The answer: I’m gonna be pretty fucking fucked.

I panicked for a little while, then looked at the numbers, and realized I’m probably not going to be any more fucked than any other financially retarded twenty something who has ever attended grad school. It won’t be so bad. It may necessitate the sale of my plasma and a few ova, but I’ll figure it out.

While we’re on the subject of questionable transactions in which I’ll never engage, I’m now accepting applications for the position of Sugar Daddy. Please leave your resumes with personnel. Thank you.

Other than the reality slap of Friday morning and afternoon, my weekend was really fun. So, fuck it.

Now, for some more answers to your questions …

Q: Why don't you post more pictures of yourself? I love seeing pictures of the people who's diaries I read. (Not-Tuesday)

A: The main for the photo shortage is that I have neither a digital camera nor a scanner, and I don’t see myself being in the market for getting either one of those things anytime soon. But, you know? It doesn’t leave a gaping hole in my life. I’m actually rather photo-paranoid. I’m generally okay with other people taking my picture, as long as I might never have to see that picture, ever ever again.

I agree, though, it’s fun to see diarists’ pictures. In the past, I’ve posted pictures developed from my or my friends’ cameras, and scanned them at work. LIKE THESE:

Those were taken a few years ago, and my hair is now red and a lot more fun, but I still look like that. Except, normally less pointillist and shitfaced.

My sister took this one of the two of us, last September:

I’m the one with the glasses and the gleaming forehead.

I have a camera phone, but the photo resolution is crappy, and when I try to use it to take pictures of myself in the mirror, I end up with a lot of pictures in which my brow is all furrowed, my face is partially obscured by the phone, and the splatters on my bathroom mirror are embarrassingly prominent.

Also prominent in these pictures are my tits, but their depiction is misleading because in order to frame the picture at all well, I have to lean in towards the mirror, which makes my boobs look bigger than they are. So, much as I’d like to take credit for owning the rack in the following camera phone photo montage, it’s really just a wacky optical illusion. Who needs Photoshop when you got perspective and gravity for FREE?

Behold:

Those two were taken right after the Pixies show in November, when I guess I was feeling particularly sassy.

This was taken a second ago, when I wasn’t feeling as sassy, despite the fact that I just got back from this awesome thing.

What’s with the face I’m making? Note the 8” X 10” glossy of Janet Leigh on the wall in the background. Note also the clever product placement on the edge of the tub. (This entry brought to you by Finesse™ Conditioner!) Please ignore the nastiness all over my mirror.

You know, now that I look again, those three photos offer a pretty accurate breastesentation. Those are my tits. All six of them.

I think we’re done, here.

Q: You mention having a theatre background....what shows have you done? What kind of roles are you generally cast in? Leads? Featured roles? Drama? Comedy? Musicals? And since you are such a good writer, any desire to write scripts? Thanks. (WittyKitty)

Oh, Witty. You asked for it. This is going to be long, but I’ll try to make it un-boring, and I swear to you that despite all this masturbatory description of my lame theatre resume, my glory years are yet to come. Right?

I guess I should just do this:

The Formative Years:

· Sing, sing, sing, JAZZ SQUARE!
· M … O … U … S … EEEEEEE …
· Solo, solo, solo, wow I can’t believe I got this part, fancy costumes, lots of driving, lots of closeted high school boys.
· Cast parties.

The College Years:

· Cannibal hunchback, weird experimental dance chorus that my poor dad said he “didn’t get.”
· Corsets and Russian accents, bitter old woman, musical lead.
· Cast parties.
· Any role that involved freaking out on stage.

Post-graduate to Present

· Favors for friends trying to beef up their directing resumes for grad school.
· Short, really fun plays.
· Experimental shows that the audiences always seem to enjoy, even though they don’t know what the fuck is going on.
· Cast parties.
· Any role that involves freaking out on stage.

Maybe I should have just put that first, to save you the trouble of reading the whole story. In fact, I think I’ll go do that, now. [Explanation: I originally wrote this after the big long description that follows.]

Done.

How very Tarantino of me.

