An Actor's Rejection: I'm Okay, and You're Okay

This weekend The Shakespeare Forum (discussed here) had auditions for their first mainstage production - Hamlet. It should be a pretty cool process, as they intend to have open rehearsals, which I am very much looking forward to attending.

I love the play Hamlet. But I wouldn't say offhand there's a role in the play I'm right for (except perhaps Rosencrantz or Guildenstern), or even angling for. I auditioned anyway, because it's good practice, and the Forum people are people I love.

A lot of the Forum people auditioned. Some got called back; a lot did not. I was one of the ones who did not.

The Worst Poem I Ever Wrote

First allow me to apologize preface: Many years ago, my sister's office was having a contest at its Halloween party - write a poem incorporating the words ghostly, spooky, creepy, and (I assume) pumpkin. I, being hilarious, composed the following monstrosity.

It's awful. And I can't get through reading it aloud without cracking up.


Bang crash
What was that ghostly noise in the dark
Creak scream
It sure is spooky when the power’s out
Bump thwack
What was that creepy laugh
Jingle crank
I miss my pumpkin patch

I miss my pumpkin patch
Oh how I miss the green tendrils and vines that wound their way around my ankles because they were evil and wanted to kill me.
Oh how I miss the plump orange gourds that goaded me into insanity with their watching eyes that I carved into them with my rusty butcher knife.
Oh how I miss the guts of the pumpkins that I discarded at random throughout the patch after carving them with my rusty butcher knife, and that I later fell asleep in on a drunken binge and have yet to wipe the seeds off my cheek.
Oh how I miss the ghostly creepy spooky scarecrow who stood watch over my pumpkin patch but later scared me to death when I was drunk. I am now dead and swimming through a pool of molten lava for my sins, one of which involves throwing pumpkin guts on consecrated ground. That is why I miss my pumpkin patch.

What Did I Do With My December?

Well ... I finally set up my website! Yes indeedy, I finally managed to cross off that niggling entry on my To Do list that had been camped out there for ... longer than I'd care to admit. Part of the reason for the delay was that I assumed I'd have to get a fancy-pants web designer to set it all up for me, which would cost a fistful of dollars. I'd even made contact with a web designer with that in mind - he told me he was swamped but that he'd get back to me in two weeks.

He then proceeded to disappear off the face of the earth.

You know. As people do.

Inspector Zelda All Knotted Up

Previously in the Adventures of Inspector Zelda...

Inspector Zelda shook her head in frustration. She would probably have shaken other things in frustration - her hands, her cup of pens, the walls ... but she was too mad at them to pay them any heed.

The knocking, which had seemed so promising of adventure, had turned out to be a maintenance man, stuck on the other side of the freight elevator. With the push of a button he was freed.

Now she sat alert in her desk chair, barely moving, barely breathing, waiting for the whiff, the twitch, the quiet shuffling step of a scandal.

But then ye olde clock chime app tolled on her smartphone, signalling that it was now time for her lunch break. With a grim smile, she shoved on her sneakers and made for the elevator bank when - WHAM! Inspector Zelda found herself facedown on the hard shiny black floor. Carefully, she twisted her spine until she could spy the culprit - an untied shoelace!

Inspector Zelda pulled the laces taut and tied them with ferocity. Double knots. Double power.

On with her day ...

to be continued ...

Inspector Zelda's Loose Ends Become Looser

Previously in the Adventures of Inspector Zelda...

Inspector Zelda scowled at the horizon. That fog, that ghastly grotesque fog that had looked so promising in its sinister nature only the day before, now it was ... humdrum. Dull. Ordinary. She almost laughed to think that she had contrasted it not twenty-four hours earlier in her mind with the benign transparent blue-grey fog that now confounded her vision of Upper Manhattan in its banality. The clouds hung low over the upper limits of the fog, but even they were a cheerful puffy white - no threatening stormclouds.

Well, clearly the weather could look after itself.

Inspector Zelda once more prowled the hallways of her pristine district, sniffing out for any nefarious goings on. All seemed utterly lost, when ...

... was that a knocking?

Inspector Zelda quickened her pace, all senses alert.

To be continued ...