorite saint and left as your favorite sinner.  Without going into too much detail, I will say that there was a ritual chanting of the beginning of Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" and one year I woke up the next morning on an airplane to Minneapolis with no idea how I had gotten there.

Then, there was the year that I visited Boston from New York, staying with a friend of mine.  On Easter morning, as I walked out of her guest bedroom to go brush my teeth, I noticed a trail of jelly beans leading to my very own Easter basket.  In the middle of the night, her husband had made elaborate candy trails for she and I to find when we woke up.

In Boston one year, I had been out til all hours of the morning carrying on with a visiting friend from NYC and my roommate.  My roommate and I got home as the sun was coming up on Easter morning and passed out.  Nevertheless, every hour on the hour, my roommate dragged her hungover self out of bed to check on the pot roast she put in the oven as soon as we stumbled in to the apartment in our club clothes from the night before.  That was either the year before or after the Easter when I saw "Rent" with an ex-Marine who wore American flag boxer shorts.

When I lived in New York, I made my home in Astoria, Queens, which is home to a very large Greek Orthodox population.  One Good Friday, I had to have an emergency root canal and was lying on my couch, delirious with pain medication when a friend stopped by to drop off a package for me.  He handed over the package and said "Um, you might want to come see this." and led me outside.  The streets of my neighborhood were filled with people dressed in black, holding candles and silently walking.  It was my first introduction to the pageantry of the Eastern Orthodox religion and was quickly followed by the second.  At midnight that Saturday, the same people were out in the streets, shooting off illegal fireworks and dancing to a marching band proceeded by a flower-bedecked statue of Jesus. It was beautiful and strange and wonderful...especially when enhanced by Vicodin.

That same year, I tried to find a church nearby that was holding an Easter service at a reasonable hour.  This was before we used the internet for EVERYTHING, guys, and I was pretty much just walking around, looking at the announcement boards outside of various churches for the better part of an hour, increasingly footsore and discouraged.  Finally, I found a service that was about to start and I ran in, grabbing a program from an usher at the door.  Turns out, the service was entirely in Korean.  A very kind young woman pointed that fact out to me and I asked her if it was OK if I stayed.  She seemed bewildered why I would want to, but she said I could.  The highlight of the service was recognizing one of the hymns and singing along in English as the rest of the congregation sang in Korean.

You can keep your Easter parades and spiral sliced hams...  I prefer my Easters random, weird and preceded by debauchery.

Things that don't make me cry

In March, a lot of things make me cry.  Today, my perfume made me cry.  It's just how March is in Chicago.  This, however, did NOT make me cry:

http://storefrontcity.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/the-la-ronde-project/

Sitting in the dark in my underwear...

What we will do for theatre...

I have been a professional actor for eighteen years.  Add to that my college career and high school and the one time I played "Princess Division" in a play about math in the fourth grade and that makes a hell of a long time spent on the stage.  Over the years, I've played mostly character roles -- the crazy ones, the broken ones, the funny ones, the ones who look as if they smell like nickels and ribbon candy...  The ones you don't have to be "pretty" for.  I like those roles.  Those roles tend to invite the actors to step pretty far outside themselves for the sake of the play and it's nice to be asked to take a brief vacation from being yourself.

In those long years as an actor, I have only had to have a stage kiss five times.  Kissy roles terrify me.  Ask me to play a cyclops grandmother and I'll ask you if you'd like a dialect with that and which side you'd like my hump to lean toward, but ask me to kiss another actor and I turn into a puddle of fear and anxiety.  "You want me to play a NORMAL woman that other normal human beings find reasonably attractive?  And then you want me to KISS them?! Is it too late to go to law school?"  Inevitably, around first dress, the director will pause the rehearsal to say to me "Do you think maybe you could put the kiss in SOMETIME BEFORE OPENING NIGHT?!"  Once a director stopped rehearsal to tell me that no one was allowed to leave that day until I finally kissed the other actor as indicated by the stage directions.  I mumbled something about maybe possibly having a sore throat and there being worse places to be stuck indefinitely until the director just said "Do it right fucking now, Amy." I screwed up my courage and ran (yes, RAN) headlong into the kiss.  There was a terrific crash.  I lost a contact lens and the other actor got a black eye.

Right now, I'm in the mother of all kissy plays.  Sex happens in every single scene and it doesn't make a lot of sense for that sex to happen without at least one kiss as foreplay.  Also, my character kind of orders people to kiss her.  She is described as "exquisite," as well, which only serves to cause further anxiety.  "Exquisite"?  Me?  Pleasant, yes.  A good personality, yes.  Witty, yes.  But "Exquisite"?  No one who has appeared in public with her skirt tucked unknowingly into the back of her pantyhose with as alarming frequency as I have is allowed to be called "exquisite."

We jumped into rehearsals for this play without a lot of discussion prior to the actual rehearsal work, so I didn't get to make my usual excuses for why I couldn't kiss that day and what happened was simply astonishing.  My scene partners kissed me and I didn't burst into flame.  It just happened.  And it was no big deal.  Still, that "exquisite" lingered.

And then there was the small matter of the lingerie.  I had to change out of a dress, into a nightgown.  In another scene, I had to take off a costume to be revealed in a corset.  And I had to stay like that for the rest of the play.  In my unders in front of strangers in a rehearsal space with a nasty draft.  Since the kiss was taken care of, the exposure of my flesh took over the worry centers of my brain and I stalled as long as I could before I finally broke down and did the costume changes tonight.  It helped immensely that one of my scene partners gets super-naked naked in the scene, so a nightgown that hits at knee length is positively Amish by comparison.  The corset was another matter.  There wasn't enough money in the budget or time in the show for me to get to have a corset.  I would have to have done a quick change into the corset and there are no such things as quick changes into corsets...at least not with me. I mean, jeez, it takes me fifteen minutes to tie my shoes.  So the dilemma was finding something appropriately risque that looked different from the nightgown and could conceivably have been under the costume piece I change out of.  Consequently, I appear in a bra and half slip onstage, in front of actual people, and a boy kisses me.  If I could tell college freshman theatre major me that this would happen, she would have switched her major to business and I would have a summer home and a boat by now.

But I did it.  And I'm alive.  And no one lost a contact or got a black eye.  Of course, all bets are off once the show opens.