Filed by Bil at 11:32 pm under Shameless Plugs, The Arts
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I discovered a new level of emotional involvement for Pamphilos at tonight’s rehearsal: frustration. Unfortunately, this new layer has tipped the balance in my brain, and all night long my affected accent was all over the damn place. It was almost as bad as Russell Crowe’s accent in “A Beautiful Mind.” Interestingly enough, though, it was on exactly the same cycle: at the start of the play, I was clearly southern, by midway through I was plain ol’ American, by the middle of Act 2 I was almost Australian, and by the very end I was southern again. One thing I learned in history class is that doing what Russell Crowe does will get you what Russell Crowe gets, so I’m going to take this accent thing as a good sign, because Crowe won his Oscar for that terrible film. I’m not sure how a live play is going to get me an Oscar, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to happen.

However, this should be fixed by opening, so the Oscar judges will probably never witness the glory. Whatever.
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Filed by Bil at 8:03 pm under Love, Shameless Plugs, The Arts
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We’ve been given a night off from rehearsal, so I can finally blog about it again.

I can only assume last night’s Electra rehearsal was our best rehearsal ever, because it was our most physically strenuous rehearsal ever. It was longer, for one thing, as any good tech rehearsal ought to be. Also, by this point we all know our lines as well as we’ve ever known them for this show, which allows us to flow more rapidly from moment to moment, which allows us to increase our intensity. And given that our two-story set is full of steps and our scenes are full of Anna throwing other actors onto the ground, there was quite a lot of up-and-down last night. So – long hours of intensely falling down and intensely getting back up over and over again so we could get it right…yeah, we were a tired bunch by quitting time last night.

But it was definitely our best rehearsal so far. We really are getting into it, especially now that we’ve got our spooky lighting and creepy sound cues. This show is going to be so good.
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Filed by Lance at 3:35 pm under General, Hatemail, Shameless Plugs, Stuff to Read, The Arts
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Here is every Hatemail we recorded last Sunday, presented in a slightly different format for your visual delight:

Filed by Bil at 9:43 am under Shameless Plugs, The Arts
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I know it comes late, but we at Tip Your Waiter would like to thank everyone who made it out to our Hatemail recording session last weekend. There’s some very good stuff that came out of it, and we’re very keen to start taking the next steps.

We had one actor who also plays guitar bring his instrument and actually wound up recording some music for us while he was here. This was pretty darn cool, so next month I think we’ll be trying harder to reach out to musicians to come along, as well.

So don’t forget, actors and musicians: last Sunday of this month, April 25, is the next open session. We recommend coming early, because while you get to choose what you want to read, it’s first-come-first-serve and only one actor can read each letter! Thanks to Beth Richards, Kat Daniels, Chris Dunn-Rankin, and Zach Livingston for the most recent set.

Now then, on to the topic of me…
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Filed by Bil at 2:59 pm under Fightin' Words, Love, Politics, Shameless Plugs, The Arts
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It appears that Lance was blogging about education at the same time I was last night, only his was finished a little while before mine, so if anyone was too distracted by Pink Floyd, please take a moment and also read up on what Lance has to say.

Now that you’ve read that post and have returned here, I wanted to give a quick shout-out to Elephant & Worm, an educational theatre company that “brings kids together with professional actors, artists, and writers to take original stories written by children and turn them into plays, movies, and songs!” Fellow Dream Theatre Company member Judith Lesser is heavily involved in this company, and you know if someone from Dream Theatre is involved, it must be great!

Kudos to all involved in education at all ages, because education should never stop. Never ever.

Filed by Bil at 12:21 am under Fightin' Words, Politics, Shameless Plugs, The Arts, The Media
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Education reform has been a very popular notion for a very long time.

Jeff Jarvis, author of one of my favorite blogs, BuzzMachine, recently posted an article titled TEDxNYed: This is bullshit – it is a rant about, among other things, the state of our educational system, and it’s a fairly brilliant comparison to the state of journalism. In one sweeping, somewhat angry blog post, he wrote three of the most fabulous things I’ve read in a blog all year:

1) Just as journalists must become more curator than creator, so must educators.
2) I’ll give the same advice to the academy that I give to news media: Do what you do best and link to the rest.
3) We must stop looking at education as a product – in which we turn out every student giving the same answer – to a process, in which every student looks for new answers. Life is a beta.

He starts the post out by acknowledging the irony of him up on a virtual soapbox, dictating that we ought not be dictated to, so I’m going to take him up on what I perceive to be an invitation to respectfully disagree (even if just to a small degree).
(Keep reading…)

Filed by Lance at 11:43 pm under General, Love, Shameless Plugs, The Arts
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I’ve been fortunate enough to have some amazing mentors in my life, and I’m happy to say Lisa Canning is one of them (I don’t know if she likes or knows she’s wearing the name badge of “Lance’s Mentor,” but I’m sticking it on her, anyway). She’s taken my thinking in directions I didn’t know were there, and if I can get my feet out of the mud, the things she teaches have the potential to simply take my life somewhere I’ve always imagined it could go.

(Keep reading…)

Filed by Lance at 2:36 pm under Fightin' Words, General, Hatemail, Shameless Plugs, The Arts
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Tip Your Waiter is hosting a recording session for our ongoing, collaborative project called Hatemail on the last Sunday of every month, and here’s what happening this time around:
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Filed by Bil at 7:58 pm under Pop Culture, Shameless Plugs, Social Issues, The Arts
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Good people of Cyberspace, prithee, look to the right side of thy screen and hark! You’ll notice we are holding an open recording session for actors to read some hatemail for us. Inquire within for more info if you’re interested. It’s from 2 to 5 PM at Trevor’s live-in recording studio (AKA his apartment). There will be coffee.

For those of you who haven’t heard me talk about it a gajillion times already, the premise is this: we get people to send us hatemail intended for someone else (anyone in the world can participate). Then, we get local actors to give them dramatic readings (any actor in town can participate). Once we have recordings, we get local musicians to underscore them (any musician in town can participate). Finally, we get local visual artists to make something pretty/grotesque/interesting for them (any visual artist in town can participate). It’s pretty simple, really.

Now then.

You know those people who claim to have read “1984″ and say that the future Orwell presents is the scariest thing they can think of? I’m gonna go ahead and call bullshit on that one.
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Filed by Bil at 8:01 pm under Love, Pop Culture, Religion, Shameless Plugs, The Media
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I’m gonna say it up front: I have no idea who this blog’s audience is. It is entirely possible that we have NO audience, and that the hit counter is just making shit up so that we don’t fire it.

That being said, I still take it as bad news that teenagers and pre-teens are reading fewer and fewer blogs these days:

Teens Spurn Blogs, Twitter

In light of the fact that it’s going to get harder instead of easier to pull an audience, I think it’s time to ask myself: what do I want from this blog?
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