Tag: Mind Over Matt

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My odds are better when I don’t audition

It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s been true when it comes to me and Expressions Theater.

Years ago, I auditioned for Mind Over Matt and was cast in the main role. In the spring, I auditioned for Wage Warfare and got shut out. 50% success rate. That by itself sounds pretty good, right?

However, for this summer’s production of Everybody Loves Opal, we were scrambling for a cast: not enough people auditioned for all of the roles. I was supposed to be just an assistant director, but since I’d been reading the Brad role during rehearsals for everyone else’s sake, I ended up playing that part for the performances as well.

Then there’s the fall/Christmas show that Expressions is putting on stage in November. I was planning on taking some time off, just relax and enjoy the season without acting, working backstage, etc. I got an email about auditions for Trials, Tribulations and Christmas Decorations and promptly deleted it. Life was spiffy.

Then I got a random phone call one evening about a month ago. At least I thought it was random. Erin, the director from Opal and the assistant director for this show, was calling to ask if I’d accept a role in the play. (Cindy, someone who’s worked with Expressions in the past, was yelling in the background that I was accepting the role whether I wanted to or not.)

There are two males in the script: John (the main character) and his son-in-law, Dennis. John is supposed to be of grandfatherly age and four or five people auditioned for that role. With about an hour left of the second day of auditions, they were distinctly lacking in a Dennis. No 30-somethings showed up, so they called me.

I suppose I could interpret that as “We’re desperate, you’re at least a marginally okay actor and won’t make the show suck too bad.” I prefer to put a more positive spin on it: “We’re desperate, you’re a slightly-more-than-marginally okay actor and could make people not thoroughly regret the fact that they paid for their tickets.” It’s all about stroking my own ego, right?

And it turns out that my luck for lack of auditioning has continued outside of Expressions. I’ve mentioned playing trivia on Thursday nights here before, but I haven’t mentioned is that a lot of my teammates attend the same church. They’ve put on a production of Scrooge every year since… I have no idea how long. I’m guessing they started sometime after “A Christmas Carol” was written, but that’s the extent of my knowledge in that regard.

I also know that one of them is the director this year and she’s been sounding… reminiscent of Erin this summer when we were having trouble finding people to put Opal onstage. In this case, it’s because they’re having a problem finding male townspeople to sing and dance in the background for Scrooge. A MAJOR problem.

Because I remembered everyone’s distress this summer, I volunteered to help out. Up until the last few weeks before performance weekend, my rehearsal schedule for the show will entail about three hours every Saturday. Learning music and choreography… I think I’ll be okay. I hope. We’re doing this for a church, I’m sure God will forgive me if I totally screw up.

I discovered how big the problem was when I got to the church last Saturday. I had no idea where I was going, but I walked in the front door, followed some voices I heard in the distance, then got pointed in the right direction. When things finally got organized, we had all the townspeople in one room to practice choreography. There were 10, maybe 12 females there? And I was one of four guys. FOUR. When you need to have couples dancing and have to tell the girls, “Pretend there’s a guy here and a guy here”… that helps explain the tone of desperation.

So now I’m committed to two shows in the next few months when I didn’t audition for either. And if I could apply that luck to finding a girlfriend, I wouldn’t care nearly as much about what Cindy might be yelling in the background during a phone call.

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Mind Over Matt, post-production party

I’m not sure if that’s the proper title for tonight’s party, but I thought the alliteration sounded cool, so I ran with it. Anyway, it’s now two weeks since we wrapped, so most of us got together to watch ourselves on DVD. (Unfortunately, two people couldn’t make it because they’ve got “higher priorities” like “family”… lame excuses, if you ask me.)

We met up at someone’s apartment in Minneapolis, ate, drank, played games and watched the first Sunday’s performance from start to finish. Minus the breaks between scenes and the intermissions, of course. No one needed 15 minutes to grab food or use the bathroom. Well, sorta didn’t need it for the bathroom—it was out of commission for a while when the toilet got plugged up and there was no plunger in the apartment. Incidentally, if you ever need to borrow a plunger from a neighbor, don’t be surprised if they tell you you don’t need to bring it back.

