A Walker in the City

You may have heard that bad weather this morning, including a tornado in Brooklyn, caused massive disruptions in the New York commute. My subway was going nowhere, so I and many others headed downtown on foot. Buses were packed, cabs were full, this was a situation my New York experience hadn't prepared me for. Subways did start running slowly after a time, but service was irregular and the cars were literally too packed to board.

Rather than wait around, I kept moving. When I finally did get on a bus sometime later it turned out that it was only a few streets away from the end of its line. Still, it was a brief rest. There was no way I was getting to the studio by 9.30 for Joanne's class, I had called ahead to say so. When I finally arrived at the studio after about a 100-block stroll, I discovered that the class in fact had started over an hour late due to the disruption. Joanne let me change and come in, which she didn't have to do. Once I got myself cleaned up I joined those of the class who had made it for a group movement exercise. I'm glad I got to experience a piece of this class, because as I told Joanne later hers was the class where I felt like I had the biggest change in both performance and attitude.

In Sam's class I worked the Bear monologue, but there wasn't time to do the Proposal scene. Sam thought the monologue was a bit similar to my character in The Proposal; I had tried to make them different but I guess not different enough. At Sam's suggestion I tried the piece as a flirtation instead of a harangue, and it worked much better. (One of the ladies had graciously agreed to be my scene partner) I should mention that when Sam makes a directorial suggestion like this he always accompanies it with a "This is just my idea, you can do what you want" sort of remark. Of course, there's a reason he's the teacher. There's a big emphasis on "Find your own technique, these are just some ideas" here, but as I've said before I think it would be sort of wasteful to not be open to the teachers' ideas - even if some are more useful to me than others in the long run.

As we head into the last day I can't even begin to sum up these 5 weeks. With the pressures of packing I don't know if I'll have time to post tomorrow, but if not then I'll do something soon after. One more day....