Last night I was able to see the musical Anything Goes on Broadway. It was AMAZING. It was so much fun and the cast was incredible! At first when I went I was really bummed because I realized Sutton Foster (who normally plays the lead role) is on a break right now and wasn't going to be in the show!! Now one of the reasons I wanted to see this show in the first place is because of her. So you can imagine my disappointment. I knew that this other woman was going to be in the show and I thought it was her understudy or something. Turns out, the actress who took over the role for the past couple weeks is Stephanie J. Block. Ok, I actually don't really know who she is but she was in Wicked as Elphaba for a while and has been in a number of other shows. She was completely and utterly fantastic!
So when you look at the video, most of the people I didn't get to see. But it's still fun to hear the music and see some of the dancing :)
Like I said the entire cast was incredible. Many of the actors that are in the preview videos and who I saw on the Tonys are no longer in the show, but the people who are in the show now, I just have one word....WOW. Joel Grey is still in the show from the original and he was just as amazing as I thought he'd be. He was the original Wizard in Wicked. He plays the funny mobster character and he was really funny and sooo talented. I was looking him up after the show and I found out some interesting facts about him. He is one of only 8 actors to have won both the Tony and Academy awards for the same role (the MC in Cabaret). Also he's 79 years old and still acting 8 nights a week onstage! Pretty cool!
Another surprise actor that was in this show is Kelly Bishop. I had no idea she had moved into this role and I am soooo glad I was able to see her! I know her best because she played the grandmother on the tv show Gilmore Girls. But what I never put together is that she is also the original Sheila character (and it's based on her life) in A Chorus Line. It turns out that this is the first time in 35 years (since Chorus Line) that she has appeared onstage in a musical. She's been in some plays and of course done a lot of movies and tv shows (you might also know her as the mother in Dirty Dancing), but this is her first musical since A Chorus Line. I was just truly amazed by that. And she was definitely totally awesome!
I found this clip when I was trying to find a clip of Kelly Bishop in her role in Anything Goes. This is from when she was in A Chorus Line and I thought it was fun. So enjoy!
Well that's about it for now. I got my draft of my thesis back with comments from my advisor and I've been thinking reaaaallly hard about working on it :). Hehe, no I'll work on it this weekend some more.
This upcoming week is my last week of my internship so I have mixed feelings about that. My friend from DC is coming up to celebrate Thanksgiving with me so that will be fun! We're also going to go see the Starkid concert (more on that later). Basically I have a lot of fun plans coming up! Yaay!
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Thesis Update! and some other ramblings...
That's right folks, I actually have some news on my thesis!
And the update is........
Drumroll please........
I just turned in my second draft to my advisor! Woooooo! Oh, is that not as exciting as you thought it would be?
The point is, my thesis is going very well and I'm not going to think about it at all while I wait for feedback from my advisor. It is currently 29 pages (which includes references and the script to my sample TV episode). I'm sure I will add and change things depending on what kind of feedback I get back though I also know for sure that I'm still missing storyboards for my episode. I'm still not exactly sure how I'm going to do the storyboards because I can't draw. I had an idea that I would get my friends to pose as the characters and then I would photoshop in the correct backgrounds but I'm not sure if that will just be too difficult.
Random fact I recently figured out about myself:
Apparently when I can't think of an average girls' name I use the name Susan. One of the characters in my show is named Susan. Also, I recently went back through my computer's harddrive and found some old stories I had written from high school and college and I use the name Susan quite a bit. I honestly have no idea why. When I was little I remember my favorite name was Kimberly Rose. Whenever I was playing pretend with my friends I would use that name. And then, when I was in high school I actually met a girl who's name was Kimberly Rose. No joke.
Ok, one other random story and then I should probably start my day. So it is the month of November currently. One thing that happens in November (no I'm not thinking of No Shave November) is NaNoWriMo. This stands for National Novel Writing Month. It's basically a bet you make with yourself that you will write a 50,000 word novel in 1 month. When I was a freshman at Willamette I ended up completing this task. My novel was called "Memoirs of College Freshman" and it was basically a very stream of consciousness account of my life up until that points. I looked at it the other day and I reread a few parts of it. It's kind of cool actually because it's more or less a blog of my life. It reminded me of this blog actually. I'm so glad that I'm keeping this blog because it gives me a way to look back and this kind of momentous time in my life and I think my NaNoWriMo story works in a similar way. In both cases I was starting on a new adventure in my life.
