Well, it is Saturday and I am neither working nor rehearsing.  For the moment.  The last week has been tech week, so the set has been going up little by little as we have rehearsed.  Even after last night, the final dress, there was still work to be done.  Thursday we got glowing praises from the director on how well the show looked even if the blood wasn’t present yet.  Hey- people die, so there has to be blood- especially for one of the deaths involving a slit throat.   Yes, I will wait while you take care of your stomach in the bathroom…  Well, I do know some of you three readers are horror buffs so you are still with me. 😉

My death is clean so I don’t have to worry about blood at least.  Moving on, last night the director was extremely po’ed after the first act.  He didn’t yell, but he did make sure everyone knew.  He was far more pleased with the second act and so during notes he crumpled up one note after another without reading them aloud so as not to get down on us.  I shudder to think of the contents of the notes had the second act not gone so well.  I do think the first number at the start of the act was the best we have ever done though, even if it did drag a bit.

Following this show I am now in the first community theatre non-musical, that is straight play, I have been in in a very long time.  Now I have done straight drama in church of course, but as for community theatre is has been far too long.  It is the same show Jamiahsh was in last year, but my role is far more humble though I felt my audition went fairly well.  So did others’ apparently.  This is my role:

Oh, sorry. That was Gowron. My role is Gower.  Mr Gower, the druggist a young Mr. Bailey worked for, originally played by H. B. Warner.  They asked if I would be willing to play additional roles if necessary and I said absolutely.  Well, hopefully next time I try out for this group they will know me better (in a good way 😉 ).  We all have to start somewhere.  I do not know when I will begin rehearsing, but I will miss the first read-through because of my Monday night small group.  I’ll try to post more on this topic.

With the exception of Thinner, I’ve liked most of the Stephen King movies I’ve seen.  My favorite is Storm of the Century, a Prime-Time Emmy Award winning made-for-tv mini-series that aired in 1999.  Every winter when a big blizzard is predicted in our corner of Ohio, we plan on being snowed in watching our Storm of the Century dvd.  It never happens though; I think it has to do with trying to watch a 240 minute movie that’s not for kids when we have 4 of them.  But anyway, if we ever get time to watch Storm of the Century in the near future, I’ll definitely blog more about it – it’s awesome!

One of Stephen King’s lesser known films, Sleepwalkers, is a movie I saw as a teenager.  I liked it back then, so when I happened to see the dvd on the library’s shelf the other day, that’s what I quickly picked up since I was in a hurry.  My husband and I watched it the other night, and we both had the same opinion.  A fun little horror film, nothing great but still entertaining.  It is Stephen King-creepy, as only he can do, and much of the movie’s creepiness has to do with the mother-son relationship; I won’t go into detail except to say that it’s extremely disturbing.  Brian Krause and Alice Krige play the mother and son monsters who need to feed on a human virgin in order to survive.  They morph into strange cat-like creatures, which is even more strange because cats are drawn to their house, yet deadly to the monsters at the same time.  The special effects are extremely cheesy by today’s standards and even laughable, but sometimes I’m a sucker for that kind of thing and really enjoy bad special effects – my favorite example of this is Jaws 3-D.

While we’re on the subject of Stephen King, as I mentioned, I like most of his movies that I’ve seen.  I tried to read the book Carrie a really long time ago, but I found it hard to follow, either because I was a teen or because of the religious ramblings inserted throughout the book which were done in such a way that it’s hard to follow because it’s depicting Carrie’s mother’s craziness.  But anyway, Stephen King is very talented, of course.  He has a gift of making movies extremely creepy without stooping as low as many of today’s horror movies do with the constant blood and gore.

An interesting event took place in his life that almost reads like one of his novels, well, actually it does since he wrote about it.  On June 19, 1999, his life was changed forever when he was hit by a car while walking down a Maine road.  There are two creepy coincidences about this incident.  First, earlier that year, King had finished most of From a Buick 8, a novel in which a character dies after getting struck by a car.  Second, the driver of the car, Bryan Smith, who was only 43, was found dead in his trailer just over a year later of an accidental overdose.  He was found dead on Stephen King’s birthday, September 21.  The accident was inspiration for the Dark Tower series of books, and King is in talks with Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams to do an adaption of the series.  Since I’m a fan of Lost and Stephen King, that might be something I’ll have to check out.  Until then, I’ll probably be planning another snowy viewing of Storm of the Century this winter that won’t come to fruition.