Thanks for the compliments on my writing, but I don’t know about my future as a playwright, though God knows I’ve read enough friggin’ plays in my time to figure out how to piece something together. Thing is, I’ve read too many good plays, and I’m completely cowed by the structure. I love plays, and don’t even know how I’d begin to write one. The only things I’ve written that come close to being scripts, are the paraphrased conversations I write in my diary entries, and those are really just cheap devices I use to avoid coming up with transitional sentences. In fact, almost 100% of the creative writing I’ve ever done can be found in this online diary, because writing used to scare the crap out of me. These days, I have a bunch of story ideas cooking up in my brain, which I’ll eventually have the balls to put to paper. Maybe. But, thanks for being so nice.

Okay, if you want, you can skip to the next question. I won’t be offended if you don’t read my overlong theatre bio.

I started doing theatre when I was in either second or third grade, but I highly doubt you want to hear a rundown of the litany of roles I played in the choruses of shows like “Oliver!” and “Scrooge: The Stingiest Man in Town.” Or about my brief stint as a native child in “South Pacific,” when I and the rest of the anglo children’s chorus painted our pasty bodies with brown grease paint, a near black-face move which would have had the NAACP all up in the Saint Mary’s Church Players faces, had my hometown been populated by enough minorities to warrant the notice of the NAACP. (My high school had about 800 students, a whopping two of whom were black. By the way, is it grammatically cheap to end a paragraph with a parenthetical? I’ve been wondering that for a while.)

I’ll give you the gist. Until I graduated from high school, my theatre experience was almost exclusively limited to musical theatre. I wouldn’t say “limited,” though, because I did a lot of musical theatre.

In high school, I was in a troupe of ambitious moppets who performed endless, sometimes torturous medleys at community events. I learned how to smile for three hours straight, and built up an extensive knowledge of many variations of the “jazz square.” We learned at least seven verses to a cheesy song about Horace Mann, the Father of Public Education … “If you knew Horace, like I know Horace / Oh, oh, oh what a Mann.” (He was born in my hometown, ostensibly on the land that now hosts the strip mall where Star Market and China Dragon stand.) We learned how to respond to such commands as, “Girls, stand in the back and bop,” “Look like you’re having fun,” and “Musical tag … and POP!”

It would make for some really awesome footage for a VH-1 special, should I ever become famous.

It was actually really fun, a lot of work, and it taught me a good deal about stage presence and focus. Luckily, most of us had enough of a sense of humor to know how fucking ridiculous we looked, and we’d often make fun of ourselves by exaggerating our performances when no one was looking. We even performed in Disney World a couple of times, got a behind the scenes tour (scary, cultish place, that Disney World), and terrorized the nightly parades. My friend Jess and I used to break away from the rest of the group and make freaks of ourselves all over Epcot.

Aside from all that Mickey Mouse Club stuff, I performed as a lead in a lot of shows in the area. My high school didn’t have a drama club, so I auditioned for whatever I or my voice teacher could find, and usually had to drive at least 45 minutes to get to rehearsal. (Made me a pretty ballsy driver, having to navigate my way through many a nor’easter to get to rehearsal.) Roles included Kim in “Bye Bye, Birdie,” (I don’t think anyone can do community theatre without escaping “Bye Bye, Birdie,”) Mary Magdalene in “Jesus Christ, Superstar,” Lily in “The Secret Garden,” Gussie in “Merrily We Roll Along,” and Babe in “The Pajama Game.” I met people in those shows who I still consider friends. The cast parties were awesome, too. And, without my Mary Magdalene stint, I never would have been able to say that I went to Pontius Pilate’s prom.

My college theatre department only produced one musical per year, so, without my familiar musicals, I became a character actress. It’s a pretty redundant term, but it basically means I played a lot of strong, quirky roles. My first year, I played a cannibalistic hunchback in an improv show, and later helped create an experimental dance chorus for “The House of Bernarda Alba.” (Anything with me in the same category as the word “dance” would have to be experimental. We basically just writhed and waved a sheet around. Oh, funny story about that. Follow the asterix!* And here’s that damned quandary about the parentheticals again.)

