Eileen was heading out of town early Friday morning, so I took my bags with me to work. I worked on the drop and did other little things, and once rehearsal started I left my stuff at the theatre and headed over to Strand bookstore: another legend of New York. Matt had told me that Pearl and Strand accounted for almost all the money that he made in New York. I understand why: Strand is a wonderful new and used bookstore (they say they have 18 miles of books!) with outside stalls of $1 books, a basement with thousands of books by category, a rare books floor, and a floor of entirely art and design books. Which I loved. I could spend soooo much money there, now that I'm moving here I probably will.
As I was browsing at Strand I got a phone call from Matt and gave him an update on the show. I was hungry so I went to a coffee shop for a grilled cheese sandwich. The people at the table next to me were shooting a scene for a film and I enjoyed watching them.

I went back to Strand after lunch and then meandered back to the theatre to pick up my bags and head to the subway. I had arranged to meet Matt's friend Lisa, who had agreed to house me for the weekend, at Radio City Music Hall where she works at 5:30. I got there slightly early, and waited around for about 20 min until she came out. We said hello (I had never seen her, only spoken on the phone the day before) and jumped on the subway to go to Astoria, Queens, where she lives.

Lisa is amazing. She and Matt started in the city about the same time 10ish years ago and assisted a lot of the same designers and worked on shows together. Since then she's become a project manager and designer; right now she's running the preproduction for a huge new show at Radio City Music Hall. But now she's realized that designing is not what she really loves to do so she's going back to school for massage therapy in the fall, while still working her day job. She's incredibly down to earth and friendly. I felt like I had known her for a long time, we clicked immediately and talked all the way back to Queens. I asked her about herself and answered her questions about me. She subscribes to the same philosophy that Matt does when it comes to breaking into theatre: just do it. Don't spend time freaking out about it or worrying that you're not good enough. Just decide what you want to do and go for it; make the phone calls, work for the people that you want to work for. It was inspiring to talk to someone who has made it, and to hear her think that I could make it too if I just tried.

Lisa lives in a beautiful house in Astoria; she's moving to Manhattan now and was still kind enough to host me in the midst of packing up everything she owns. She put me in a room with a very comfortable air mattress (I slept wonderfully all the nights I was there) and gave me keys so I could come and go as I pleased. Once we got home we were both pretty hungry so we decided to go out so she could show me the neighborhood and we could get food. Astoria is lovely, apparently very safe, with lots of great reasonably priced restaurants. We went to a new Italian place and ordered a pizza to go and then went down to the wine store and bought 2 bottles of wine. We discovered that we both tend to buy by the label (whichever wine has the coolest label in the price range we want is the one we buy), but we ended up with good wines in spite of that. Back at the house we sat at the table and ate and chatted and drank wine. Soon Lisa's best friend Sarah (roommate from college and roommate in the city for the first 5 years they were here) came over and ate and drank with us. She was very nice as well; as the evening progressed she and Lisa got into a fairly intense discussion about a guy that Sarah was considering dating that Lisa did not like. It was very clear that they knew each other very well and cared about each other a lot; kind of refreshing actually to see two friends who were willing to argue with each other because they cared so much about each other. The evening was lovely, though, we talked for about 3 hours and then Sarah went home and I showered and went to bed.

Saturday I woke up early and took the subway down to the theatre. There was no rehearsal so I was able to work the full day in the space which was great. I finished the charcoal city drop I had been working on for several days (it looks pretty cool if I do say it myself) and worked on the bar set piece, finishing it up and painting it. Alex and Michael (artistic director and executive producer/lead in the show) were there working too so we had fun talking. I headed back to Astoria around 6pm, where I showered and then went out with Lisa and Sarah. A friend of theirs was having a birthday party at a nearby bar and they invited me along, so I went. We first stopped at a new burger place (it was pretty good) where Lisa described what it was like to have been a vegan and then vegetarian and to recently have started eating meat again. Very interesting.

We walked over to the bar and found their group out in the garden. The friend who's birthday it was ended up being the assistant charge from Juilliard who I had interviewed with back in April. She remembered me and it was weird to see just how small a world theatre is. The group of us sat in the garden and drank (I got a Stella) and talked for a couple hours, then Lisa and Sarah and I left and headed home. Back at the house Lisa and I had a discussion of how it's really only worth it to do theatre if you really love it, and how if you really love it you'll make a way to work in it. Eventually we both went to bed.

