My apartment is overrun with tabbies!

Yesterday was a looong day.  I went to work for a few hours, and left early to go to JFK airport to meet my parents and sister-in-law.  Karine (SIL) and my niece and nephew were flying in as Phase I of my brother's family's move back stateside.  The kids were going with my parents off to New Hampshire, and Edna Mo, my brother's cat, was packed off with me.  Poor Karine then had to turn around and go right back to Italy.  Apparently it was a traumatic trip--traffic to Rome was terrible and they very nearly missed the flight.  My niece started running a fever, and then on their approach to JFK, they had a missed approach and people were freaking out.  But the kids seemed quite calm.  Karine handed over the carrier which had a curled up bebbeh in it, lashed shut with one of those plastic locked ties and I hopped in a taxi.  This was perhaps the single most miserable taxi ride I've ever had--90-degree heat + NO A/C + slow-moving traffic + incomprehensible, argumentative cabbie (he tried to tell me Inwood wasn't in Manhattan) + inexplicable nausea.  I have no idea where the latter came from--I kept thinking of anything to not throw up.  Inching up the Harlem River Drive was brutal--the sun was right on me, I was extremely overheated and worried about Edna because she'd been in the cart for something like 14 hours at that point.  And we actually dodged a bullet, it seems we barely missed a severe hailstorm.  We finally got home and I hurried her into the apartment which was blessedly cool and then sawed open her carrier.  Naturally Tatia and Tibby flipped out--the symphony of tabby hisses and growls reached quite a crescendo.  I was surprised at their respective reactions--Tatia actually flipped out less, and just retreated to her eyrie in the kitchen atop the ice cream maker box, but Tibby seemed horrified.  Poor Edna Mo, 14 hours in transit and she enters to this hostile reception!  I put out water and a box for her and then, figuring the best thing I could was just to be there for all three of them, crashed for several hours.

When I woke up in blessed air conditioned darkness, Edna Mo seemed a little more comfortable and had curled up in Anya's easy chair.  She allowed me to skritch her several times and ventured out from Anya's room whenever I beckoned her.  T-squared are of course still extremely resistant to this interloper.  When Anya came home she was thrilled that Edna wants to hang out in her room--Tatia and Tibby enter there from time to time but they're still pretty shy with her.  Adorably, when I entered the building with Edna in her carrier, a girl about 10 or 12 years old was also entering.  She asked if I'd adopted a cat--I said no, she was just staying with me for a little while.  She said she loved cats but her mother was allergic.  I said if you ever want to play with my cats, just knock on my door.

Just another example of how slack our landlord is--I've been trying and trying to get him to do something about the tabby infestation and he ignored it and now it's worse!  Doodness!

The Thyme Has Come...

And Thyme is over.  As Duncan said, there was a good amount of stress with its going up, but once it settled in, it was a fantastic experience.  I absolutely love playing my merrie trickster, my id, my easily amused little child Puck.  Not an easy role, though--I worked my ass off on its physicality.  I was going for a couple of things--a kind of animalistic movement, because Puck is so much less restrained by societal norms than a human would be, there's a closer connection to the id, the purely physical.  So I was going for the immediacy you see in animals, especially predators--that springy, immediate action paired with that absolute stillness when hunting animals "point"--that is, when they sight their quarry (you see it in dogs and cats).  The other thing I was incorporating was a kind of cartoonish, exaggerated expression, where every emotion is fully committed to and physically expressed, a la Roger Rabbit.  I felt pretty good about how it came out--it felt organic, I don't know how well it read.  But I did get some nice feedback from audience members so something I was doing was working.  I really would love to do Midsummer again--doing Thyme made a lot of those lines come back.  My mistress with a monster is in love!...The king doth keep his revels here tonight/Take heed the queen come not within his sight/For Oberon is passing fell and wrath/because that she as her attendant hath/a lovely boy, stol'n from an Indian king/She never had so sweet a changeling...Captain of our fairy band/Helena is here at hand!...I remember absolutely flying in from stage left for that entrance, so much fun.  I do have specific ideas about how Puck should look, because of all that energy.  He should be small/thin and very fast--there are numerous textual references about how fast he is.  He shouldn't be this huge lumbering dude like Stanley Tucci, ugh!  So miscast...

At any rate it was so completely awesome to get to work with so many old friends again, like Michelle and Kelly, and then to meet new ones like Matthew.  He is such a talented actor, although I REALLY WISH he nailed the lines better.  I think once he'd gottten to the point where he basically knew them and wouldn't go up on them during a performance, he was so relieved (he had to learn that part quickly) that he never looked back over the script again.  Regardless he is terrific, he always made me laugh during the "Demetrius is in love with Lysander" scene.  (My favorite line: "Blah blah blah, your tears do make me yawn."  I just love his unabashed selfishness.)  I told him he made that scene great for me--I didn't get bored with having to stay still for 7 pages or whatever it is, because I genuinely found him hilarious.  He told me "you give the nicest compliments!"  I also loved Rebecca's performance in that scene.  "Does no one want my ladylove?"  So cute!

The one kind of annoying thing was the whole festival thing--argh, I just hate that 15 minutes in/out restriction.  It is SO frustrating when you have very specific hair and makeup *and* you're the first one on stage (I had this problem for Prince Trevor as well).  I loathe getting ready in the hallways or the lobby of the theater, it seems so amateurish.  I get that they want to maximize the theater rental by cramming in as many shows as possible but still *grumble.*