37 is a prime number

Today is my birthday. There's not a whole lot to say about all that, really. For the most part, I don't celebrate birthdays (aside from the milestone ones) and they are more a time of reflection and review than anything else.

Fitting, then, that my big day comes so close to end of this little 10-week adventure. And since Monkey Boy was asking about a kind of wrap-up post on the blog, I guess it's only right that I should try and bring some sort of closure to it all. Well, as much closure as I can, anyway. And what better time to try to begin this than the present.

Hmmm..."birthday" mentioned in the first paragraph..."present" mentioned in the second...maybe I care more about these things than I thought. I'm a psychiatrist's dream...

(---long pause---)

(---staring at computer screen---)

I guess I'm just not too sure where to start. If I had to sum up quickly, I would have to say that this has been a pretty decent experience. SP is a great guy to work with (even if he does go off track sometimes on stage) and I don't know how many people I could have been stuck in the Delta House with alone for two months. We settled ourselves into a nice little routine, like I imagine an old married couple might sometimes do, and things were generally pretty amicable the entire time. Actually, thinking back on it now, we never once got into an argument or had anything worse than civil words to each other. SP is a good guy and I'm so happy that we had this opportunity to work with each other. I wish him all the best.

The rest of the cast ran hot and cold with me. JF, who is a great scene partner and just the nicest person, was a real pleasure to be on stage with. She was a great sport (I had to ogle her during every show and she never once held it against me personally) and is a very talented actress. The style of her acting in this show is a little too presentational for my liking but, as SP pointed out the other day, she was directed that way and so she's only following orders. Which I guess I appreciate.

HM and DM were not the greatest actors but as far as people, they almost couldn't have been nicer. They literally made SP and I feel like we were a part of their family, which I know is how DM wants his casts to feel. He knows (or seems to know) that he can't provide everything he would like to be able to in terms of housing and pay and facilities and such so he tries to make up for it with inviting us everywhere and offering a short-term loan during the awkward early-rehearsal period. Which is, as far as I'm concerned, above and beyond the call.

SH also wasn't great to work with but she tried. And, in the end, I guess that's all I can hope and ask for from a bad performer. She and her daughter also tried to include us in the familial feeling, which was nice. And, for what it's worth, she is currently trying to organize an outing including both our cast and the cast of the next show ("Mid-Life Crises: The Musical) for tomorrow night as a sort of going-away/welcome/Tucker's birthday thing. And it looks like most everyone is on board (she didn't know that the Delta Housers were sort of planning to go out that night anyway but...) which is nice. I'm sure it'll be a good time...even if it IS karaoke.

The show...was what it was. It was hot and sweaty and fun to work on sometimes and always had me on my toes and isn't something I'm likely to be able to do again any time soon. Not the best of circumstances, of course, but definitely not the worse show I've ever done...sadly.

The Delta House? Well, it sort of provided a nice metaphor for the entire adventure, I think. It tried to be a good place to live for wayward actors and did, technically, provide us with a roof over our heads, cable television, and internet service but once you got kind of settled the place starts looking as if it were going to fall apart any moment. The IDEA of the Delta House is good, but the REALITY of the Delta House falls faaaaaaaaar short.

OK...so I'm about all "reflectioned" out at this point in the evening. And the Mid-Lifers are starting to return from their evening rehearsal so maybe that means something fun will start to happen. So I'll continue this another time. Probably tomorrow.