Sunday I had decided to take the day off work. I was going to go to Redeemer Presbyterian Church (Tim Keller's church) but ended up sleeping in past their morning services. It was my first time sleeping in since I came to the city, so I was ok with it. Lisa was gone when I got up, she left a note saying that she would be in Manhattan all day with a friend and to call her if I needed anything. I left the house around 10am and went to a bagel shop for breakfast (garlic bagel with cream cheese and coffee....delicious). The day before, Alex, the artistic director at the theatre, informed me that he was concerned that I was working too much and not having enough fun in New York. He was going to a vintage motorcycle show in Brooklyn on Sunday and invited me to come along if I wanted to. I figured that it would be interesting and a new experience so I took the subway over there after breakfast to meet Alex and his friend Leone at the show. Subways run weirdly in the city on weekends, I discovered. A lot of the routes change due to maintenance work and several stations don't get service at all. I had to take a bus down from the subway to get to Brooklyn because the trains weren't running there. It was fairly straightforward; I got slightly turned around when I got off, but then figured it out. When I got to the show, which was a big blocked off street with tents and food and rows of people's motorcycle's from the '70s and '80s (kind of like a farmers' market for motorcycles), Alex wasn't there yet so I just wandered around and looked at all the bikes. They were really cool; I had never spent time looking at one up close before but I discovered that there are several different types and got to see how the machine has evolved from older models to what people ride today.

Alex and his friend arrived after about an hour and we wandered up and down the street chatting and looking at bikes, got beer (they were charging for the water, but the beer and the food were free), and generally had a good time. Alex took these photos and sent them to the production staff for the Drunkard to make them jealous.



I left at about 2pm, planning to go to the Met for the afternoon. This was not to be, however. I got to the subway stop I had planned to leave from only to discover that trains were not running there that day. So I was stuck in Brooklyn with little idea of where I was. I found a bus stop, though, and got on a bus that eventually took me over by where Eileen lives, an area I at least slightly knew. There I was able to get the subway back to Manhattan. However, it had taken like 2 hours longer than I planned for, so I ended up just canning the Met idea and heading back to Astoria instead. I was hoping to catch Lisa and see if she could give me comments on my portfolio and then go swing dancing with her and Sarah. When I got back though I got a call from her that she was going to a movie with her friend and probably wouldn't make it home at all that night. So instead I organized my notes for the show and did laundry (Lisa kindly let me use the machines at her house which was great because my clothes were quite dirty since I had to bring so few of them). I was tired and started feeling a bit lonely and depressed because I was by myself. So I went out to wander the neighborhood and find dinner and called Remus and talked for a couple hours. That helped a lot, it was good to hear from her; we hadn't talked since I left for the city. I bought dinner at the grocery store: an Aloe Vera Juice drink (quite good, sweet, Japanese, but has chunks of Aloe floating in it that you have to get used to) and a peach pie, which I ate half of and had the other half for lunch the next day. I went to bed around 11 or midnight and slept very well.

tbc

The Saga Begins

Well so much has happened in the past few weeks that I don't know where to start. Long story short I moved back home from Williamsburg, hung out and unpacked and repacked for a week, spent a couple awesome days with the Chapmans, and went to Nags Head for a wonderful week with the fam. It was all wonderful but I don't have space to talk about it here BECAUSE...

I'm in New York! During the beach trip I was looking for work; part of that entailed talking with Matt about the New York show we had discussed over the summer and seeing if he still needed my help. He did and we arranged that I would spend 3 days in the city right after the beach. I tried to arrange housing for myself with friends but at the last minute that fell through. I was very sad and called Matt the day before I was supposed to leave to tell him that it looked like I wouldn't be able to come after all. He minor-ly freaked out (he told me later that he contemplated throwing his phone off the roof) and told me that he really needed me up here. He made a counter offer that he would find me housing for the first week and get the theatre to pay me more than originally agreed if I would come up to the city for 2 weeks and arrange housing myself for the second week. This all happened Saturday evening. I spent Sunday packing and updating my portfolio (and seeing Todd and Janetta!!) and on Monday at 4:30 am my wonderful sister Melanie kindly sacrificed sleep to drive me to Baltimore to catch the train to Penn Station. I read the script to the play on the way up and once I arrived I took the subway to the theatre. I got a tiny bit lost walking from the station to the theatre, but I called Matt and he sorted me out.

I arrived at the Playhouse at the same time as Dan, a recent MFA-graduate who worked as Charge Artist for the Pennsylvania show that Matt and I did this summer. He just moved to the city and Matt had called him to come work on the show for a couple days. Matt met us both and showed us around the space and gave us a quick rundown of his design. Then we jumped right into it, Dan painting based coats on the back wall and the luaun and Matt and I building frames for sliding panels that are one of the major set pieces. It was strange to be building again; it's been a long time since I've done it but I gradually got back into the swing of things. We worked like crazy for 3 hours until rehearsal started at 1, then stopped for the day. The three of us went out to lunch together to a taco joint (very good, I had a bean, cheese, and rice burrito) and chatted and I got to know Dan better. After lunch Matt and I ditched Dan and went on a walking tour of lower Manhattan. Matt knows the area really well because he did a lot of shows there and went to grad school in the general vicinity. So we walked all over and he showed me all his favorite spots. useful stores to know about, and the general geography of the Lower East Side. We went into Pearl, which is apparently the best art store in the world (Matt had been raving about it to me for months). And he's right, the place is incredible: it's 5 stories tall and chock-full of more art supplies than you could ever imagine, for pretty decent prices. It was kind of like heaven; Matt let me just wander around for a long time. Eventually we headed back toward the theatre, Matt bought us iced coffee because I was fading after being for far too long and he was tired too. Rehearsal was still going on when we got back so we sat out on the roof and Matt talked me through all the particulars of the design. The show is called The Drunkard and it's an 1850s temperance play; it's very interesting. Matt gave me a thumbdrive full of documents to copy to my computer and a couple books of research to memorize overnight and then it was time for me to go for the day.

