It has been two weeks since I was in Winona, MN, and in that time I have had the opportunity to reflect on my experiences. I was truly blessed to get the chance to do what I did for six weeks. I began in mid-May in the scene shop at Winona State University working as a carpenter and juggling in my duties as assistant lighting designer at the same time. During this period of my internship I was probably the most miserable, but now having stepped away for some time I realize it was valuable time spent in a worthwhile manner. I was able to practice the skills I already had, re-fine some of those skills and add some new skills to the old resume. I feel now that those first 3 
weeks of construction have allowed me to make myself more marketable to more professional companies, and I hope that I will now be able to secure some of those posts that were slightly out of my reach before.
In terms of working with the lighting designer, I could not have been luckier. He was a wonderful man who was very open to my suggestions and who allowed me to have a real voice in the look of these two productions. I learned many valuable skills from him in the realm of the technical aspects of design, but I also learned life lessons as well. I learned that everything will be easier if you just remain calm. Don’t let the stress eat at you. These are things I have been told on numerous occasions that one would figure I should have learned by now, but seeing these little nuggets of wisdom actually being lived out by this man were what cemented it for me. I could not be luckier. Not many people in my field can say that they have had such an experience so early in their design careers. I just now cross my fingers that there are others out there that will be willing to continue teaching me in such an open and encouraging fashion.
The experience of Winona: not so exciting, but the people that make up the company of the Great River Shakespeare Festival and their supporters are truly amazing people. I feel that every person I came into contact with in Winona enriched my life in some way, and I can only hope that I made a similar contribution to them. I was welcomed with such warmth to these peoples’ lives, it was incredible. The passion these people had for doing this work or helping this festival survive was awe inspiring. I have never seen a community of people stand behind an arts organization in quite this way. The townspeople welcomed me into their homes as if I was an old friend. The company members welcomed me as a colleague and peer, an equal. I felt truly honored to be with these people. I have never really had a strong sense of community at any point in my life, but now I know what a being a part of a thriving community is like, and I like that feeling.
So excited!!! I am in the process of preparing for my spring break, which is a trip to Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia. I am going to Savannah just for fun, but Atlanta is strictly business. I finally got my stuff together, and I will be attending the Southeastern Theatre Conference in hopes of finding summer employment in my field of interest. I have my resume all made up (I just need to go to Kinko’s and make lots of copies on very nice paper). I am in the process of putting together a book of materials to take with me as examples of my work. I am so stoked. I will try and blog each day if I can find the time in all the craziness. I will also post photos. 
Once again I am faced with the truth that I can’t hack it. Is there nothing in this world that I can be good at? So many things show promise, but then they just fizzle out. It may not even be that I am not good at this business, it may be that I am just not chemically put together correctly for this business. I am too imbalanced. I give so much of myself to the point where it could be considered obsessive, but that is not a good thing. I live and die with the show. I am at this moment at a point in this process where I find it very difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel because I can’t seem to achieve a success. Sure, I got the show hung and focused and was able to get through level set pretty much unscathed, but the past couple of days have been a horrible roller coaster ride of emotion. I hate roller coasters and I would like to get off of this one. I find that more often than not I am in tears in this work. It doesn’t matter where you are in the production process (actor, designer or management) it is always tearful. I find myself bursting into tears on a fairly regular basis which does not boost confidence at all. It just leaves me thinking more and more about how big of a failure it looks like I will be in the process. I just want it to be beautiful. I want my work to help the playwright tell a compelling story and speak to people. I thought that was my objective, and I thought that my tactics were working. Now the director won’t even look me in the face. I really have failed. Jesus Christ, what next?
So today begins my campaign to quit smoking. I am not a cold turkey person. I have tried it and I just get ill. It is kind of ugly. Here we are and it is only 10:13 am as I am writing this, and I already want to kill myself. This morning I thought it would be no big deal, but then we got to the car. The car is my time alone to me in the morning. A place where I can just enjoy my cigarette in peace and quiet. My best friend Sarah is joining me in the adventure. We have decided that for the next couple of weeks we can only smoke when we drink, and we have set a limit to how many cigarettes can be consumed during a sitting of drinking. You never really think how much something like this affects you. I am prone to panic attacks and extremely high stress, and it took all I had to not give in to the oncoming panic attack this morning. It was killing me.
