Sunday, November 23, 2008

BRRRR.....

My god it was cold today!


I took an epic journey to Wal-Mart and found myself confronted by below freezing weather. The first time I checked my computer said it was sunny and 31 degrees fahrenheit. I think if that happened in San Francisco the majority of the city's population would up and disappear nor would they be out watching high school football as so many were doing on my campus today. I went to Wal-Mart with my lovely Em and our friend Caitlin, who is very dear to both of us, and by the time we arrived at Wal-Mart it must have been 28 degrees not including wind chill. We spent a lovely warm time in Wal-Mart searching for various things we needed and didn't really need. After Wal-Mart we made the trek down the parking lot to the Olive Garden to have wonderful hot Italian food and a little taste of wine,ooh yay! illegality. Anyways, we had an awesome dinner and decided to go wait for the bus by Wal-Mart. The bus close to never came, meaning we waited an hour and a half for it and ended up calling the Stony Brook Police Department to find out when the next would be. They said it should've already arrived that it left somewhere around an hour ago.

Well the bus came about 20minutes later but it was ridiculous.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Pocket

Saturday, I helped paint the floor of Theatre 3 on campus, a very small black box theatre which Pocket Theater does all of their productions in. So we hung the lights the lights last thursday for The Pavilion, which opens this thursday and I'm really excited for. It took us  a total of six hours to finish hanging and cabling all the lights but there were still problems, those got resolved the next day luckily. I had a lot of fun at light hang and I learned a lot of technical know how and I feel very fulfilled.


After light hang went so smoothly we woke up early on Saturday, had some bagels and began to paint, quite fervently actually. We split up into teams, so to speak, where some of us cleaned the floor, scraped up gum and bad patches of paint covered tape. Others of us began to paint and oh did it look beautiful, the difference was night and day. Eventually four cans of paint were used and one of our group was sent to get more paint. This person went out and came back with two more cans. We quickly spread the last bit of paint on the floor and watched as it slowly dried, and dried. As we watched we realized that it was fully dried and that instead of the flat black that we started with the last two cans were semi-gloss so there were supremely splotchy parts to make it badly done. So we left it be.
Today we finished it!! Got another three cans o' paint and touched up the shiny spots and now it looks amazing! All thanks to the awesome folks of POCKET THEATRE!!!

Thursday, November 13, 2008

LIFE UPDATE

So, it has been almost 2 months since I last updated and I thought it was a good time to update.


I have been having an amazing time here at Stony Brook! Classes are relatively easy, even though I did just have an awful midterm in Astronomy. The leaves are turning and it makes me want to write more poetry. The colors are amazing, things I only thought I'd see in the Northwestern United States.

In the musical world I've been having a blast! I got into the all male A Capella group on campus The High C's. As a group we just went to see Rockapella one of the best A Capella groups this country has to offer. It was amazing we took a four hour trip to the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT. They have an awesome campus in Storrs and they have seven, count them, seven A Capella groups on campus and all of them got to open for Rockapella, we made friends with one of the groups and hope to go back for an A Capella fest or something like that.
My knowledge of musicals has been expanding so fast I have something like eighty musical soundtracks now, including a lot of Disney, but I've fallen in love with the works of Stephen Sondheim, the greatest living composer of our time.

I've gotten heavily involved with the student theatre group here, Pocket Theatre, which is awesome group of actors and techies really devoted to the art that they love. We're putting on the Pavilion in a few weeks, which I hear is going incredibly. Next semester we're hoping to put together a musical, hopefully Songs for A New World by Jason Robert Brown. The actual theatre department recently finished their run of Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl, which was amazing! I look forward to their rendition of Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge.

Classes here have been pretty good overall. I'm captivated by almost all of them. I'm taking Astronomy 101, Acting 1, Singing for Actors(another theatre class), a voice lesson, the Chorale here at Stony Brook, Writing 101 and Intro to Stony Brook(most useless class ever!). My favorite class of the semester is my Singing for Actos class, it is taught by the amazingly talented Marie Danvers, who played Christine DaaƩ in Phantom of the Opera on Broadway and who is also an amazing teacher. I'm having the most fun and learning a large amount on how to control my voice.

I must say that I have an awesome group of friends that I hold close to me here. I have had such good times, from climbing trees to discovering massive fish in the pond on campus. The goldfish, for lack of a better description was about the length of my arm, so roughly three feet.

Well it's raining at the moment, quite profusely actually and I'm going to be of to bed soon!

So I will update again soon!

Thanks as always!
J