Monday started off with politics as usual-- except that this is was last class! It's so sad... I have this week and finals and then I have to go home. :( Our outing was the Imperial War Museum where we focused on WWI and WWII propaganda. We went in the trench experience exhibit, which made me want to vomit since they added smell to the ordeal... it was awful. War is just so unreal to me. I still can't even begin to understand why we do it. What lands and ideas and material things can be worth as much as human life? The answer should be nothing, but it's not to the politicians.
Anyway, after the outing I went as quickly as I could to Pineapple Dance Studios, where auditions for a Royal Caribbean Cruise production of Hairspray were taking place. I obviously had none of my audition stuff with me, so I had bought some sheet music to Come to Your Senses (again) and Love Song as my pop song since it went over so well at karaoke. And I went to Rymans and bought some cardstock to staple a random facebook profile pic (thanks Paula) to double as a headshot and my resume onto. Lindsay was going to come as well, but she decided not to at the last minute because she didn't have a headshot with her and didn't have a song that she thought was good to audition for Hairspray with. I figured that since I was going for the experience, it really didn't matter if my "headshot" was on special paper or not, or whether my song was good for Hairspray. I used Come to Your Senses because it's in my rep and I love performing it. I got to the audition around 12:45pm. They were supposed to start registration for the open call at 12:30 but decided to wait until all of the private auditions had shown up. So I waited until 2:15 to sign up, but there had been people waiting in a back room since 9am, so they wanted to let them go first. But people who had even gotten there after me wormed their way into that line. They had formed three lines and we ended up merging them once everyone knew that we had all gotten there around the same time. I ended up being #164 (they started the open call at #98) so I was not happy that a lot of people had cut. When I auditioned last summer in New York (http://psamandacarlee.blogspot.com/2010/07/if-i-can-make-it-there-ill-make-it.html) they had us sign up on two different sheets so that order was kept. So London, you should learn something from the Americans. So they started taking people in one at a time and told us that to move things along we would get one song. I sat there for another 2 hours and waited my turn. I had class at 4, but I had told the professor that I was going ahead of time. They called my number at about 4:15, and I went in at 4:20. I sang my 32 bars and it went really well. I miss singing so much. Thank God for Scott Zane Smith's classes. And then they said thank you, which I pretty much knew was going to happen because they had asked for 5'3" and under for Tracy (the role I was going for) so, again, I just went for the experience. I RAN to the tube and almost all the way to class and got there around 4:45pm. So I only missed about half of the class, and like I said, she had excused me. We got ready to go see War Horse , which Julia had told me about earlier, so I was really excited to go. And we also discussed the play from last week and got our critiques back-- I got a 98% on mine!! So, as usual, I am doing the best in theatre amongst all my classes.
We walked to the theatre on Drury Lane (I now know the muffin man). Our seats were in the circle above stage left, but we still had a good view of most of the stage. I absolutely LOVED the production. The puppets were amazing, as were the actors/puppeteers playing the horses. Sitting above and house right was cool because we got to see a lot of the intricate movements of the puppets, whereas if we were in center seats but further back we would have gotten the spectacle instead of seeing the way it was done. It is a fantastic play, and I loved the musical elements to it. It's not really a musical since the songs are environmental rather than plot-driving, but the mood was set so well by them. Having gone horseback riding the day before, and to the imperial war museum that morning, everything seemed to work out perfectly since the play is about a horse that is volunteered to serve in WWI.
After the play we got together for wine and cheese in Flat C as our final theatre discussion/ party for the end of term. We ended up discussing it until past midnight! It was a great way to end the semester in terms of theatre class.
Day 47 aka here are all the americans.
The last class of Media and Society was stupid. We watched two movies and waited to have a small individual talk with the professor about our thesis and grades. I am about 99% sure he has not looked at a single thing we've done this semester because he told all of us that we were "at the B+/A- level and if [we] just gave an extra push we would probably get an A- or even an A". Aka you haven't read a single assignment we've turned in all semester. I'm really worried about my final paper because we haven't done anything but talk about art in his class, and the subject is Media and Society. It's supposed to be a SMAD class. Anyway, all I have to do is write my final paper and do my part of our group presentation on the day of the final, which is just another way for him to do nothing in the span of two hours since our final presentation is about what we felt like when we got here and how we feel now. Catherine came up with a really cool idea to get everyone in the class in one group, so we're doing that. I already made my slide for the slide show, so now I just have to write my words and figure out the stories I want to tell. More on that later.
After class, I worked on getting some postcards done and on updating this blog. We had a group movie at 7:15pm at the Master House Museum, which is a cinema museum that was built in what used to be the Master's house of the Workhouse Charlie Chaplin and his family worked at in Kennington. It was a really funny yet really weird movie called Tamara Drewe, which was apparently based on a popular comic strip from The Guardian in 2005.
Following the movie, we went to the Sports Cafe in Piccadilly Circus. It was really cool and VERY American. It was college night, so it was basically like being at JMU except for the whole buying alcohol thing. They had beer pong, but we got there too late to sign up. We started the dance party downstairs and had a ton of fun dancing and hanging out. Tomorrow I'll be writing a paper, finishing the HP movies for Thursday night (!) and taking the group picture for the Madison House portraits!
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