Turns out that the performance went really well, everyone nailed their lines and they looked good doing it. Okay, I think we looked good doing it. It was a shame that we didn’t have a bigger audience that afternoon, but as the director pointed out when giving her introductory speech, people had to do a lot of shoveling before coming to the show.

The only regret I have about the party? Sure, there’s the sad “I don’t know if or when I’ll see any of these people again with whom I’ve had so much fun” stuff, but during the course of the play, Matt mentions having Cheetos and Sprite in his kitchen. Tonight? No Cheetos or Sprite. I felt so dirty…

So that’s it. We’re wrapped, no more stories about the future of the play. There are a handful of stories I’ve yet to tell due to a lack of blog entries for the last three or four months, but I’ve got until the last day of the year to write stuff—I should be able to fill in one or two blanks during that time. Whether I’ll be able to fill the void that came about due to the lack of Cheetos and Sprite tonight… maybe it’s not that bad and I just need to straighten out my priorities. Maybe all I need to do is spend some time with my “family.”

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Scab half-life = 5 days

Something I neglected to mention about injuries sustained during Mind Over Matt was that I skinned up my knee a little bit when rolling off the couch, a maneuver which isn’t really conducive to keeping your balance and staying upright. That in itself isn’t a big deal, though if the director had let me wear shorts like I had originally planned during that scene, it would have been significantly messier.

The reason that came to mind was because I finally picked off the scab yesterday. Yeah, I know, it’s a bad habit, but it’s just so tempting to take off the edges, then get a little further in until you pull the whole thing off and expose an artery. Good times. But I waited for a week and a half before giving into the temptation, so it had more time to heal—I’m giving myself a little bit of credit for that.

I had another bad habit when I was younger that I managed to stop doing over time: tearing off my fingernails. When they would start to get long, I wouldn’t pull out a nail clipper, I’d just make a little divot in the side and then tug it across until all of that extra length was gone. But then sometimes I’d tear at it, get a little further in until I’d pull the whole thing off and expose an artery. Not so good times.

Okay, it never got that bad, but sometimes it would get down far enough to hurt and start bleeding. Not enough to scab up, mind you, so no fun for either bad habit. Eventually, that bleeding was enough motivation for me to stop. Now I just let my nails grow until they turn into giant claws like Florence Griffith Joyner’s. (Pretty hot, huh?)

As it turns out, a few other people in the play have a bad habit: biting their fingernails. And I’m not talking just nibbling at them once in a while—I’m talking like water dripping on a rock to the point where it erodes the ends of their front teeth. Not wanting to do it, putting Tabasco or other stuff on the nails to make them taste bad… nothing has worked. Wanna know what I recommended to them?

Well, you’ve read this far, so I might as well tell you. I recommended using those big plastic nail savers that you put on your fingers after applying nail polish. Sure, you might have to file the ends down to points so you can push the buttons on a phone or type on a keyboard, but if it helps break the habit, wouldn’t that be worth the occasional puncture wound if you absentmindedly poke at a scab that had been there for a week or two? Unless you stab it until the whole thing comes off and you expose an artery, of course.

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Stuntmen are for sissies.

I know, it’s been about a week and a half since Mind Over Matt closed shop and I never reported anything about how things went from the second weekend of performances. Truth is, it all ran pretty well. I had a few word gaffes on Friday (much like the previous week), but aside from that, no harms or fouls. On second thought, scratch that: I suffered several harms that were caused by yours truly. Continue reading “Stuntmen are for sissies.”

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Knowing your station in life

With such a long break between Sunday afternoon’s show and a Friday night performance, we had a brush-up on Wednesday to go through our lines—a brief and informal refresher, if you will. And it was definitely informal. Informal to the point of making up lines as we went along.

For example, an exchange might normally go “You shouldn’t do that” and “Oh, but I want to.” Wednesday night, we’d usually say something like “You shouldn’t do that” and “Okay, I won’t… oh, but I want to.” It was a hoot, but if it had been a group of strangers versus our cast, I could have ended up in a lot of trouble.

