Sweet, innocent...

So I'm back in the library again. The other library we went to doesn't have wireless internet access after all. It's another bank of computers we can use, which is good, so I should still be able to update pretty much daily. But I was just really wishing I could get my own computer to work so that I could use AIM. I miss chatting on AIM. But I didn't come to England to chat on AIM. Blah, blah, blah, I know, I know.

Anyway, things are still good. The visit to Anne Hathaway's cottage was good yesterday. The walk was really pretty, although we did see a horse lying sprawled out in a pasture. Healthy horses don't lie down, do they? Anyhow, we toured the house and took some pictures in the garden. I keep teasing Amanda because I swear she already has about a hundred pictures of flowers on her camera. She does have a purpose because she plans to print some of the best pictures in black and white and use them to decorate her room when we get back to Texas, but I have to tease her anyway. It was kind of cool to walk through the labyrinth again and see how much the bushes have grown since the last time I was there. They only came to my waist last time and now some of them are almost up to my head.

Last night was a lot of fun. The Alexes, Liz, Amanda and I went to a pub down the road from our house called The Lamplighter. It was pound fifty pint night, woohoo! I drank a couple pints of Strongbow (in draft form!! AH!), ate a greasy package of fish and chips, and watched the Poland/Germany "football" game. How very British of me. I always forget how ridiculous alcohol is here. For one thing, the alcohol content of beer is stronger than it is in the states. And then there's the fact that even though I only had two beers over a 2 1/2 hour period and that seems perfectly reasonable, a glass of beer here is an entire literal pint of beer. A glass of beer back home? Not so much. Anyway, we were all telling stories and making each other laugh about stupid things, and of course at some point sex came up and both Alexes' jaws dropped at a few things I had to say. Things that I'd rather not repeat here 'cause my Mom is reading this at the moment. This inevitably happens every time I'm getting to know new people. I blow the cover of my sweet and innocent reputation and it's never quite the same again. :-) I still don't understand why this reputation precedes me in the first place, but I've decided it's a mystery about myself that I'm just never going to solve. And it's also a reputation I'll never be able to shake no matter what the hell I do, so whatever! I embrace it.
Anyway, we all came home from the pub kinda buzzed. As we passed him on the second floor on our way upstairs Chris asked if we were drunk and Amanda said, "No, we're just amused" and I couldn't resist calling back down the stairwell, "Is amused a synonym for drunk?" Ha. The five of us are the only ones that live all the way up on the third floor and we've now decided that the third floor is where it's all going down. As long as we're showing up for class and getting our stuff done (and we do and we are) we figure we might as well enjoy the local culture while we're here. And, frankly, there's nothing to do here in Stratford after 6:00 other than go to the pubs, so what can ya do?

This morning was fun. Paul taped his lecture for the BBC this morning and we were guests in the audience. Since the show itself is actually about Holy Trinity Church, the portions Paul taped at the Birthplace Trust are actually just short little blurbs that I imagine will ultimately just be little short bits in the final show to establish the setting or something like that. So the "letcture" was actually just thirty seconds of real lecture and then a bunch of time when Paul talked about random things and the camera crew filmed us watching him talk and pretending to be fascinated and attentive. And then afterwards some of us happened to be standing around on the street deciding what to do next and the producer ended up asking us to be extras in some other shots. So they filmed us walking around in the birthplace gardens and pretending to take some pictures and look at the house and then they filmed us pretending to do research in the library. It was kinda fun, and it's not like I had anything better to do this morning. And the producer made me laugh by saying we were, "Lovely! So realistic!" as we were pretending to research. Um, yes. Because it's quite hard to pretend to read a book and copy notes out of it. Although maybe it is hard to just do your own thing and ignore a camera if you've never done it before, I don't know. The funny thing is, there's this girl in our group who drives us all crazy, and when they asked for a volunteer from the audience to be taped asking Paul a question, of course her hand flew up immediately. And the rest of us all groaned inwardly, because we know how Mindy is. Sure enough, it was the most long winded and complicated question ever. But they made it shorter and filmed her asking it, and now I'm sure we're not going to hear the end of it for days. Like, for the past couple of days now she's been all excited about this and talking about how she can add it to her resume, which is just ridiculous. You can't put that on a resume. "Extra on BBC program Songs of Grace". Haha. I mean, I suppose you COULD, but it would be a very pathetic move. And then she kept talking about how "we're being filmed on Thursday morning!" Um, no, dude. Paul the important Shakespeare expert is being filmed. We're just sitting on chairs to fill in the edges of the frame and ensure that he's speaking to a full house. Immediately after they filmed her asking her question she commented out loud to the whole room "I'm more than just 'extra on the left' now!" Jesus. Oh, the stories I could tell about this girl. But I'm not in a bitchy mood right now and, honestly, I mostly just feel bad for her. It's kind of depressing because I think she's genuinely a nice person and she seems to know how annoying she is (she wrote Jenn, her roommate, a letter the other day saying "If I'm following you around like a pathetic puppy dog just tell me to leave you alone and I will...") but she's just incapable of not being annoying. With the exception of her I really like everyone in this group, though, and we're all getting along well so far. So that's good.

This afternoon we had rehearsal for our scene with Patricia and then this afternoon we had the first half of our master class with Jane Lapotaire. She's definitely a character. She's a major classical actress, and an associate artist at the RSC (there are only about fifteen associate artists in the world, so apparently it's a really big deal). She's acted with people like Kenneth Brannagh and Sir Laurence Olivier, so she's kind of important. Google her if you're curious, it turns up tons of stuff but I'm too lazy to link right now. Needless to say, I was kind of intimidated. But you know, it wasn't as scary as I thought it would be. She's actually really, really funny and entertaining. She is definitely very blunt and she's not afraid to make fun of you, but it wasn't as bad as I thought she might be. And she does have a point: if you can't take blunt criticism, acting is not for you. Given, I don't do well with constant criticism and acting is NOT for me and I already know that and I'll tell her that next time if I have to, but today I actually think I did fairly well and got off easy. The only critique I got is that my voice is very high. She said, "Can you lower your voice half an octave?" and I said "I can try..." and then she addressed the class and said, "Some girls, particularly cute little girls who are probably their daddy's favorite, have a habit of using a sweet little high pitched voice because they've found that it works to get them whatever they want from men." And everyone in the class that knows me burst out laughing and I just shrugged and laughed because, well, that's pretty much the truth. Hey, at least I acknowledge it! Anyway, then she went on to explain how I could lower my voice and it worked! She later referred to someone as looking like a "real prat" which I sort of love. Prat. I think that prat, 'have a go', and 'dodgy' all need more use in the U.S.

Alright, I'm getting the five minute warning on this computer and England plays a World Cup game on TV in ten minutes and I'd really like to be at a pub for at least part of the game because I'm sure it's going to be wild. So I'm out of here.