Matt had arranged that I spend the first several days with the show's stage manager, Eileen. She lives in Brooklyn and so we took the subway back to her place. She was very nice and welcoming, let me sleep on the couch, and invited me along to dinner with her and one of her friends, which I happily attended. I spent a couple hours after dinner going over all the design stuff from Matt and then went to sleep and slept very well.

Tuesday I went in to work by 9am and we worked until 7pm. I spent most of the day out on the roof with Dan cutting profiles for the sliding panels and painting them to look like trees and bushes. It was a little bit awkward because as the asst. designer I was in charge and therefore was supposed to tell Dan what to do; but he has his MFA and I do not so I sometimes felt a bit out of my depth. I got used to being in charge eventually, though, and we ended up getting a lot done. The three of us went to lunch again, this time at a mostly-vegetarian sandwich place. I got a hummus-lettuce-tomato sandwich on a baguette; it was so big I could only eat half of it. Frank, the director, stopped by towards the end of our lunch to say hi and spend a little time talking with me and Dan. He's very nice but very high-energy, almost twitchy, and needs to feel like everyone is working and listening.

After lunch we went back to work, finished painting the stuff outside and then came in to look at the back wall of the theatre. Dan asked Matt about the design, to which Matt responded "Emily has a plan". I didn't, but I immediately came up with one. :-) I spent a couple minutes drawing a rough sketch of a forest scene and then Dan and I sketched it out and painted it. We got the whole thing finished in about 3 hours, it was awesome.

We stopped work at 7 and Matt and I headed uptown to meet his friend Campbell (a professor at NYU that I had met during the school year) for dinner at a delicious Thai restaurant. It was a fun dinner; I didn't talk very much but it was lots of fun to listen to both Matt's and Campbell's stories. Campbell kindly paid for dinner and gave me his phone number to call him later in the week if I needed help at all. He and Matt got me to subway station and I headed back to Brooklyn. I got a bit lost getting back; accidentally got off at the wrong transfer and got turned around, but I got there eventually. Matt had bought me a mini-subway map of Manhattan which then and since has proved extremely useful. I eventually got safely back to Eileen's and went to bed.

Wednesday morning we met at the theatre at 9 again. I was a little early and found Matt sitting outside waiting for us. We sat and chatted a bit while we waited for Dan, then went inside and got to work. I spent the morning working on a 4-piece muslin drop of a city scene. I made a sketch and then started laying the thing out on the roof. At noon we stopped work and went to lunch, to another vegetarian cafe up the street; I got a fruit smoothie cuz I wasn't very hungry. Then we said goodbye to Dan (that was all the time the theatre could afford to hire him for) and Matt and I went back to the theatre. We watched rehearsal for a while, then I made a list of things that needed to get done and talked it over with him. I went out and got coffee for me and Matt and Alex (the artistic director) and chatted with them for a bit (Matt wants to bring a WM show to the theatre next summer), and then I took a walk around the neighborhood to get a better sense of the geography. I was back by 5pm in time for a meeting between Matt, Frank the director, and me to figure out a bunch of set issues before Matt left town and to officially hand over the reigns to me. I took a bunch of notes and we figured a lot of things out. And then it was time for Matt to go to drive back to Williamsburg. I helped him take his stuff outside, said goodbye, and headed back to Brooklyn.

I was feeling a bit down and nervous that night. The meeting with Frank had shown a lot of areas of the design that I was not familiar with and showed that I needed to get to know the script better. I got Chinese food from a take-out place next to Eileen's apartment and spent the evening on the couch going over the design and the script and making a spreadsheet of the show. It was very helpful and I felt much better after doing it. Matt also left me an encouraging voicemail saying he was sure I'd be fine and do a great job, which helped too.

Thursday I went in to work at 9am; Matt had passed on his keys to the theatre to me. I spent the morning mostly working on the drop outside and doing little notes. Alex kindly brought me coffee around 11 and after rehearsal started we had a good chat about everything that needed to happen for the show. I left and went to lunch at the cafe around the corner for a bagel and fruit smoothie and spent time finishing the spreadsheet I had started the previous night. When I finished I came back to the theatre to work more on the drop outside. At 330 we had a production meeting for the staff of the show, my first non-PBK production meeting ever. It went ok, at least for me; though there was some weird back and forth between the director and the costume designer. After the meeting I talked with Alex and then headed over to Blick, another art store, to pick up some more charcoal for the drop. I explored the whole store, bought the charcoal, and then took a long walk exploring the area: SoHo, and the East Village. I called home and talked to the fam for a while as I walked. Then I headed back to Brooklyn and ate my leftover Chinese food before heading to bed.

To be continued....