Here it comes...

Well my friends, this is it. The hurricane of tech week now charges toward us. There is no stopping it. Next week is the last week I will be here. :( I don't have much time (I must go study and prepare for finals and such like), but I have one quick note for you all. If you are desirous to come see our production of Tewelth Night you can come this next Wednesday or Thursday at 7:30 pm to the outdoor stage at Mira Costa College. Since this is a masked performance we have two casts, one which will act while the other is speaking. If you come Wednesday night you will see the Rosencrantz cast (the cast I am in) on stage and if you come the following night Guildenstern will be acting for you.
You will not have to purchase tickets. However, they will be asking for donations and such like at the door. Also, since it is outside, please bring lawn chairs and blankets. Hope to see you there!

Happy 4th of July

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY EVERYONE!
Hope you all have some fantastic and fun plans for this evening.

Well, I thought it was about time to give you all an update of what I've been up to. Classes have been fun and yet challenging. My instructors are constantly pushing me to make new discoveries about my characters or text. This past week and for all next week, myself and another girl are working on Act 4, Scene 3 from Othello, and we are constantly being pushed to understand the text better and better.

Miss Stienberg, you will be pleased to know that one of my favorite classes though, is our IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) class. IPA is the pronunciation guide for a word that appears directly after a word in a dictionary. It is SO fun! No one else really likes it, but it was really easy for me to pick up. (Thank you St. Andrew's for making me take Greek and Latin).

I also told you that I would be posting some pictures, so here are a few.

These next few photos were taken the other night at the DelMar fair. The first one is Aimee and Rachel and the second, going from left to right is Aimee, Justin (yes the same Justin I am staying with this week), and Karen. (This was taken just after we went on one of the scariest rides we had ever been on, thus the concerned looks).
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And this is Gedaly and Alexandra....


















This is Eve and Sassan giving us a wonderful performance of Truly Bad Opera. (My apologies for the poor quality. They were moving too fast for me to catch a clear shot and we didn't have the house lights on).
For those of you who are wondering, Truly Bad Opera is an exercise we do to help us with calling (producing a rich, round, full voice for speaking). We were instructed to do the scenes we were practicing in our acting lab in operatic voices. Some of it is truly bad, but it is also the funnest and funniest thing ever. Once you get up on stage and start singing no one has any worries about what they sound like, or what notes are coming next. They just drop their jaw, breath deep and let it all out.

Anyway, that pretty much concludes the highlights of this week. Next week we have a guest instructor coming from Chile to work with us in the mornings on movement and choreography-like exercises. So that should be interesting. Right now though, I'm off to Balboa Park to hang out. (Some of you are wondering what I'm going to do when I come home and have nothing to do. My only answer is I better have some pretty full hours to keep me busy or yes, I will be very bored. :D). Until next time....

-E.

I Have Survived

Well, I have survived the first two weeks of the Actor's Academy and the next three are going to fly by before I know it. All I can say is that it is the greatest. The other Academy students seem to have really accepted me into their circle. Yes, they are on the slightly insane side, but what else is to be expected from actors? To give you a small taste: the other day, as we were packing up our things, one of the girls came in singing Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody and within a few measures the whole room had erupted and joined in the singing.
As you all have heard, we are doing Shakespeare's Twelfth Night on JULY 16TH AND 17TH. If you can come for one of the shows, I can assure you that you will not walk away disappointed. This group of 33 actors were chosen out of some 70 auditions. So be assured that you will get some of the best. Also, they style in which we are doing the play is quite different. No its not a Nazi prisoner of war camp, nor Vancouver, or even the Lunar Landscape. We are doing this play following in the vein of Cirque du Soliel. We actually have two parts for every character. One speaking part and one acting part. So while one person speaks the lines, the other will be up on stage, fully masked, acting everything out.
Unfortunately, I somehow missed the actual auditions, but turns out they gave me speaking parts anyway. I get to play the Sea Captain, the Priest, Officer two and the Servant, as well as an attendant and be a part of the chorus, which are not speaking parts. (Some of you might be thinking "wait a second. That's more parts than what she told me the other week. Did I miss something?" Well... no, not really. This past week Eric Bishop, our director, found out that some of the players had lost their partners and so he asked me to fill in).
Anyway, thats about all the news. If any of you would like to come down, I will be sending out more information when I can. And yes, pictures will be coming soon. Right now, I'm off to the Highland Games down the street. (Yes, I know. It's just one social thing after another. And yes, its a little hard for a simple mountain girl like me to adjust to. Yet, I'm loving every minute of it! :D)

Tradition!

"It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time.... [Tradition] is the democracy of the dead."

- G. K. Chesterton

It always amazes me how Chesterton can take something so commonplace, something we don't even really think about and make us think about it and make it important...something like a Piece of Chalk or Orthodoxy....

Are we all Elephant Men?

I sat curled up on the couch watching the deformed face of a 22 year-old male flicker across my T.V. screen. Women screamed when they saw him. You could tell doctors were uncomfortable when they examined him. Its true. He was ugly.

I pulled the blanket closer. I didn't want to watch. He scared me and it wasn't just fear because he was weired or strange, it was fear because he was ugly. This man on the screen was ugly and I was afraid of him. Why?

I sipped my hot tea, filling my lungs with the smell of peppermint as I breathed in the steam. His sunken eyes stared back into mine, I couldn't look at him though. Yet there was some morbid part of me that said I must. Feelings of anger, depression, and pity streamed up inside of me like the steam that steadily blew out of my cup. Anger... anger at the world for being so cruel to someone so deformed, and anger at myself for identifying with them. Depression because I too have treated those who were not blessed with the gift of beauty with less humanity than that of my neighbors. Pity because beneath a face that seems completely incapable of all expression, sadness was written all over it. Yet, I could not watch. Why?

