a wonderful time down there

I'm back from my second week. Turned out to be only 4 days, 3 nights. Last week's stay was only 3 days, 2 nights. Not sure if it's better that I baby step my way into time away from home like it's been, or if it would have been better to start off with a 6-day stay and get used to it so everything else would be a piece of cake.

Got there on Wednesday for MVP rehearsal. It was scheduled from 6:30 to 10, but we didn't use all that time by a long shot. We just did a read-through and were out by 8:30. The script is about 30 pages long and apparently runs about an hour. The cast seems cool. I was really only meeting one person for the first time - the guy who plays Jackie Robinson. The other 4 in the 5 person cast is me, our two-hats-wearing director (he's the AD of the theater and it's his house I'm staying at), Amanda (who is also in SMOKE ON THE MOUNTAIN), and this guy named Dustin.

Okay, I was technically meeting Dustin for the first time, too. But I felt like I already knew him and vice versa, because he works at the theater, he's the one I had to e-mail my headshot and bio to, and he says he saw me in HEDWIG last summer.

After the rehearsal, I went to my temporary home, re-strung my guitar, looked at some of the guitar books I brought with me for fun, finally learned the riff to the DMB song "Rhyme and Reason," probably read some of my book and watched some stuff that was waiting for me on the TiVo, and went to bed.

I think I slept until 11-ish. Thursday was an easy day. Just had SMOKE rehearsal from 6 something 'til 10. Spent the day doing some reading of my book, memorizing for SMOKE, watching more stuff that the TiVo taped for me, and went to rehearsal. Scott said he couldn't do what we had planned to do, which was start blocking, because he didn't get the set layout in a file he could open on his computer. He (understandably) didn't want to block anything without knowing 100% what was where. So we sat in a circle on the stage and did some monologue/characterization work. Surprisingly, not a total waste of time.

When it was over, I went back to the house, and listened to somebody talk. A lot. I was bored and wanted to relax and watch some TV, but I listened to them to be polite. It's all good, though. I enjoy talking to this person, but they were on a roll this night. When they were done, I did all the stuff I mentioned above and went to bed.

I'll talk about the next couple of days in the next entry. The last one was so long, I'm going to start splitting them up to make the reading easier. I've got more to say, though, so stay tuned.