This year has already gotten off to an exciting start. My job has always been kind of here, there and everywhere. Outside of the website I didn’t really have any other regular duties. Well, coming back this year that all changed. Gregg, being the man of innovation and experimentation that he is, has come up with some ideas for us to have a greater presence in the world. My job has in the past three weeks grown exponentially in terms of responsibilities. I love it. I love going to work, and always feeling like there is something for me to accomplish. So many of us always claim the job is just a good resume credit, but for me it is just exciting. It is fun. I talked with one of our teaching and learning technologies personnel today, and she gave me some ideas of ways that I could incorporate the work that I am doing now with what I want to do with the rest of my life. She recommended I build my own website and experiment with the technologies out there. She told me that if I could get myself some basic knowledge, I could find a way to make this a viable income as well as work on my passion, my work in the theatre. Some day soon I hope to move this blog to a domain of its very own, as well as put together my own digital portfolio. For the past couple of days I have been thinking and couldn’t make the connection between my job in the department and the art. But here it is so simply laid out. The skills in the technology will help me to build something very dynamic. It is an excellent thing, I can create a portfolio that can travel anywhere I go. I haven’t been this excited in a long time.
So it has been a very long time since I have posted, but today I just feel it is time for another one. I thought I might fill everyone in on what I have been up to this summer in the most happening vacation spot in the U.S., FredVegas. I moved in successfully to the townhouse and have set up shop. I have almost completed French 202, and I will soon be able to feel the relief of knowing that I am done with languages. I have taken a position with a super corporation, A.C. Moore Arts & Crafts. Even though it is summer I still go to my favorite retreat, duPont Hall. I have been updating the computers in the management offices to latest version of Mac OS X. This may all sound very boring to some of you, but me, I have enjoyed every moment. I live with people I love, I do what I want, when I want and I live life to the fullest. Thank you, that is all.
I spent around 40 hours on the project and poured all of the creativity I had left at the end of the semester. The professor who graded the project said that the design was full of weak choices and that my grade was a gift. This was difficult for me to read because I really felt like I had done a valuable design. I am not and have never claimed to be a scene designer. I don’t really understand it. I have trouble finding an eye for it. I think that part of that deals with the my actual physical eyes. I don’t see in three dimensions because of a birth defect and I think it limits the way I am able to view the world. One of the comments made was that I didn’t have enough visual research for my design, but I don’t always feel like a lot of research is necessary. I think a design can be a fully creative process like painting or sculpture in which you are creating from imagination. I design alot from imagination. I have trouble seeing things as everyone else sees them in the world around me, so I use to my imagination to see them as they could be. I thought my design was very creative, especially compared to some of those of my peers. I do admit it was probably not the most inspired design, but I thought it still had some beauty. I have had trouble with this Scene Design class from the beginnning. I just have so much trouble with this form of design. Scenic and costume design are two design avenues that I have no idea about. Of course, to be a successful designer and to be a good one overall one should have an understanding of the others. I have tried reading about them to gain understanding, but it is not something that can be merely taught by a book. The professor of the class says that she believes that I do have talent for design. I have come to find that my ideas are usually very creative and work, but I have a hard time representing those ideas physically for others to see and understand. I lack some of the basic artistic skills that they all say I can learn, but I keep practicing and it doesn’t seem to be improving, but we shall see. I am going to take some advice from the professor and do some fine tuning on these designs for my portfolio because they could be very valuable for me, and maybe she could possibly help by being a sounding board for ideas.
Gregg always says that the most important thing an actor can learn is to be vulnerable. I have struggled with this idea for a long while. Partially because I don’t like to be vulnerable in real life, so why would I want to make myself vulnerable in front of an entire audience. I never thought I would be able to do it. I don’t like feeling vulnerable. I have figured out that all my life I have never wanted to be the weak one, I always had to be strong. But for TTB I decided to give it a try. Just plunge in and see what happened. It was probably one of the most rewarding moments of my life. There is a scene in which my character Jon has to cope with the fact that his best friend Michael has AIDS and that there time together is limited. It was a scene that I as an actor had the potential to have enormous power, but I couldn’t seem to use that. I couldn’t evoke it. We got into the first performance and before I knew it I was completely lost to the Studio, I was in New York running through Central Park. It was the most amazing feeling ever. I got to experience it again today’s performance. It is so incredibly rewarding. I now understand a little better why people would want to make their life this way, acting. Again this acting thing is a struggle because I still want to be a designer and just seem so torn because I do find acting very rewarding as well.
