Dear Mom and family,
It's 5 AM. The mornings are still chilly and I have a fire going, my sweatshirt over my flannel nightgown, slipper-socks on my feet and my fuzzy throw around my knees.
Tuesday I seemed to have a difficult time "getting going". Though there were no sharp pains in my back, there was still a general soreness from turning all of those compost piles the day before.
Only late in the morning did I find the will power to go look at my drama club papers, and figure out a couple of short scenes for the kids to use as a little "audition". I had to meet my computer tutor at one, and I would have time to copy the papers for the drama club between the tutoring session and the time to go up to the boys and girls club for drama club.
I met my computer tutor at 1:00. We mostly worked on my personal website, ghc-ghc-ghc.com. This website is not meant for the general public, but its URL is on cards that I hand out to people I already know, and new people I whom meet in person. It just has short paragraphs on things I'm interested in, and related links. The new thing I learned on Tuesday was to link to an off-site page, such as my travel meetup.
I do not give my e-mail or post office box address on the website, but they are on the card:
The first drama club meeting of the year was at 5:00. The main goal is to get down on paper whichII was at the kids I have, so I can go to my collection of scenes and find a group of scenes that works for them. The secondary goal is to have some structure so that they get the idea that this is not a wild, crazy activity, but one where they often have to sit and follow directions.
First I have them fill up the top of a paper which has a space for their first and last name, their age, and their grade. I then take these papers back and lay them out in front of me so that I can see all the names.
Then I have them pick partners. If they can't read (I have some first graders) they need to have a partner who can read. I give them all a paper with two brief scenes on it. They and their partner pick one of the scenes and practice for a few minutes, which means they are all over the room talking at once.
An example of one of the "scenes" I used yesterday is this, an excerpt from a short scene written for young people by Laurie Allen.
A: Look, the card doesn't even have a name on it.
B: Yeah, if we turn it in, anyone could claim it, so why not us?
A: Because...it's not our money! You guys make me so mad.
Then I have them all sit down, and one by one, the pairs of partners get up in front of all of us. One says, "My name is _______ and I will be playing "A", and the other one says, "My name is _______ and I will be playing "B". (At any audition, even in high school and beyond, each actor says this exact thing at the beginning of an audition.)
This gives me a chance to grab the two papers with those two kids names on it. I circle "male" or "female", "b" for big role and "s" for small role, "k" if they look like a kid and "t" if they look like a teenager, and make a few little notes. After they do their little dual scene, they have to just stand there until I've filled out their papers, which is a good way for me to find out if they have the maturity to join the club.
(Any kid who joins the club will get some sort of little role, but I need to find out which ones could handle something more challenging and which ones will need months of rehearsals to be able to learn to say a two lines loudly and clearly enough so that the audience can hear them.)
Then I go home and cut 3x5 cards into quarters, each with a kids' name, age, and whether they are a boy or girl. I look through my huge collection of small scenes and find some that might work, and make a big grid, with each square a role in a scene. Then I try to fit the cardboard squares on the chart, trying to remember something about each kid's personality. If I end up with two extra cardboard squares, I go looking for another short scene in my file, or a couple of monologues.
I've found that what makes a scene effective is the rhythm and excellence of the spoken words. For instance, I can take a scene which was written for two girls, where they are arguing about something, and make it into one between four kids or even five, with the groups arguing with each other. As long as the excellent dialogue originally written by the author is still there, the scene still seems to work.
This way I can give more kids an opportunity to learn something, without having the eventual late-April performance be too long. I always still give the original author credit on the program, but add the words "adapted from a scene by".
There is a quite a bit of material written for kids' drama classes which is kind of "blah". For me, it has to "pop", and I have accumulated quite a collection of scenes which meets that criteria.
I have collected material from many different sources. I have ordered collections of short scenes from Brooklyn Publishers, a Texas outfit which specializes in kids' drama, and I've found a few authors that I really like. But some of the stuff is saved from material which Lyssa's high school class used, adapted and shortened. Some scenes I stole from movies and children's books. I have a couple which were written by some of the middle school kids. I've even written a few scenes myself.