Second year, I played the young romantic lead in a period farce by Gogol, an old woman in an Albee play, and The Baker’s Wife in “Into the Woods.” The following year I was in London, and played an ex-porn star possessed by demons in a really bad play put on by the University College London’s Drama Club. It was fun. I got to say the line, “COCKS like … FUCKIN’ AIRPLANES!” while batting an empty vodka bottle around the stage.

My last year in college, I played an obnoxious mother in a French farce, and later played a crazy, hypoglycemic therapist in a Christopher Durang play, in which I had a scene where I screamed “COCKSUCKER” for about ten minutes.

Since college, I’ve done basically anything I could get cast in, which hasn't been a lot. I played the villain in a spin-off of “Much Ado About Nothing,” in which I belted a Garbage song from the stairs in a bar. I did a very short, very funny, very good play in which I mortified an ex-boyfriend by faking an orgasm in the middle of a restaurant.

It’s just now occurring to me that I might be cast based on my willingness to completely and convincingly embarrass myself. Go figure.

For the past two years, I’ve been involved in a small, experimental theatre company, so I don’t really have to audition anymore. I love it. We do fun things with puppets and musical instruments and sounds and lights. Last play I did with them, I maneuvered and voiced a smokin’ hot Lauren Bacalle puppet, and, in other scenes of the same show, played a film-noir-inspired secretary. These days, we’re working on characters and songs for a Spinal Tap sort of band. I unfortunately won’t be around to be in the show, which sucks, because I loved my character. It’s fun to play around in the meantime, though.

Whew. Next?

Q: Cheetos: poofy or crunchy? (Golfwidow)

A: You know, I’m sort of junk food ignorant, and didn’t even know there was an option. But I’m going to go with “crunchy,” because if I wanted poofy Cheetos, I’d just buy Jax. One of the mysterious appeals of Cheetos is that they look like cheese-dipped, refried drippings. Or like those sandcastles I used to make, constructed out of a stalagmite of wet sand dripped and dripped upon itself until it came to a peak. But, instead of sand, Cheetos are made out of whatthefuck, and FRIED, and dipped in CHEESE.

Crunchy. Yum.

Q: What is your favorite spot in Chicago? (Beth)

Um, my futon? No.

When I’m not going to an event of some kind, like a street fair, a Mexican wrestling match, or a hot air balloon ride, I spend a lot of time shooting the shit and drinking wine on my friends’ back porch on Carmen. I go out, but I’m not hip enough to give you a comprehensive list of hot spots. But, for proof that I do go out, here are some favorites, in no particular order:

Moody’s Pub. Cheap pitchers of beer and sangria. Peanuts on the tables. Fireplace in the winter, patio in the summer. Moody’s is located directly across from the armory where my theatre company and I used to perform, so we’d go there for drinks almost once a week after rehearsals. The wait staff knows and loves us. It’s a nice, warm, regulars kind of place.

Shiroi Hana is a sushi restaurant around the corner from where a good friend of mine used to live, and she and I would eat there fairly regularly. It’s not the best sushi, but it is sushi. Besides, the sushi chefs are Mexican, and I think that’s kind of funny in a not-funny way.

Fiesta Mexicana serves damned good Mexican food, and the best damned margaritas I’ve ever had. They’re a little pricey, but their food is the real deal, and every time I’ve been to Fiesta Mexicana I’ve had a great time.

The Empty Bottle is a divey little music venue, far, far away from anything convenient. It’s always been worth the trip, though. The front area has pool tables and a photo booth, they have good specials on awful beer, and the whole place has enough character to make people leave their images at the door. That’s probably really naïve of me to say, but that’s been my experience. I’m likely oblivious, though.

Leona’s is my favorite restaurant stand-by. I could eat from Leona’s every damned day. And they have little trivia cards on every table, so if you’re there on a date, you and your romantic interest can ask each other what’s the capital of Madagascar instead of toiling through awkward conversation. And then you can get drunk on things like “Electric Lemonade” and make out. Not that I’ve ever had to resort to that.

Simon’s and Farragut’s are cozy bars near my neighborhood, and my friends and I go there quite often. My friends’ landlord owns Farragut’s, so sometimes we get free drinks. Any of the bars in that area are good, actually, so if one is too crowded, you and your friends can move on to the next one.

