That Post I Never Posted

At last! Here is the latest update on the life of London Caiti!

Part of this was written Sunday [editor's note: this means either 2 or 3 weeks ago.] but I don't have internet often so it's quite long, you may notice...

SO last weekend (weekend before last now!) I decided to do a bit of exploring on my own. I got up late on Saturday and set out to take a double decker bus somewhere! I didn't really have any idea where I was going, but the 27 busline looked like I could ride it a good long way without having to switch, so I decided that looked as good as anything. I hopped on near my hostel and spent about an hour and 3/4 riding on the top deck seeing a bit of the city, listening to music, and generally starting to feel more like myself in London. I ended up somewhere on the West side of London in Chalk Hill at the end of the bus line at something called the Stalls or the Horse Tunnel Market which was something of a combo vintage store, antique store, street festival, horse statue museum, and folk art show! There were giant chandeliers all over the place, as well as life sized bronze horse statues and fountains and all sorts of crazy market stalls with everything from goth/steampunk clothes to hand-carved indian furniture to old records and china tea sets. I even found some old Doctor Who novels that I thought about getting! The whole thing was IMMENSE, as well! Part of it was open air and part was inside a big building with carves walls and leather-upholstered ceilings, so as I was there the stars started coming out in between the stall roofs. I ended up grabbing some curry, rice, and an fanta from a vendor and catching the bus back home with a promise that I would have to take Tina there when she finally got into town! I spent part of the ride back writing, so I ended up missing my bus stop, but the end of the line was just about a 10 minute walk from home, so I just got a nice, though enforced, walk out of it!

Sunday I went down to the National because one of the girls got £5 tickets to go see August: Osage County! I was expecting a lot out of it since everyone has been talking it up for the better part of a year, so I was rather disappointed with the end result. Part of it might have been that I went to see a matinee, so the energy of an evening performance just wasn't there, but it just didn't have the honesty or the openness of some of the other shows I'd seen here. There were good moments in it, but the sound design was just plain AWFUL, and the script didn't wow me nearly as much as I was hoping it would. The opening monologue was terribly bland, and all in all, I would've much preferred 2 hours of the best moments from the play than the 3 and a half hours of luke-warm acting and writing that I got. Also, the final moment was the clincher of my distaste for the play, as one of my great dislikes is being bashed over the head with the symbollism stick. For those of you who have seen it: And then you're gone, and then you're gone, and then... This is the way the world goes round... Really? Really really? No thank you, I got it without the nasty bump on the head there. Ah well, it was still worth the cheap ticket to see it, and I didn't have to stand in line, so I've got nothing to complain about.

The week of classes was essentially just cementing us all into our schedules and really getting down to work. I won't bore you with the details, but let it be known that we were all just a little more sore and tired at the end of the week than we were at the beginning...

What with it eventually being Friday after a looooooooooong week of classes, a big group of people went out to a pub near LAMDA called the Curtain's Up, so I agreed to join. By the time we got there, it was so crowded we couldn't even get a spot at the bar, much less a table, so after standing around in rehearsal clothes holding my backpack for about an hour, I decided to head for home and a long-awaited dinner. I stopped by the store to get a bottle of wine to complement my pasta (ricotta and spinach tortellini out of a refrigerator pack. Don't you wish you were this classy?), got home, made dinner, put on The Producers, and proceeded to have a lovely wine, pasta, musical, chocolate-filled evening in. Did a bit of washing up, and went to bed early.

Saturday after a not-so-restful night of sleep I got up early-ish to go to the bank, try to get a phone or sim card, and meet Drew downtown. The bank was a success, the phone not so much, but eventually, after a severe lack of breakfast due to the fact that my eggs were stolen from my box in the communal fridge at the hostel, I got down to Piccadilly Circus where there was an inexplicable street performance of a fake, yet very well-costumed and rehearsed "Changing of the Guard" which included a straight-faced game of patty-cake, fake ballet, and all sorts of silliness! It was excellent. There were Cockney-sounding street performers there too in black outfits with white buttons in patterns ALL OVER them! After several unsuccessful encounters with payphones, finally met up with Drew and went to an uber-fancy place for lunch! The food was absolutely delicious, and I had my first encounter with real, honest-to-goodness Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. To Dan's credit, I thought he'd just been clever and made up the name for the play, but no. It is a real type of tea! And I did rather want to buy some… Alas, I did not. Perhaps one day in the future I'll have to go back and get some!

Anyway, after lunch we went to a GIGANTIC bookstore called Waterstone's that was literally five stories tall and had a sale of 3 books for the price of 2, leading me to purchase 3 new books: Empire of Sand by Robert Ryan, Labyrinth by Kate Mosse, and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Will be sure to report back when I've finished each! Afterwards we set out for Drew's school since he'd queued all morning for our tickets and so needed a nap, and since the show didn't start until 7:30pm, so I got to call my Dad on his birthday using Drew's Skype (HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!!!) made a light dinner while Drew slept and soon afterwards we were on our way to the National to see War Horse.