Anyway, I thought I'd post the first little section here just for fun. If you would like to read any of the rest of it, let me know and I can send it :)
Memoirs of a College Freshman
November 2005
And the update is........
Drumroll please........
I just turned in my second draft to my advisor! Woooooo! Oh, is that not as exciting as you thought it would be?
The point is, my thesis is going very well and I'm not going to think about it at all while I wait for feedback from my advisor. It is currently 29 pages (which includes references and the script to my sample TV episode). I'm sure I will add and change things depending on what kind of feedback I get back though I also know for sure that I'm still missing storyboards for my episode. I'm still not exactly sure how I'm going to do the storyboards because I can't draw. I had an idea that I would get my friends to pose as the characters and then I would photoshop in the correct backgrounds but I'm not sure if that will just be too difficult.
Random fact I recently figured out about myself:
Apparently when I can't think of an average girls' name I use the name Susan. One of the characters in my show is named Susan. Also, I recently went back through my computer's harddrive and found some old stories I had written from high school and college and I use the name Susan quite a bit. I honestly have no idea why. When I was little I remember my favorite name was Kimberly Rose. Whenever I was playing pretend with my friends I would use that name. And then, when I was in high school I actually met a girl who's name was Kimberly Rose. No joke.
Ok, one other random story and then I should probably start my day. So it is the month of November currently. One thing that happens in November (no I'm not thinking of No Shave November) is NaNoWriMo. This stands for National Novel Writing Month. It's basically a bet you make with yourself that you will write a 50,000 word novel in 1 month. When I was a freshman at Willamette I ended up completing this task. My novel was called "Memoirs of College Freshman" and it was basically a very stream of consciousness account of my life up until that points. I looked at it the other day and I reread a few parts of it. It's kind of cool actually because it's more or less a blog of my life. It reminded me of this blog actually. I'm so glad that I'm keeping this blog because it gives me a way to look back and this kind of momentous time in my life and I think my NaNoWriMo story works in a similar way. In both cases I was starting on a new adventure in my life.
Anyway, I thought I'd post the first little section here just for fun. If you would like to read any of the rest of it, let me know and I can send it :)
Memoirs of a College Freshman
November 2005
Forward (aka the part where I say why I’m even writing this)
As you can probably tell from the title, I am a college freshman. It’s a pretty obvious conclusion to come to under the circumstances. I wouldn’t think yourself to be a genius if all your basing that on is that you figured out the above. Just a thought. First off, lets talk a little bit about my nicknames. People pretty much call me three things. My high school friends call me Al or Allison, mostly Al though. On the other hand, all of my Fountain Valley friends call me Ali. This is because my friend Stacey started calling me Ali kind of randomly one day and then when she introduced me to all of her friends and acquaintances she introduced me as such. Most of my college friends call me Allison (well except for Noah who calls me Bubbles). Anyway, I’m a pretty average girl, short, shy, practically unnoticeable. Why a story about me of all people you ask. Why would anyone care about the life story of such a person? The truth is, probably no one. In fact, if you’d like the entire truth my life story is just as boring as the next person’s life story. I haven’t done anything fabulous, I haven’t found the cure for the common cold, I haven’t eaten the world’s biggest melon, I wasn’t valedictorian of my high school, I wasn’t the most popular or the most athletic (or even athletic at all). Basically, I’m a girl who’s just trying to live her life as best she can. I needed to write a 50,000 word novel, couldn’t find the creativity in me to write about something else, and so I decided to write about my life. It’s as simple as that. It is one of the only things I know of where I’m an expert, or at least as much of an expert that I can be. Besides, don’t people always say ‘write what you know’? Well, here’s something I know. And so I present to you: my life. (The author retains the right to have her story not be in any kind of exact chronological order or to even make sense at times.)
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Seminar
So I totally forgot to mention the awesome play I saw last night!