At one point, I encourage someone to go into the kitchen and she normally responds with a hesitant “Oooookay…” This time, she asked, “What do I look like to you?” The setup was so good, I couldn’t help but blurt out, “You look like a woman! Now go in the kitchen and get me a samwich!” I then proceeded to laugh myself to tears.

Of course, some people were insensitive enough to point out, “So that’s why you’re single!”, so maybe not all of those tears were from laughter.

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“Mind Over Matt”, opening weekend

Yeah, I probably could have written an entry after each performance, but I didn’t realize how drained I’d feel afterward. We all went out to dinner on Friday and Saturday night—when I got home, I didn’t feel like doing much beyond crawling into bed. Consequently… opening weekend instead of opening night.

If you’re curious, here’s the play’s official plot summary (in case you can’t tell, it’s a comedy):
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Ever argue with yourself? Ever said, “I don’t know what got into me?” This is the story of Matthew Lane. Matt is a successful illustrator with a couple of deadlines and several squabbling inner personalities who do weird and wonderful things. As Matt tries to gather up enough nerve to ask out the girl of his dreams, Matt’s egos, who all have their own hang-ups, lead him in one too many directions. When Matt’s overworked boss comes to believe that Matt has a crush on her, the conflicted egos manage to make a bad situation much, much worse.
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So I was indeed fidgety slightly past the point when the lights came up on Friday night, but things went pretty well. A few word slip-ups here and there, but the two times that I briefly forgot a line, I was already supposed to be flustered versus delivering an extended monologue, so no major flubs (I almost forgot to put my watch on, which is a pretty important prop… got lucky on that one).

Now that I think about it, we were uncomfortably close to a serious catastrophe. I have to make a few costume changes between scenes and there’s a limited time to do it. A few people are backstage and hold out the clothes for me, but when I was trying to change pants, my zipper got stuck. As I kept pulling on it and panic was welling up inside me—I’m not kidding, I was starting to freak out—I was wondering how much effort it would take to just tear my khakis off so I could put on my jeans. Thankfully, tugging the zipper up and back down got it loose, so I didn’t have to resort to any extreme measures. (I think I’ve popped a couple stitches as well, so whether the khakis will be functional after the final performance is up in the air.)

Saturday flowed even smoother than opening night, though at one point, Ashley (the girl of my dreams… but not really, since she has a boyfriend and Matt isn’t the kind of guy who would kill for love) is sitting on a stool and jumps backward suddenly. Somehow, her shoe went flying off the stage. And I mean flying. It reached the wall about 15 feet behind where she was sitting. Thankfully, there were stairs down to the floor on that side of the stage, so she simply walked down and retrieved it as we kept talking through that part of the scene. (As you would expect, the audience loved it.)

Sunday afternoon, she lost the shoe again, but it stayed on the stage this time. Overall, things have been improving every show, but that’s coming from my perspective. For all I know, some of the other cast members might be thrilled about the invention of adult diapers.

Along the lines of perspective, I can’t say much about the audience—it’s my first show in that theater, so if someone says it’s larger or smaller, if they’re louder or quieter, if they throw more stuff at the stage than usual… I have to take their word for it. Apparently, Friday was good, Saturday was small because the weather was really crummy and Sunday was okay, but the crowd wasn’t very responsive. Given how long it’s been since I’ve played for an audience, I thought they were all just fine.

Oh, and before I wrap this up, I’d like to give some kudos to my 93-year-old grandma. She came to the Sunday matinee and everyone in the cast and crew who met her thought she was adorable. Consider: when she bought her ticket, she asked, “Am I allowed to boo if the show is bad?” I love my grandma.

So that’s the scoop. We’re done with Weekend #1 and have three shows left next weekend. If you’re interested in seeing one of those performances, ticket presale info is still on the poster two entries ago. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry (assuming you laugh so hard that you cry, anyway) and we’re pretty sure you won’t ask for your money back. If you’re still on the fence, I’ll just point out that Grandma never felt the need to boo.