by Amanda on October 28, 2009
I’ve never been to a roller derby match, or bout, or whatever they’re called… but this event jumped out from my inbox as one of the more interesting Halloween themed events happening around town (gi-normous parties at bars are not my style). Click here for event details.
If a roller derby too rowdy for your tastes – check out the Brit Noir film series at the National Gallery of Art. Or, stay home, gorge yourself on candy, and watch some of Jordan’s favorite Halloween flicks.
More on Halloween:
Tagged as:
holidays
by Amanda on October 23, 2009
Photo by hubertk on Flickr
“I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance.”
- Joan Didion
Tagged as:
performance,
quotes,
writing
by Amanda on October 22, 2009
Photo by laurenatclemson on Flickr
“I keep coming out to the beach to remember how patient the earth is. The universe makes space you just gotta wait for it.”
Tagged as:
nature,
quotes
by Amanda on October 20, 2009
I’m a big fan of a theater group called the Neo-Futurists (they’re the creative force behind “Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind,” a show that’s come to Woolly Mammoth for the past couple of years, and will be back starting December 7). I recently discovered that the Neo-Futurists are on Twitter, and that each week, they provide a prompt to inspire their followers to write short, tweet-length “plays” – aka twitterplays. This week, the instructions were, simply:
TWITTERPLAY ASSIGNMENT: write a 1-tweet play that uses 1)breakfast food & 2)a siren #twitterplay
In turn, fans from across the country started publishing twitterplays. Here’s mine:
Center stage: A woman, graveside. Tombstone:”Huevos rancheros, RIP.” She weeps:”My love, you set off a siren in my intestines.” #twitterplay
…and here’s a round-up of all of ‘em (link added 10/22/09).
Another example of how constraints (in this case, word count) breed creativity…
Related Links:
Tagged as:
theater,
web
by Amanda on October 19, 2009
… at least, that’s what it feels like. Today I hit a wall of exhaustion and “done-ness” that I had no idea I was in danger of hitting. Three movers came by the house to peruse all our earthly possessions and tell us how much it will cost to put them all in a van and drive them 4 hours north. Meanwhile a dozen other moving companies call us (me) daily. I want to pull the phone off the hook, close all the curtains, go to sleep, and wake up on moving day — no, better yet, I want to wake up and be in New York with our bags unpacked, everything put away. Maybe someone went to the market for us, and filled a bowl with fresh produce on our kitchen counter…
I’m also getting pangs, the pangs of saying goodbye. We saw our friend Sean tonight, for the first time in weeks – someone we’ve seen every Monday for 5 years, at JINX rehearsal. Last night we had dinner with my parents and they brought a camera – a signal that this kind of gathering was now more of a rarity than it ever had been before. I’m feeling pangs, too, about the house itself, and all our things – our art… stuff we’re selling, or putting in storage. It’s weird, how much things, and buildings, come to mean to us. This was “our” house for four years, and now it will be someone else’s…to leave it behind as though it’s just a structure passing hands in a real estate transaction is so WEIRD. And yet, we don’t want our things to weigh us down – don’t want STUFF to be the reason we don’t travel, or live various places, do various things. Pursue various dreams.
Still, that doesn’t mean things, buildings, walls – that these things don’t mean anything. They mean a lot. And so do the people we’re leaving behind. Not “leaving,” of course – we’ll still love them, and see them. They’ll visit, and we’ll visit. But it will be different. That difference sunk in today, in a brand new way.
There’s no part of me that thinks the right thing to do is to stay. But leaving feels like wrenching a tree with deep, deep roots from the soil… what will we become, when planted in new, soft earth? That’s the exciting part. But the pain of transition is very real.
Tagged as:
movingdiary