While I was at the middle school, and our audiences were around 150 people, I did pay royalties on scenes I had purchased, out of my own pocket as it was a volunteer no-budget program. But it's now been so long, many of the scenes are altered, and my audiences are now so small, that I no longer do. But I do always put the author's names on the program.
Last year it was difficult even to get through the first day's activity because I had three or four kids (kindergarteners and first graders) who couldn't even seem to sit down for five minutes straight. I am now glad I let them stay in the club, because this year I had some of those same kids back, and they were all able to do what they were supposed to do. They were also beside themselves with excitement at being in drama club again, which made our first meeting on Tuesday fun for me!
At our Tuesday meeting, they were also all able to speak clearly when they gave their little audition, even the new ones. Usually we get one or two who just mumble shyly at the beginning. So it was a better than average group in that respect. But later, at the end of the meeting, when we did the improvisation games, I realized that this group, as a whole, had less comic ability and less imagination than any other groups I have ever had! Oh well, every group is different.
As always, it was mostly girls and only a couple of boys. There was one boy I really liked, kind of quiet and mature for ten years, but with an impish sense of humor. I sure hope he stays in.
On Wednesday, I did some work on the front yard area in the morning, and drove in to my Arabic lesson. I had her work on sentences which I'd studied before using a more commonly used verb tense and/or voice, put into a conjugation that I'm still struggling with. So, instead of "She studied her lesson", "You two girls, have you studied your lesson?"
(Arabic has a dual masculine and feminine as well as a plural masculine and feminine and a singular masculine and feminine, in the second and third person. In the first person, they only have "I" and "We" the way we do, what matters is who you're talking TO.)
(If this seems incredibly complicated, remember that Arabic does not have a familiar and a polite set of verb forms, the way French and Spanish do.)
I had two errands to do on the way home, Home Depot for saucers to put under large plant pots, and the recycling bins on Power Rd. in East Mesa. (Apache Junction had to stop having recycling bins because too many people just dumped their garbage in them. That's the kind of classy town I live in.)
When I came home I had planned to straighten up the house, but instead just made a fire, got my book, the comforter, and a glass of wine and settled back in Dale Sr,'s recliner. (He was still hanging out with John Ducette the bricklayer, and the rest of his Wednesday evening gang, over at his "man-cave".) When he got home, I went to the bedroom, crawled under the big fat winter comforter, and fell right asleep, in my clothes!
Yesterday, Thursday, I met my friend Tish for lunch at the Wok In. She's spent the whole of December going through everything in her house, having yard sales, and selling things on-line. Her husband Dixon balked at first, but now is very happy to have a workshop he can actually get into, having sold many tools which he no longer uses.
Then we spent a couple of hours shopping, in the same strip mall. We looked through the Wild West Mercantile Co., which specializes in old fashioned clothes for "reenactors", and an antique mall. I found several small things, and she found a sturdy pine table she plans to by for her little kitchen.
Here we are at the antique mall:
After he left, it was only the four of us, four out of the five who have been in the travel club for a long time. (The new lady who has been coming, the one whose rambling tangents I had to learn to "manage", wasn't there this month.) I had bought for each of the long-time members $10 t-shirts from the Rick Steves website, and it was a nice opportunity to give them to them without slighting anyone.
I was very grateful, this year, for the fact that these women let me know how much the group meant to them. Without their support, I would not have found the courage to take more of a leadership role
in re-directing the conversation when it started to get out of control.
Ann, the one with the very short hair on the left, is the co-organizer. She is the one who has encouraged me to try staying in a hostel, and to try traveling alone, both of which I have enjoyed a great deal. She is also the one with whom I went to that wonderful music festival in Alamos, at the tip of the Mexican state of Sonora.
Love, Lennie
No comments:
Post a Comment