Click on any of those links, and you’ll see a lot of the same descriptions, like “comfortable,” “dive,” “hole in the wall,” “good value.”

Man, I am such a fuckin’ rockstar.

Speaking of which, I think I’m almost done for the night.

Q: Ok, so I'm probably asking something you've already answered in the past but what are you going to study in school. And along the same lines, what do you want to be if you grow up?(Deb)

A: I’ll be getting my Master’s in Drama Therapy, which is a branch of creative arts therapy. The degree is the equivalent to a degree in Clinical Psychology, only specialized. Also, in accordance with the Almighty Psychology Rules of California or something, the program will cover the requirements for a Masters in Family Therapy. When/if I graduate, assuming this Sugar Daddy thing pans out, I’ll have earned a bunch of letters: MA (Masters in … the Arts?), RDT (Registered Drama Therapist), and MFT (Masters of Family Therapy). MARDTMFT! I will finally be important. I will be an art master.

Since no one knows what Drama Therapy is, here’s a description offered by my school’s website:

“Drama therapy is the systematic and intentional use of drama and theater processes to promote emotional growth and psychological integration. Like the other creative arts therapies, it is the application of a creative medium to psychotherapy. It is a playful, active, and powerful approach that has been found to be effective with severely disturbed and disabled populations, but it is equally applicable to the exploration of personal growth in all people. As a primary or adjunctive modality, drama therapy may be used in diverse settings, including community mental health facilities, hospitals, schools, prisons, senior centers, private industry, and private practice. Drama therapists conduct treatment, evaluation, and research with groups, individuals, families, and communities.”

Blah, blah, blah. I dunno; during my interview I threw scarves and pretended to be a lesbian.

There’s a lot of improvisation, pretending, and role-play involved. Some of the kids I interned with were writing plays loosely based around their personal issues. One was making a video for his dying father. I worked with groups of children, some of whom were profoundly disturbed, playing ongoing make-believe games helping them learn to socialize. My advisor used to work with a theatre company which did improv with prison inmates. It’s difficult, and fun, and imaginative, and I’m really excited about it. I don’t know exactly what I want to do within the field, but I’ll figure it out.

Funny enough, I don’t particularly want to be important if I grow up. As excited as I am about this, and as dedicated as I’ll be, I’m probably the least career-oriented person you’ll ever meet. I know I make like of it, but I’d make light of my impending career even if it was neurosurgery. If I had my way, I’d be a financially independent hobo adventurer. Guess I’m trying to find a way to combine real life with fantasy.

Thanks, everyone. I’ll finish up in the next entry.

* Did you find it? Yay! Okay, story:

“The House of Bernarda Alba” features an all-woman cast with about 13 roles. The production that I was in was translated and directed by my very hot senior friend Alfredo, and was soon referred to as “The Hot Freshman Girls Show” within the Theatre department. I assure you, I was only lumped into that category because of the company I kept.

Alfredo added the chorus for his own artistic purposes. The chorus was comprised of four women, myself included, who would flit around between scenes providing some kind of interpretive dance synopsis of the themes of the play. Yeah, I don’t know. The show was melodramatic and not very well-received, but when pressed, audience members who couldn't think of any general praise would say, "The chorus was really cool."

We developed most of our dances during 4-hour-long rehearsals of “contact dancing.” In contact dancing, the dancers move fluidly, while at all times maintaining some kind of physical contact to at least one other dancer, to form a sort of undulating puddle.

During one particularly productive rehearsal, I and three other nubile nineteen year old girls had been writhing against each other for two hours, and when the music ended, Alfredo hit the lights and said, “Good job. I have to take a break,” and then he dashed out of the room. He was gone for about ten minutes, presumably jacking off in the little boys’ room. The rest of us exchanged awkward glances, but we didn’t say anything about it. Did we need to?

~ Last Five Entries ~

Arm-in-Arm Down Burgundy - 09.05.05

Motivated! - 08.25.05

Moths, and Relative Nonsense - 08.18.05

I Finally Have Internet Access in my Bedroom. But, No Ashtray. - 08.09.05

Here I Am - 08.02.05

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