Its odd to think that one man's ugliness can be the subject for so much ridicule. The Elephant Man. I remember now, thats what they used to call him. They never thought of him as a man... he was a beast, a creature, an elephant to be more precise. And so thats how they treated him. They put him in a Circus and locked him in a dungeon when they didn't need him. Why? Because he was ugly? We are just as ugly.

Yes.... we are just as ugly. If you don't fit the mold or if you're not as pretty as everyone else on the street, are you not shut away from that society? Are you not shunned and sent to be with other people of your sort? Are you not laughed at and ridiculed? Admit it, we've all done this, and we've all had this happen. We don't care about a person's character is like. If he or she is not like us, if they are in any way different, we don't like them. The Elephant man - no, I can't call him that, Joseph, yes... thats his name. Joseph Merrick was smart. He didn't look smart, but they say he continually read, he read the bible many times, and had most of it memorized. He built and imagined things and was loving and friendly too. Yet, they hated him. (Think about this, this was done to our Savior too). So what does this show? Nothing except that our souls can turn black and cold as hell very quickly. It shows nothing except that when we laugh at someone who is ugly and deformed, our souls are becoming deformed and ugly as well - as ugly and deformed as the Elephant Man.

But I was still afraid. His words were practically incomprehensible, and yet they seemed to seep from the speakers and slid into my ears. "You see" he said "we always fear what we do not understand." We cannot understand how someone could be so ugly, and so the women screamed and the doctors were uncomfortable and I was afraid and he.... he was beaten and scorned. But there is something more to this fear. There is fear because we know we have been in both situations and we didn't like either one. Fear because we know there is some sort of measure for beauty and we are afraid when we loose sight of that vision. We forget, when we see ugliness and evil that there is such a thing as beauty and we become afraid that we might never see it again. And so we think we can make it disappear by beating it back and pushing it into the shadows where no one can see it.

So I sit on my couch, with my tea and blankets, and the million comforts of the world, pondering... pondering... aren't we all just elephant men then?

Salt anyone?

"Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer each one." St. Paul, Colossians 4:6

I watched a rather strange movie tonight. It was called network and, as I was notably warned, every other word seemed to be f*** or some other variation of the profanity. And as I watched, this quote kept coming to mind and then I began thinking how this admonition from St. Paul is so easily over looked by the church today.

Before I became an Anglican I remeber being scared to death about cussing. I remember my old sunday school teacher assuring me that I would be damned to hell if I ever used any sort of vulgar language, but I was never told why. In other words, the church seems to teach her young that it is wrong to swear or use profanities and vulgarities, but she would never tell them why.

The Church is the salt of the world. She are the flavoring in the universe. But how is her saltiness supposed to be kept if she speaks as every common pagen speaks? How is she supposed to the salt of the world if her speach is not always with grace? If she does not know how she ought to answer everyone?

I am not a saint when it comes to keeping a pure mouth or saything things with grace, but if we took St. Paul's admition to heart it could make at least a small difference in the beauty of the Church.

Luke chapter 5, verse 8

"Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord."
~ St. Peter
As I was reading through the Gospel according to St Luke, a verse caught my eye that I had never noticed before. But this time, for some reason, this odd verse caused my cursory eye to halt and examine more carefully what I had read. Did I just read that St. Peter wanted the Lord to depart from him? Peter just wasted a whole day of fishing because he caught nothing, then a man shows up, tells him to put his net back in the water and keep fishing, and then Peter is blessed with an over abundance of fish. And as a word of gratitude he tells the Lord to get away? No, I must not have read that. Who would want the Lord to depart from them, particularly after a blessing such as that?

Usually, when one recognizes one's sinfulness (for example the sin of unfaithfulness) their first reaction is to fall to their knees and say "forgive me Lord, after thy great goodness." Not "Stay away from me!" That is what the lepers said. They shouted out "Unclean! Unclean" so that no one would catch their disease. But even then, they did not run away from Jesus when they saw him coming. They ran to him. They knew they were unclean and that they were supposed to stay far away from those who were pure. But they also knew that Jesus could heal them from their disease. Was there ever a case where the leper said to Jesus, "depart from me, for I am a leprous man, O Lord. I'm a hopeless case, let me rot."?

We are the lepers. And if we are faithful to Christ and his church we do cry out "forgive me Lord, after thy great goodness." But when do we ever tell him to leave us? In our age of hopeless negativism, it seems like something that would be shouted from the rooftops all the time. But we do not say things like this. We do not believe that we are such a hopeless case and that God should just leave us to rot. We have hope that Christ will forgive us. After all he forgave that one woman who did all those terrible things. He said "Her sins, which are many, are forgiven." (That was also in Luke).

Our country has had such an easy life that we take for granted that our sins are forgiven and that when we confess it is for the sake of reminding ourselves that our sins have been forgiven, not for the sake of saying that we are sinners and that God is the once, present and future King of the universe. (Reminding us that we are breaking his laws when we sin and we face the ultimate pit of despair when we fail to renew ourselves with him). However, St. peter seems to have quite a different view of things. "Depart from me, O Lord" is his reaction. Why? Why should Christ depart? Because Peter is a sinful man. I know that is a weak answer, but could it be that he knew it was wrong to enter into the presence of the Lord without a sacrifice, without the shedding of blood, without the cleansing of the spirit? In Peter's time if the priest entered approached the alter without making the proper sacrifices he deserved damnation. So how much more terrible would it be if you entered into the physical presence of the Lord with dirty hands?

If then, we recognize that we could fall so quickly into damnation if we are not careful, particularly in approaching His table, then we too should say "Depart from me, For I am a sinful man, O Lord." And then once we do recognize our fallen state we should say that, "I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof, but speak the word only and my soul shall be healed."