Sunday blog post

 

Happy October!!

This month is already off to the races..

 On Tuesday, I had another dentist appointment. This was my second week in a row going to the dentist.

On Thursday, I went to work.

On Friday, one of our clients bought us Culver’s while we were at work. That evening, I went to Whitey’s to watch stand-up comedy. 🎤

On Saturday, I went to St. Catherine University to see Wonderlust. 🎭 I love seeing shows because it gives me a deadline to write reviews, and I love deadlines because they keep me motivated.

Earlier in the week, on Tuesday, September 29, we had our Next Slide, Please show at Eat Street Crossing in Minneapolis. 🎬 We did our slideshow karaoke, and it was quite a success. We had a good audience, and it was exciting to look out and see so many people there. Afterward, we started talking about all the possibilities for how we could continue with the show. It made me excited about what we are building and what it could eventually become. we also have a show October 20th at 5:30pm at the same location.

It is exciting to think about how many shows we have coming up. There are going to be so many opportunities to meet other comedians and people involved in the comedy community. I have been thinking about how we can meet more people and what kinds of opportunities could come from all of these shows. There is something really exciting about realizing that there are so many people out there that I haven't met yet.

I also picked up The It Girl by Ruth Ware at Half Price Books. 📚 The mobile library also came to our building, so I have been accumulating books from several different places.

I love fall, and I have been feeling a lot of energy lately. I like going to autumn events and having things to look forward to, and right now there seem to be a lot of things happening.

Tomorrow is my birthday, and my son and I are going shopping. 🎂 I am looking forward to spending the day with 

Wife of a Salesman, Girl Friday Productions at Gremlin Theatre

Girl Friday Productions returns under new leadership with Eleanor Burgess’s Wife of a Salesman, directed by Megan K. Pence. The Twin Cities premiere is playing at Gremlin Theatre in St. Paul through October 4.

The play takes us back to the world of Death of a Salesman, but this time the women are at the center. A wife tracks down the woman who is having an affair with her husband, and the two women are forced into a conversation that goes beyond the affair itself. The play looks at marriage and the expectations placed on women, as well as the question of what happiness means within those expectations.

Death of a Salesman was in the back of my mind throughout the performance. That connection is part of what makes the premise interesting, but it also made me wonder how much familiarity with Miller's play affects the experience of Wife of a Salesman. The women are at the center of this story, but their connection to each other still comes through a man.

I wanted to know more about these women outside of the conflict that brought them together. I understood why they were there and what they were arguing about, but I was curious about who they were before this confrontation. What were their lives like outside of being someone's wife or someone's mistress? What did they want for themselves?

Mo Perry played The Wife, Hannah Steblay played The Mistress and Craig Johnson played Jim. Perry brought a stern, energetic quality to The Wife that immediately grabbed my attention. There was a forcefulness to the performance that made me sit up a little straighter and pay attention whenever Perry was onstage.

The play also moves between the historical story and a contemporary, meta-theatrical layer. At one point the action stops and the fourth wall is broken, which changed the way I was looking at what I had been watching. When the play moved into the contemporary timeline, I found myself wishing I could see a character dealing with a similar situation to the one the two women in the original story were facing. I was curious about what an affair like this might look like for women living in the present day, and how the choices surrounding it might be different.

That was one of the places where my curiosity about the play really kicked in. I wondered what it would have been like to see the historical and contemporary experiences placed more directly alongside each other. For me, that might have created an even stronger connection between the women and the questions the play raises about how much has changed for women, and how much hasn't.

That feeling was also connected to the space. Gremlin Theatre has an unusual U-shaped seating arrangement, and I've seen other productions there that used the space in ways that made me feel very aware of the actors moving around the audience. In this production, I sometimes felt more enclosed. The industrial, warehouse-like lighting added to that feeling for me.

What stayed with me most was my curiosity about the women themselves. Wife of a Salesman puts them in the middle of a story that we already know from another perspective, and I wanted to look beyond that original story and understand these women on their own terms.

Wife of a Salesman runs at Gremlin Theatre through October 4.

Sunday Blog post

 Earlier in the week, I did some training for a new job and took my son to a couple of places to get groceries. 🛒 I was also doing some planning for an upcoming show at Eat Street Crossing called Next Slide, Please, where comedians will be doing their own slideshow presentations. 🎤

Tuesday was our Technically Funny show at The Others Collective. We did the same slideshow-karaoke-style format, with comedians getting up and giving presentations on random topics. 🎭 This turned out way better than expected and it was so exciting to see how much equipment the production crew had including boom mics and cameras.The audience feedback was amazing and there was some call and response towards comedians who did characters like motivational speakers or even the opposite:demotivational speakers.

Since the show was being streamed online through Pennant TV, I invited some of my family members to watch it. It was nice that they could actually see the show even though they weren't there in person.

Then Saturday came. I took my son to McDonald’s, and later I went to see Wife of a Salesman at the Gremlin Theatre in St. Paul with a friend. 🍟

Every day, my son and I have also been reading The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware together. We take turns reading, skipping over any bad parts. 📖

I also wrote some posts for Medium based on some of my experiences producing shows. It’s been fun getting back into writing and looking at some of the things I’ve been doing from a different perspective.

Look forward to a review of Wife of a Salesman on my blog soon!

Sunday Blog post

 This week was a little bit of everything.

On Tuesday, I started orientation for a new job. Orientation ran from Tuesday through Friday, so that took up a good part of the week. During one of my breaks, I was able to write some comedy jokes, a lot of which ended up being about therapy. Apparently, therapy is one of my more reliable sources of material.

The company also gave us a really nice blanket that rolls up and packs into something you can carry around like a purse. I thought that was pretty creative. I’ve never had a job where one of the first things they gave me was basically a portable blanket.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I picked up some Posca markers because I wanted to do some artwork. I’m still trying to figure out how to get better at watercolor, so I also bought some TAMBI watercolors and have been experimenting with those. I’m still very much in the “trying to figure out how to make this look good” stage.

There were also rehearsals for our upcoming shows. I’ve been talking to different performers about whether they might want to join us, so there’s been a lot of that going on too.

On September 22, we’ll be performing in Technically Funny at The Others, our improv group Waxy Comedy will be doing a portion of show that mixes comedy with presentation-style performances. Then, on September 29, Waxi Comedy will be hosting a show called Next Slide, Please at Eat Street Crossing, where we expect a lot of comedians to give presentations as part of the show. Both shows have involved a fair amount of planning, rehearsing, and reaching out to performers.

Earlier in the week, I went to Comedy Corner to watch an open mic. It was a pretty tense show because there were a lot of hecklers in the audience, and the comics had to fight their way through their acts.

At one point, the host said, “Please don’t talk to the comics unless they talk to you first.”

I loved that.

Then five of the hecklers got up and left after hearing it, which was actually pretty smart of them.

By the end of the week, I had managed to read two books: The Woman in Cabin 10 and The Death of Mrs. Westaway, both by Ruth Ware. I’ve been getting back into reading, so it was nice to actually make it through two books.

On Sunday, I went to Hive Collaborative to do musical improv, which was a nice way to end the week.

Random mansion in my area

So that was pretty much my week, How about yours?