While this week was fairly uneventful, there were still some awesome adventures. Here's a highlight reel for y'all:
- I got around to doing my laundry (SUPER exciting, I know). Fortunately, our building has an in-progress laundry room. Unfortunately, I do not have any fun laundromat stories....
- I did go to Central Park on Tuesday. Fall weather is finally here!! The days are crisper and chillier. It's been excellent sweater weather :) AND the leaves are slowly but surely changing colors. I feel like such a little kid sometimes: stepping on crunchy leaves, looking up at the trees... I REALLY want to rake a pile of leaves together and jump into it, but I think I've going to have to wait a lil bit longer for that to happen. My iPhone camera did not do the beautiful afternoon light streaming through the trees justice... But here's a picture anyway.
- I just about died with excitement when I saw this pop up on my twitter feed:
And then after a little internet research, and nerding out with Michaela, I found this and did die with excitement:
Now, I don't know if y'all have seen the YouTube video "Marcel the Shell with Shoes on," but I'm a little obsessed with it. He's just so stinkin' cute!! Watch it!!
- I bought my plane tickets home for my visit in December! I'll be Santa Barbara from Dec 10-17th. Yay!!
- On Thursday I went birthday elfing since Kelsey's birthday was on Friday. I had quite the adventure wandering around the city looking for things. It is so difficult to find crate paper streamers in this city!! I went to like 5 different stores before I found some at the Rite Aid in the West Village. I wrap her gift and decorated the apartment with orange and black streamers, as well as some cheesy green spider webs. Our apartment looks ready for Halloween now (minus the carved pumpkins) :
- Also on Thursday I went to see Master Shakespeare's Loves Labors Lost with Charlie at The Public Theater in the East Village. I met him at his work and we decided to eat there since they have apparently have excellent Mac n Cheese and when have I ever turned Mac n Cheese down? Never. I must say, it was pretty darn good. Not quite as good as Mama Michaels' nor quite as good as Hollister Brewing Company's either, but easily the best I have had in a restaurant in New York City. The show itself was much better than the last production Kelsey and I saw (in Santa Barbara at the Granada) and WAY better than the last play that Charlie and I saw (We Live Here). It was a more concise version of the script and I enjoyed the actors performances. The set was very minimal, which I always enjoy more when it comes to Shakespeare, and the costumes were great. Overall, a very pleasant evening of theater. After the show we decided to have a few drinks and went to the Queen Vic, a very chill English pub in the East Village. We grabbed a table by the windows and saw some interesting street activity: a man yelling at another man (who was standing on the sidewalk, dealing drugs and not being discrete about it, at all) who we later learned was a former employee of the bar and the man yelling at him was the owner.... it was crazy. Then there were the not so subtle guys who would literally stop in the middle of the sidewalk and stare at me through the window... Now, I usually never notice when people are looking at me (which my mom finds incredibly amusing) but that was just ridiculous, hard NOT to notice, and I found it to be quite silly. Anyway, it was a fun night: great conversation, great beer, great company. What more could you ask for on a Thursday night?
- FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21ST WAS KELSEY'S 23RD BIRTHDAY!! YAY!!! I got up earlier than I had been all week to go see her co-lab midterm in the West Village at 9 am. Co-lab is a class where the first year actors, directors, and playwrights work together to create new work (at least, that is my understanding of it). The playwrights were given an area in the West Village to wander around, find a space and assigned to write a 3-5 minute play to take place there. Then the directors were assigned a playwright once the plays had gone through their first draft. Then the directors were given actors. You get the picture. So I grabbed a cup of coffee and wandered over to the Hudson River park until I hard heard from Kelsey where they were starting. It was chilly and windy but still a beautiful morning! Kelsey told me that they were starting at the Highline Park (which is AWESOME!) so I headed over there and stumbled upon her class. It was cool to see the work and meet a lot of the people in her class. It reminded me of the outdoor movement piece we did sophomore year with Jeff. After the last piece I headed back to Midtown, stopping at TJs to get eggs since I had forgotten I needed them to bake Kelsey's funfetti birthday cake. I got home and started baking, worked on my acting resume a little bit, read, cleaned, decorated the cake and then passed out. I woke up around 5:30 and got ready to meet Kelsey at the bar down the street from her school. It was great meeting her classmates and chatting with them. Good people. Around 8:30 we decided dinner would be an excellent idea before we headed to the haunted house. Kelsey, Nicole (one of Kelsey's classmates), and I made our way to a restaurant called The Riviera Cafe; Kelsey's other classmate Kyle joined