Not journaled since Ju-frickin'-ly. That's when the storm-tossing began, I suppose. Wow. It feels so recent. It's November now and the chain reaction is still in full force . . . not to mention it's still summer.

I'm home at the moment, but that's a rarity. After Hurricane Katrina closed Tulane, I went to Louisiana Tech with several frendz for about a week and a half, intending to make use of their theatre department and my own free time to continue my writing work from the summer. However, though Tech gives regular semester credits, they operate on a quarter system, and for this reason Tulane didn't want to give full credit for classes taken there. So I left, acquainting my professors with the reasons, and word makes it to the president, who calls the president of Tulane and gets the misunderstanding fixed the next day. But it's cool. Nothing, with one exception, has bothered me in the least during all this time.

When I got home, just before Hurricane Rita, my phone started working again and I found a voicemail from Clayton, my friend and intended roommate from Tulane. No point in going into the details here . . . basically he told me to call one of our professors, who told me about a semester-long theatre program in Connecticut at the O'Neill National Theater Center which was accepting hurricane refugee students for free. And I went.

It's an amazing place. We work hard-- seven-thirty a.m. to ten p.m. most days, seven days a week except for the three day break I have right now-- but I'm learning immense amounts, and there are only twenty-nine students. We study all diversity of theatre stuff-- a bit of design and directing, playwrighting, classical text interpretation, contemporary scene study, Alexander technique, Droznin movement, Suzuki (we start that next week; I led a warmup in Suzuki one day, but that's all we've had thus far), various voice methods, singing, stage combat, yoga . . . anyway, it keeps one busy. And healthy. Add that to our having one internet-accessible computer on the whole campus, and I end up communicating mostly just by mail.

So that's the state of things until December 18th. What does that mean regarding artistic endeavors? Glad I asked.

This whole thing is a huge artistic endeavor in itself. I've done work I'm fairly proud of (directing a scene from Waiting for Godot, playwrighting assignments, acting in various things) and some I'm not (acting as Hamlet and Leonard Charteris from George Bernard Shaw's "The Philanderer"), but there is most definitely more to come. My current assignment in playwrighting is a thirty-page one-act. There's an elusive idea in my head that I mean to attempt to capture. Some twelve to fifteen of those will have directed staged readings, and I'd love to see my work there. And the twenty-nine of us will be assembling some sort of ensemble piece for our final project. Little of this stuff lends itself to submission here, though-- **gasp** except plays I wrote! I'll come back to that.

Before leaving home I did a lot of work on my story-- a significant amount of rewrite and addition throughout, some external work on the plot and characters, and the transcription of everything written in my notebook. The work I'm doing at the National Theater Institute also has a lot to do with storytelling in general, so I think my writing will profit from this even if I'm not working on The Raeon or The Bananja or my big story right now.

Basically, unless we have an easy week somewhere, don't expect to hear from me before late December. I see many submissions I'm eager to view, but "the more delay'd, delighted." I probably say that too much.

So, submissions I'll put up for now: two plays. I've written three so far. They consist of:

A Story with No Middle
The exercise: a play with a chorus who can speak nothing but a single piece of found text, as many times as needed. The story concerns something lost and reflects the story of Little Red Riding Hood. At some point a parade goes by. Many good plays were written for this, surprisingly. Mine concerns nursing home escapees.

Mid-Fall
The exercise: a radio play. We all had a bit more trouble with this, but good results, still. Mine concerns Firenze, the guy from my nameless RPG idea who is followed about by a raincloud-- Mafo, if anyone remembers that, it'd be you. The day it got read I found out Hurricane Wilma was coming to Connecticut and I kind of went crazy for a while. Interesting day. I like the concept quite a lot, but I don't think it's so well suited to the radio play medium; it ended up being way too vague to understand. This one needs work, so I won't post it yet.

Finding Text
The exercise: write a piece of impossible theatre, whatever that means to you. Mine is also a found text piece, with origins all over the place. It was a big hit. People wrote amazing stuff for this one, including, from the one Canadian girl in our group, a companion piece to Bobrauschenbergamerica, Charles Mee's play that we've worked with a lot here, bringing about many discussions of what it is to be an American. Hers is called "Jim Carrey Canadia." Frickin' hilarious.

More about those when they're submitted. For now I hope you're all well and I'll contact you again come December, by which time it may still be summer, and the world will be yet different.