Well the last two weeks have felt more like two months or two years. Lots going on.

My friends from WM came to visit 2 weekends ago. There were 4 of them: Christy, Rachel, Meg, and Meg’s friend Kati who I’d never met but was very nice. They bussed up here on Saturday morning; I met them at their bus at 830. We went and got bagels for breakfast, then headed to the Met for a couple hours. I had never been and was thoroughly awed by their impressive collection. Definitely somewhere I need to spend a lot more time at. We got pizza and garlic roles for lunch, then walked across Central Park and took the subway back to my apartment so they could drop their bags. We spent some time just resting and recuperating, then headed back downtown. We wandered through a street fair on 6^th Ave, bought cupcakes at my friend Stephanie’s cupcake shop, and went to the Lego store. There we had fun making lego people of Dave and Matt from WM, choosing the correct faces, shirts, pants, hats/hair, and accessories. We made a Happy Dave, an Angry Dave, and a Matt. Christy is giving them to them for Christmas.

In the evening we went and saw the closing performance of my show Nance O’Neil. I think they enjoyed it, but there were a lot of yawns because we were all starting to get tired. After the show we met up with Stephanie and Angela (both former WMers) for dinner and drinks. We had to go over to the NYU area to find a place open late enough (it was like 1130), and I nearly got us killed crossing the street, after which jaywalking was outlawed, but eventually we settled on a barbeque joint. The food was delicious, more so because we were all starving, and I enjoyed a beer with my pulled pork, cornbread, and macncheese. After we ate we all subwayed home together and collapsed into well-deserved rest.

Sunday we got up and headed down to Brooklyn to visit the Brooklyn Flea Market. It’s enormous and had a lot of cool stuff: furniture, art, books, clothes, everything. Bit pricier than we were expecting though. We got food from an amazing street food vendor: mine was a gruyere and onions grilled cheese sandwich accompanied by cardamom honey iced tea. After the flea market we went back to Manhattan and walked for a while. We went to Pearl (the best art store in the world), through Soho to Strand (the best bookstore in the world). It was a long walk, and the girls’ feet were hurting and generally they were a tad grumpy. My feet have stopped hurting when I walk, so I think I accidentally overtired them. With a bunch of grumps on my hands I chose the only reliable solution I know: food! We took the subway to the Shake Shack, an outdoor burger joint of deliciousness, and Rachel and I stood in the very long line and had a great conversation while the others rested on a bench in the park. After our food, which was great, we tried to go up the Empire State Building, but ended up canning that idea after we saw the $30 price tag. Instead, after a quick stop in H&M for me to buy fingerless gloves, Rachel, Christy, and I came back to my place while Meg and Kati went to see Times Square at night. Stephanie and Angela came up to my apartment to hang out, and we spent a nice evening chatting all together, eating cookies, and drinking wine. Monday morning the girls left early, and I spent time cleaning up the apartment and then delved into my next project: the show.

Follow Me Down has made my last 2 weeks insane. It can be easily divided into 3 segments: homework, shopping, and installation/tech. I spent a couple days on the front end working from my apartment finishing the design and preparing for everything. I have to Technical Director working on the show with me, so in addition to the design and conceptual work I’m also responsible for building, installing, and painting everything. We are a rental at the theater we’re performing in, so we have no scene shop, no paint area, no props storage to pull from, nothing. So I not only had to figure out what I wanted onstage, but then how to build it or where to buy it from, and how to get it to the theater. Pretty much everything had to be purchased and we had to somehow stay within our small budget.

So I spent a few days figuring out how to install doors, pricing lumber and molding, and designing windows and fireplaces and figuring out how to build them quickly and cheaply. All things I’m not used to doing; I think it was good for me, definitely taught me new things.

The next phase was the buying of everything. The director and I were nervous because nothing had been purchase a week before the show opened (because we had nowhere to put it). I headed a trip to a free arts-reuse center with some guys from the cast and brought back a bunch of little stuff, but all the big furniture pieces (rug, couch, tables, chairs, sideboard, etc) remained unfound and unpurchased. The end of the first week I went out to Brooklyn for a day and found a bunch of the stuff at thrift stores and flea markets. But we didn’t have a way to get it back to the theater, and everyone was too busy to come down and help me move it. I went up to Queens the next day to find backups for things, just in case they were gone once we got around to getting them.

So it boiled down to Monday, the day we were allowed to move into the space and the day I had the cast available to work for me. I was very nervous beforehand, about renting a UHaul, driving in the city for the first time, buying lumber for the first time, directing a build, and getting the furniture to the theatre. But God really helped me and the day went beautifully. I woke up insanely early, rented a pickup truck from UHaul, drove to my apartment to pick up the chairs I was lending the show, drove to the lumber store and bought the lumber order, and went to the theatre. The cast was there, and I sent a few of them with the truck to Brooklyn to pick up the furniture I had selected, and set the rest of them to work cutting lumber, painting, and installing doors. We got everything that really needed to be done completed by the end of the day, and the cast was awesome—great attitudes and hard workers.

We ran the show in the space Monday night, our first official tech, and since then I have been working in the space during the day and then watching the techs late into the night. The week started better than I had hoped, but it’s been a little rough more recently. I had been told that I could work during the day in the space (which I needed to get all my notes done), and Liz, the TD at the theater and a WM grad I knew my freshman year, has been wonderful about lending me tools and has been very generous about letting me do whatever I want in the space. But apparently the higher-ups at the theater were not willing to be quite so generous with time or tools. Sarah, my director, got in some trouble a couple days ago when the theater decided that they needed our space for rehearsal that day. I got ousted for a couple hours, and wandered around doing a bit of shopping but mostly wandering, until they let me back in. The next day we got yelled at and told we couldn’t build in the space (which was the point of buying lumber). So the generous situation we had at the beginning of the week has tightened a bit in the last few days and the director has gotten yelled at a lot, which has made the situation a bit stressful. And I’ve lost some of the working time I had counted on in the space to get all my notes done.

But, that’s ok. We are pushing through, and we preview tonight and officially open tomorrow. I’m leaving shortly to finish my last few notes, and then I’ll be done! I’ve learned a lot on this show and have loved the people and think the play is brilliant, but it’s been more work than I bargained for.

Anyhoo, that’s been my life recently. I don’t have time to write about all the stuff I’ve been thinking about, but I will soon. I’m going home for a couple days on Sunday and cannot express how excited I am about that!!! It will be so awesome to see the fam again and Tuffy and everything. I absolutely cannot wait.