Well, At Least I Bought Some Paint...

Boy, this "getting the house in shape" crud is difficult. I actually damn near killed myself by trotting off to KMart and buying two gallons of paint (two bathrooms and the kitchen cabinets, that is) and all the other stuff one needs...paint brushes, rollers, spackle...you know. I'm here to tell you that that shit is HEAVY. Also, just so you know, KMart bags are fragile in the extreme. One of mine broke before I even got into a taxi. That was a damn nuisance.

Then of course, nothing could be done about taking the garbage out last Wednesday because of our "blizzard." 10 inches of snow. I am invariably amazed at the hysteria New York (and New York weather people in particular) can display when confronted with actual weather. They seem just fine with fair and warmer and a little rain, but anything after that brings forth a barrage of references to the "storm of the century," "blizzard," "massive amounts of rain," and other forms of completely unwarranted craziness. I mean, it's winter. You get snow. It's spring. You get rain. It's summer. You get thunderstorms. And the rest of the city just goes leaping along behind the weather people...all the newspapers and news stations, for instance, warn you about water in the subway system. Um, people, have you ever noticed those grids in the streets? Have you ever noticed that you can hear (and feel) the subway through them? Has it ever occurred to your cute little pea sized brain what might, just MIGHT possibly happen, if you pour water over the grids? Gee, it goes into the subway? Ya think? Sheesh.

So trying to paint has been iffy, what with all that garbage lying around waiting to be taken out, and giving my living room a faint background aura of "bar the morning after," with all those beer cans...oh, and did I mention we had a Valentine Day's party on Saturday? This means, aside from the eau de booze drifting around my house, I have to get Sarah and/or Vicky to take down the hearts they stuck on the ceiling...not to mention the stars left over from New Year's Eve, which they decided to leave up for Valentine's Day. Oh, yes, and all those hearts taped to the walls, although I can reach those.

But I could hardly paint things the day of a party. So that got put off, and I was going to get to it today, but Sarah informed me that my brother-in-law and nephew are coming to have dinner with us tomorrow night...so I couldn't very well paint today (it has to dry, obviously) and I can't do it tomorrow. Now Wednesday might be a good day, except that I think people are coming over to move out my furniture (the junk I'm getting rid of)...and Thursday night I have rehearsal.

Ah, yes. Rehearsal. We're fully into it now, and it is exhausting. I made the guys (director Ted and playwright Philippe) quit in the middle last week because I was dropping. This is the period of rehearsal (right after the first read-throughs) when the REAL work begins. Line by line by line, getting out every single meaning, every single shape of a thought, every single possible interpretation...you can, in a role as large as this one, easily spend an hour on a single arc of the script. My script is beginning to look like a real working script, peppered with notes, which is great, because it means we're getting somewhere...one of those notes, I noticed today, reads, "Think Funny Face." Yes, well, I know what I mean, and nobody else has to...they'll see the effect of the note. They don't need to know how I got it.

Boy, it's satisfying, though. Movies are lovely in terms of giving me nice money and feeding me food, but they don't feed anything else. As I always say (ad infinitum, as a matter of fact), background work isn't acting. This play is ACTING. And I love it.

I am going to bed...tomorrow morning I have to get up and actually get dressed and figure out what to cook for dinner tomorrow night (something cheap, that being where the finances are) and then go buy it, and pick up prescriptions, and go to the library because for reasons that escape me, New York State no longer sends out income tax forms. No, I don't know...you have to go to the library, of all odd places, to get them. You're supposed to be able to get them at the post office, but our little branch never has them.

So a full day. I think I'll sleep late Wednesday.

Love, Wendy