good samaritan opens

THE GOOD SAMARITAN, a play i have been directing, opens tomorrow at the overtime theater. here is an article. it has been really fun and rewarding working on it and i think it looks great. i hope the audiences will think so too.

the beach

i hadn't been to port aransas, that i can remember, since i was in high school. i just went back there this past weekend and it wasn't as i recalled it at all.

the beach was bordered on the shoreline with a substantial barrier of seaweed, the intense bright green bushy kind with berries that looks like something you'd buy in the garnish section of hobby lobby. this seaweed had also been pulverized into most of the sand, discoloring it and changing its texture. where i had remembered soft, duny sand there was now a hard sandy surface. it took me a while to assimilate this change and accept the fact that the beach had changed. as i looked at the little kids running around i thought, "they think this is the way the beach is supposed to be." then i thought of myself as a kid and how someone older might have been sitting on the beach when i was running around and they were probably thinking, "he thinks this is the way the beach is supposed to be." for me then, as for the kids now, the beach was perfect just as it was. nothing to compare it to. after i processed all that, i relaxed into the scene a little better and it became less alien.

yet another jarring development was the warmness of the ocean. i can't remember ever walking into an ocean that felt like warm bathwater. but the gulf felt that way this weekend. it wasn't really unpleasant, but again, it wasn't what i expected or was used to. it seemed just a little wrong. 

despite all my comparing the present to the past, david and i floated in the water and sat on the beach having a perfectly lovely time. also, we visited my aunt and uncle, who live in rockport, and that was really nice. 

hiatus from blogging is over

last day of school was june 5. we had a clean-up day, painted my office wall back to white (it was grape jelly-purple), threw lots of stuff away, moved stuff around preparing for the summer, and i bid the place goodbye. i was tempted to steal the red velvet couch but did not.

once again i have found that when you make your desires known, they tend to manifest in real time. i had written down this quote, but i don't remember where i found it: "If you don't articulate your conscious desires, your unconscious patterns will come true." seems like both an exhortation and a warning, don't you think?

so some exciting things are happening:

a really wonderful relationship is developing with the people of the AtticRep theatre company, and i'm now a company member as well as educational outreach director. currently we are putting together acting workshops to take into schools this coming year. also, i will be appearing in two of their plays next season, TRUE WEST (sam shepard) and THE GOAT, or WHO IS SYLVIA? (edward albee). i will also be working with the classic theatre company on THE GLASS MENAGERIE, which starts rehearsals in august.

right now i am directing a play called THE GOOD SAMARITAN, by scott mcdowell, with a very talented group of actors at the overtime theatre. this play was written by a local writer and it is a 50's film noir detective mystery. it's going well. we finished blocking last night, are thinking up some interesting ideas for lighting and staging, and we open on august 1st.

i'm going to the coast this weekend with david. i haven't been to the texas coast in a long time-- though i've been near it, i haven't made a beach trip since i was a teen. how weird. so i'm really looking forward to that.

favorite music in my world recently: noise for pretend, vampire weekend, american princes, slow runner, philip glass's saxophone album, balkan beat box, foals, joan as police woman, and the new martha wainwright album.