I have a very busy weekend ahead. Today I costumed a short film competition submission. At 7pm I dropped off a stack of distressed scrubs and tea-dyed lab coats. Now I'm waiting until midnight when the writing team will send me a final synopsis of the shoot tomorrow, and I'll send an email to the actors telling them what of their own to bring, and how to do prepare hair and makeup.

Tomorrow I have two performances of Pinocchio, and another two on Sunday. Sunday night is the premier of "November" - the film I costumed last march. Its being shown at a cafe on 5th along with two other shorts. I will, of course, utilize the opportunity to dress up.

Pinocchio is finally going well. The first two performances were good, but felt like a dress rehearsal. The rehearsal process involved a significant amount of cutting and re-writing. We got two new songs on our last two days, and much of the expositional dialogue was curtailed drastically. I spent a lot of my first performance trying to remember WHICH part of that line had been cut, after I'd already memorized it the old way. Our third and fourth performances suddenly clicked, and we're feeling solid. It's fun to do a physical comedy role. Each show I find something new to do with the cane, a clever way of sliding about, or a way to reinforce that our comic duo is more than just funny. We are, after all, the bad guys.

Next week I get a bit of a break. We've only got one weekday show, and it's the one my understudy is taking over. I've come down with Pinocchio's cold, so I'll be glad to have a few days to recover. It started as a sore throat, too. I'm such a baby when my throat hurts. I spent most of my day in a fuzzy bathrobe alternately napping, and checking on the progress of the costumes I'd poured a liter of bleach over. I'd kind of hoped they'd smolder a bit, but I guess it takes longer than I left them. There was a nice mottled look to the formerly-solid colored scrubs. The white lab coats got modified with tea dye and soy sauce, leaving a nice streaky finish. Then I had a hayday tearing out cuffs, ripping off some buttons, and whipping together a few holes with dark-colored thread. It was a fun day, all in all.

I'm reading Harry Potter. All the books I've been checking out meaning to read have gone by the wayside. I'm just too busy now to start anything new, and too tired to absorb a new cast of characters.

My corset-making class finished last week, though my corset still needs to have its edges finished. I also need to embroider flowers on the stems I ran up all the seams. I'm hoping to get it done to wear to Batboy on Halloween.

Two more weeks of Lindy Hop class before Elves and the Shoemaker rehearsals start. I"m hoping to pick up some more extras work to fill in my empty days. And I'm gearing up to vote, trying to be informed, but feeling woefully unable to sort through all the propaganda to get to any sense of what's real. Even something as simple as Prop 1 - a tax increase to fund our mass transit - gets murky once shunted around the commercial circuit. I'm all for more public transportation, since I use it pretty often, but then I read that the last proposition fell quite short of the intention, and is now overbudget and a decade behind. Sigh.

I'll be glad when the election is over.