Only a couple of weeks until opening night. To be …
Only a couple of weeks until opening night. To be honest, it looks to me like we’d better get busy on a lot of things if we’re going to avoid completely embarrassing ourselves. My part went pretty much hitchless at today’s rehearsal, thank god, but we mucked around far too long and ended up not even getting through the whole play. They also want me to play the fanfare pieces on my trumpet, so I have to come up with that as well. Occasionally I have to remind myself that I’m just doing this for fun, and it is fun, but sometimes people need to be reminded of that, lest we take it as well as ourselves too seriously. Some of the people there are interested in filmmaking, and it would be really cool if we could get together after the play to help out on each other’s projects. Paul, a tall bloke who plays the Common Man, is an excellent actor and expressed interest in doing a project which could be interesting later on, and of course Dean seems to be interested as well. Ha ha! Little do they know that I pay my cast and crew in instant noodle coupons!
After rehearsal we all went down to Saints and Sinners, near the Far Eastern Plaza Hotel, for drinks, and then to an Italian restaurant near where I live. The ensueing discussion on methods of sexual aids was, shall we say, frank, and I found myself wishing for the application of a few more well-placed metaphors. The Chilean wine, a sip of which reminded me of various odors found wafting around my high-school biology class, did help.
Every so often, mosquitoes will invade my room. They never do this alone. No, they always work in groups. It’s as if they are on contract and have to work together to enter my room and annoy me as much as possible. I can’t figure out why evolution hasn’t eliminated that whiny buzzing noise from mosquitoes, since this, above all, is why you slap them. You’d think that mosquitoes that didn’t make that noise, or ‘stealth mosquitoes’, would have been better equipped to not get mushed and survive to breed more.
I finally got Snatch on DVD, as well as a Marx Bros. movie and the latest in the Half-Life series, Blue Shift. HL:BS has gotten bad reviews since it is too short and uses three-year-old graphics, but I still think that Half-Life has given me the best first-person-shooter experience I have encountered so far, with the Jedi Knight: Dark Forces games coming in a close second. Also I need something to tide me over to more interesting things like Unreal II, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the next Duke Nukem Forever or whatever else is just around the corner. As you can see, I am rather partial to First-person Shooters. Ever since I first saw a Doom demo at a software exhibit, I was hooked on the things. Now I’m just waiting for the true virtual reality plug for the back of my head. I figure we’ll all become zombies sooner or later. “Enslave the world by turning everyone into mindless zombies(as opposed to thoughtful zombies)” has got to be on the To Do list of at least seven or eight of the top-ten major global corporations. The other two or three probably just want to go the “Kill everyone for a quick profit” route. Oh, I’m sorry, did I mention that I can get a tad cynical at times? Well I can, particularly at the beginning of another work week.
