Blarg!

Life in limbo continues weird and unreliable. Much like a window A/C unit! Our hours are super weird for Oliver, and I'm struggling to adjust. Which is killing my all over productivity! I was in for the Beauty and the Beast tour this week. Was kept all the way through without booking it. Once again. It makes me wonder. After going from being kept for projects in a rooms full of super broadway divas, I still can't manage to book a non union tour? (I pretty much stopped trying this year after being drug along by Shrek, never being kept to sing for West Side, and then my multiple final callbacks for Addams Family both this year and last year.) By this time last year, I had been back in New York for a month less, and had booked three paid shows and gotten a teaching job. This year, with my sturdier resume and much improved audition skills, I have had a teaching job and am working for free (my recent extreme Tennessee Williams life means I should take it with a grain of salt, but still!). I got an email last night from HISD. They finally approved me, and all of the jobs I wanted to apply for are filled. Somehow I doubt the elementary school that started as an all black high school during segregation wants a small white girl teaching dance. I haven't heard back from any other schools or districts. Trying to get up my momentum is still hard (not as hard as it was a month ago, but baby steps!) and it is so frustrating when I keep hitting brick walls. And I'm running out of bubble bath. Thank god shower gel can also make a good bubble bath!

Ends, Beginnings, and Pizza Limbo

With my life being the whacky upheaval the last few years have been, writing this blog has been a sort of therapy. It goes me time to think life through and write it out in a very different way than journaling. What started as a way to avoid talking about nothing but work with friends and family has become something completely different. Last night was my last night at Golda Och (Thanks to everyone there. The students and staff were all sweet and embracing to the gentile from Texas. My junior high school ladies even tried to get me married. Jewish mothers in training!) And it got me to thinking about what to do with this blog as I hop on new endings and beginnings. It's all far away from my original intent, but things grow and change on their own. Which means I'm going to keep writing. Especially right now. Until I move in August, I just have evening rehearsals and then weekend shows with Oliver. I'm in limbo, trying to enjoy my remaining time in the land of taste pizza. Then its back to enchiladas and margaritas!

The GTT Decision

It's been a rough start for 2013. With all that has gone done, I've sat down and done some major thinking about what is important to me, and I've come to a big decision. When Oliver! is over and my lease is up, I will be heading back to Texas. Being close to my family is much more important to me than I thought, and being so far away made all of the deaths and illness that the past two years have brought much more difficult. Also, I am tired of being poor. I love when I'm working, but when I'm not working, I'm miserable. I have 6 part time jobs and will end up working maybe two days a week. I worry about money to the point that I can't sleep. And the jobs I do have in between shows are exhausting and demeaning. There's only so much of that I can take! The state of the theatre is rocky right now. The middle ground is lost. Tours go out non equity and SETA instead of production, so there is no storing the nuts away for the winter of the next unemployment. Casts are small and many regional theatres are closing their doors. I know if I stuck it around, eventually the right show and the right team would come along and I'd have that Broadway credit (after much more regional theatre-ing). I'm just not patient enough to wait for it and wait tables until it comes. Broadway and most of what plays on it nowadays doesn't interest me. My voice, physical type, and dancing style are all not in vogue right now. I need another ten years on before I can play most character roles that suit my voice, so I'm heading back to Houston, looking to get a full time theatre teaching position and continue theatre in Houston's thriving store front scene. So Houston friends and theatre folk- I'm coming back! Let me know if you have anything for me (throwing it out there. I've done worse, annoying, self promoting things in New York!) I wouldn't take my foray into New York back for anything. It's been a blast, and I've worked with some amazing people and made some awesome new friends! The boots aren't done traveling. They are just two stepping and available for summers! And to my roomie, who left yesterday to start a new job and get married in San Antonio, thanks for everything. Go rock at life! (And I should be able to make your wedding now!)