us shortly after we got there. We talked about grad schools and grad school auditions among many other things. It was really fun. After dinner we met up with a few more of Kelsey's classmates and headed to the haunted house Kelsey wanted to go to on the Lower East Side, where we met up with Dom and Maggie. It was so good to see them! We bought our tickets and stood in line for what seemed like FOR-EV-ER! It was a tad bit ridiculous. Now- I do not do so well with haunted houses. I love working in them, but for whatever reason the waiting in line for them (the anticipation of the terrifying unknown I know is immediately in front of me) causes mild panic attacks. Luckily, we were going to one based on fairytales and had two-dimensional sets (like a pop up book) combined with the Brazilian Bamboozler silliness (Velson is one of Kelsey's classmates, things get lost in translation) kept my mind elsewhere. The actual haunted house was well done, and a pretty cool concept. I wont lie, I had my face buried in Kelsey's back anytime we walked from room to room (it was guided) but it was still good haha. The second part of it was dumb. They had you go up to the second floor of the building and had you participate in an "experiment on fear." They showed a video, tried to make the crowd believe this really was an experiment by telling us we were being videoed, and asked stupid questions. Then they had us walk through single-file through a claustrophobia simulator (which if anyone was claustrophobic they would have freaked the fuck out and died) which, in my opinion, was dumb and they should have explained what it was before sending anyone through it. The tunnel lead us to a poorly devised lab set. We sat in a semi-stadium seating formation and they demonstrated some common fears... like stage fright (they shined a special on Kelsey, had her come up on-stage, do a clown dance, and answer a few questions in front of everyone. Clearly they should not have chosen an actor.) By the time we got out of the haunted house it was 12:45/almost 1 am. We adventured to the Upper East Side to a bar where Tristan, one of Kelsey's classmate's, works. We took the subway from the Lower East Side up to Midtown to catch the 6 train. Unfortunately for us the platform was under construction so we had to exit the station and walk to another entrance to catch the train. I can't tell you how many stairs we climbed and how many escalators we road on to reach the surface. It was like we had been in the bowels of hell, the center of the Earth, chillin with the dinosaurs. It was ridiculous. Anyway, we made it. And when the 6 train was going to be 17 minutes we decided to cab it the rest of the way. It was closer to 2 am by the time we made it to the bar, but lots of people were still there and burst into "Happy Birthday" when Kelsey entered. It was great! Charlie was there and we talked for a while, I met more classmates, sat at the bar and talked to Kels... It was fun. At 3:30 Kelsey and I decided it was time to go home. We hailed a cab, came home and ate cake while Kelsey opened the rest of her presents. It was a MIGHTY long day, but man was it fun :)
- SATURDAY, OCTOBER 22ND I don't know how Kelsey made it to work before 9 am, but I certainly slept in until 11. I worked on my acting resume some more with the info that Kelsey has been passing along to me from her casting workshops (which is SO INCREDIBLY HELPFUL!!). I signed up last week for this thing called ActorFest 2011, which is put on by Backstage, so I had to get my headshots/resume ready for the real acting world. Once I had a finalized draft I made my way to Kelsey's cafe and hung out with her for a while. She gave me a few more suggestions for my resume, we ate a delicious veggie quesadilla, and looked at the gossip magazines the owner stocks the cafe with. I headed home around 8 and finished up my resume, printed it out, made sure my adjustments fit the 8x10 picture and headed to the FedEx Office that is across the street. It's open 24/7 and is awesome. Printed and cut my resumes very easily and headed home to staple them to my headshots. Around 1 am I decided I should get some sleep since ActorFest 2011 started at 9 am.
- ACTORFEST 2011: Oh my word. I am really glad I went for the free option because this place was a ZOO!! I got to the block the pavilion was on around 9:15 and the line to get in wrapped pretty much around the ENTIRE block. So I hopped in line and waited. And waited. There was a lot of good people watching, which was nice. There were a lot a little kids/younger kids/teenagers there with their stage moms.... yeah. I finally got into the building and it was sheer madness. I snagged a free bag and wandered around the entirely too small showroom, got some info about classes, met Kelsey's Alexander Technique teacher (small world), and dropped of my headshot/resume with 20 casting directors/agencies. That part was pretty cool. Then I left, haha. I walked across the street to Old Navy and took advantage of the sale they were having. Yay running pants!!
So there you have it. Week 3. Hopefully next week I will have some new job stories. I'm currently in negotiations with the tiramisu shop. I have the job, we're just figuring out the hours/week situation.
Hope all is well wherever y'all are!
love,
jen
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