I got to see Seminar with Alan Rickman! Seminar is a new play about this kind of out of work and slightly crazed writer who is teaching a writing workshop to 4 would-be fiction writers. It was a comedy and actually pretty funny. I'm still not sure if I got the deeper plots that were involved and there was a lot of poignant moments where I think you were supposed to think deeply about life and writing and reading and politics and whatever else in life. But for the most part it was enjoyable to watch and seeing Alan Rickman was amazing. He is such a good actor. I know this is kind of a bad explanation of the play, but it really is hard to explain. The point is that I enjoyed it. Oh and there was this really funny part towards the end where Alan Rickman chases another character all over the stage. That might have been one of my favorite parts. :)
Here is the video preview. It doesn't say a lot about what the show is about, but it's fun to listen to Alan Rickman talk ^_^
I got to see Seminar with Alan Rickman! Seminar is a new play about this kind of out of work and slightly crazed writer who is teaching a writing workshop to 4 would-be fiction writers. It was a comedy and actually pretty funny. I'm still not sure if I got the deeper plots that were involved and there was a lot of poignant moments where I think you were supposed to think deeply about life and writing and reading and politics and whatever else in life. But for the most part it was enjoyable to watch and seeing Alan Rickman was amazing. He is such a good actor. I know this is kind of a bad explanation of the play, but it really is hard to explain. The point is that I enjoyed it. Oh and there was this really funny part towards the end where Alan Rickman chases another character all over the stage. That might have been one of my favorite parts. :)
Here is the video preview. It doesn't say a lot about what the show is about, but it's fun to listen to Alan Rickman talk ^_^
Happy November!
Welcome to November!
So I was randomly noticing that you can tell when I've had a busy/stressful month by the number of times I post in my blog in any given month. I realized I only had 3 posts in October, and I was really super busy, but for the most part I average about 5 posts per month. Of course then there was April which only had 2 posts...you can probably now see the trend in how busy I was that month. Anyway, I just thought it was a funny thing to notice.
This weekend my plan is thesis thesis thesis! I actually started working on it again this week and it's going pretty well. I had to basically rearrange everything I had in my first draft, but at least the information seemed solid even if it was in the wrong place. My advisor had a lot of good comments and so I'm currently working my way through those. As far as I can tell right now the two sections that need a lot of work are my Literature Review section and then of course the design section. The design section is really hard and really easy at the same time. It's easy because it doesn't involve a lot of research and citing of journal articles, but it's hard because I basically have to come up with a storyline and I still don't have an extremely strong grasp of who my characters are and what they are trying to accomplish.
But anyway, we'll see. I also had a visitor the last couple days which was really fun. Tanya, a friend of mine from Willamette crashed at my place while she was visiting the city on a class field trip and we got to catch up so that was awesome!
I'm also finishing up a video game study. There's a girl in my program (only working on her doctorate) and she's working on her dissertation research and I'm one of her participants! It's really fun so far. Basically I play a video game and then have to take surveys and talk about my experiences with it.
The other thing I'm now constantly doing is applying to jobs. My new routine is every day (or every other day) I have a list of television company websites and I go through and look at the new job postings to see if there is anything I'm qualified for and if I find something, I apply for it. I haven't heard back from any of the jobs yet, but at least it's a start and I'm trying!
And just because I like my blog posts to have some sort of visual element....I'm hosting a Flat Stanley for my cousin's 3rd grade class so I've been trying to take some pictures of him with various NYC landmarks. :)
So I was randomly noticing that you can tell when I've had a busy/stressful month by the number of times I post in my blog in any given month. I realized I only had 3 posts in October, and I was really super busy, but for the most part I average about 5 posts per month. Of course then there was April which only had 2 posts...you can probably now see the trend in how busy I was that month. Anyway, I just thought it was a funny thing to notice.
This weekend my plan is thesis thesis thesis! I actually started working on it again this week and it's going pretty well. I had to basically rearrange everything I had in my first draft, but at least the information seemed solid even if it was in the wrong place. My advisor had a lot of good comments and so I'm currently working my way through those. As far as I can tell right now the two sections that need a lot of work are my Literature Review section and then of course the design section. The design section is really hard and really easy at the same time. It's easy because it doesn't involve a lot of research and citing of journal articles, but it's hard because I basically have to come up with a storyline and I still don't have an extremely strong grasp of who my characters are and what they are trying to accomplish.
But anyway, we'll see. I also had a visitor the last couple days which was really fun. Tanya, a friend of mine from Willamette crashed at my place while she was visiting the city on a class field trip and we got to catch up so that was awesome!
I'm also finishing up a video game study. There's a girl in my program (only working on her doctorate) and she's working on her dissertation research and I'm one of her participants! It's really fun so far. Basically I play a video game and then have to take surveys and talk about my experiences with it.
The other thing I'm now constantly doing is applying to jobs. My new routine is every day (or every other day) I have a list of television company websites and I go through and look at the new job postings to see if there is anything I'm qualified for and if I find something, I apply for it. I haven't heard back from any of the jobs yet, but at least it's a start and I'm trying!
And just because I like my blog posts to have some sort of visual element....I'm hosting a Flat Stanley for my cousin's 3rd grade class so I've been trying to take some pictures of him with various NYC landmarks. :)
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