This is how I roll...

animal print pants outta control.

Bout days always start with me getting "I'm sexy and I know it" by LMFAO stuck in my head. Including a visual of Cookie Rumble in her skating gear doing a dance that I can only describe by referencing John Travolta and Olivia Newton John's moves in "Your the one the I Want" at the end of Grease. On bout day, you wake up excited. Thoughts are punctuated with anticipation.You could imagine that in such a heightened state of merriment and nerves it would be hard to focus on something such as Samuel Beckett, a man that demand a certain sense of focus. If you thought this, you would be right. But here's the old college try-

Disclaimer: Reading performance pieces upsets me. It takes me hours pouring over pages wondering which is the proper inflection, how would the director choose to set up each scene, ect. It's much easier for me to watch different productions and go from there. I discovered this when I was an "actor" in high school (quotations marks to connotate a lesser amount of skill.) If I was reading a part for a play I'd never seen before I totally missed the emotional mark- every time. If I was supposed the be the blushing flower, I was the boisterous butch. If the role asked for weeping, I was knee slapping. Additionally, every acting teacher I had told us to go big or go home. So when mixed it up, I mixed it up good.

The greatest plunder to my career was during one of my senior projects in which my partner and I received a scene from Shakespeare's 12th Night. At this point, my emotional disorder was already quite apparent to me and needless to say the whole situation made me nervous. The teacher of the class was not only an actor herself, but a director and proclaimed expert on the subject of theatre. Handing me a Shakespeare piece as a self led project was like handing a blind woman a copy of Dickens' Great Expectation and asking her to turn in a report by Friday. I was ill equipped for the mission. My character, later described to me as a bubbly cougar lusting after her prey, was played as reserved and merely friendly older woman. This mistake killed the entire scene. My partner was amazing. Right on the nose.
 
Attempting to focus in more on Beckett- I view Beckett's work as relying on the emotion. On a state of mind other than the purely intellectual. You have to feel Beckett. When I first read Not I, I didn't get an intellectual sense of what was going on, who the character was. I got a sense of her, a feeling of her situation. It wasn't until Contemporary Forms picked the piece apart that I moved past that sensory vision (As you could imagine I missed most of the major facts about the character.) Similarly, experiencing Waiting for Godot, is exactly that, an experience. I can pull no objective facts, have no sense of plot line other than the obvious waiting. Just a thin sense of possible themes and sense. Actually, all I can focus on is whether or not Godot is God. I'm pretty sure Beckett claimed that Godot is not God, but it is fascinating to watch/read the piece in the context of Godot as God. It brings a whole new life to the piece. A new life that maybe Beckett was not aiming for. Though he was a protestant, it is possible that he was trying to portray life, not necessary life in the context of religion. By saying that Godot is God you instantly limit the production while leaving it open ended allows us to explore the humanity depicted in the show at a much broader scope. Saying Godot is God could also limit your audience. Not everyone wants to see a show summarized as two character waiting for God. In our lives we wait for so many things. Each period takes a little out of us, until we are tight legged, hunch backed and waiting to die. Waiting, desperation, lonliness- these are broad themes that we can all relate to.

Thinking about waiting while waiting is slightly ironic. My one tracked mind is angered and yet relieved by the forced new topics when all I want to do is skate. It would be interesting to see how the topics of one track mindedness change with age. It seems like now-a-days most of those tracks revolve around sex. Kids are interested in the next heart throb, teens are thinking about doing drugs and having sex with each other, and adults love talking about their kids (and sex/having sex to have kids.) It'd be an interesting survey topic.