Before I go on, I just want to mention that all I'd heard about War Horse was that it was good and it was about a boy and his horse during World War I. The best phrase I can find to describe what it actually was was sweetly and innocently honest and simple. The plot itself became quite confused in terms of who was where and when and how, but the emotions behind it were perfectly clear. It's based on a children's book, but they managed to translate it to stage in a way that keeps its roots. It doesn't become a gruesome play for adults just because it's set during WWI, but rather it keeps the mask-less clarity of children's literature. This boy and this horse love each other, not in a slightly creepy Equus way, but in a boy-and-his-noble-steed sort of way. They each save the other's life many times, and in a way they each pull the other through. It was really a play about devotion, being completely and totally devoted to another being, and it was really and truly beautiful. The horses were all puppets, and for the most part the work was executed superbly! There were a few moments of it not quite working, but the puppet became a character to the extent that at one point I was WEEPING for the horse, more than I've probably ever cried in a play before. The whole play is set to a soundtrack of sorts of what I saw to be the narrator's voice as the main character after he's home from the war. He had a beautiful, native singing voice that was the sort of sound one connects to the land of England itself, and the songs were perfectly suited to him, and to the chorus of the full cast (over 30 men and a very few women, darn it.) that would occasionally join the song. Our seats were literally two chairs to the left of center in the very front row! It was the PERFECT play for it too! While it was intense, it wasn't painfully so, and it let us see the workings of the puppets, the expressions… the most amazing goose-puppet-and-operator! Drew described the whole thing as cinematic, and I must agree. The scope of it was enormous, including 3 languages, several countries, an enormous cast, beautiful and intricate puppets with 3 operators each… The set was absolutely minimalist, but perfect! It was all complemented with charcoal drawings made for the book.

Afterwards we headed to the Sherlock Holmes pub just down the Thames from the National. It was a good old-fashioned pub with no music or TV and just lots of people sitting around and talking, so we stayed for awhile and then went our separate ways.

Sunday I mostly just went on errands again, but I GOT A PHONE!!! For anyone who needs it, the number is 075 5260 3409 cause London numbers are ridiculously long! I also went to a thrift store and to the sounds of Mama Mia blasting through the speakers, I picked out my clown outfit. It's amazing. I got gold spandex/denim mix high waist slightly flared pants, a bright green shirt with little buttons on the sleeves and giant painted mushrooms along the bottom, a weird headscarf thingy that's got velvet and tassels and a flower print on part of it, and a washed-out denim thigh-length coat with slightly matted fake fur cuffs, all for the grand total of 4 pounds! Add a red nose and golden stilettos and you've got Ernestina Sweeney, my first costumed clown. She likes knitting, tap dancing, and impersonating animals. Oh clown class, how I both love and fear thee! Which is actually true of most of my classes...

Classes this week have been going well. We had a substitute teacher for Alexander today, which was nice to have a bit of variety, and we were working on the floor and table for about an hour out of the hour and a quarter class, so I feel like we all got much more out of it than we have been. Stage combat was today, and we're learning the most BAMF fight in the history of the universe!!! It's rapier and dagger and looks amazing. This week started something called "Early Birds" which is an extra, optional class on Monday at 9am that my roommate and I decided to try out. It's basically a really intense workout first thing on a Monday morning that does everything the other classes could have possibly missed. Which is pretty much entirely muscle groups that I didn't know I even had. One of the exercises (after we've all gone for a 3/4 mile sprint) is as follows: Stand in second position (feet more than shoulder width apart, pointing out). Bend your knees so you're in a plie. Now jump. Now do that 7 more times, and on the last one turn a quarter turn, and do that 8 times... Repeat until you're facing front. Tired yet? Now do it 4 times each way, then two each way, then one each way, then jump and do a full turn. I hurt.

We're still working on our scenes from the histories. I've got one of Henry V's monologues, but not the Band of Brothers one. In a week and a half we're switching to Restoration comedies, and we're switching teachers to someone who's been described as the "that's shit, do it again but good." type, but in a good way. Apparently everything he directs comes out very precise and VERY good. I'll be sure to fill you in on it when we get there! We're actually putting on a full play, apparently, with basic costumes and lights and everything! Not sure if we get a set yet, but we'll see. I'm looking forward to it quite a bit!

Well, here I am at last on a Wednesday afternoon. We've been dismissed early from our last class, so I thought I'd finally get around to typing this all out since I'm sure you've been waiting on pins and needles for the latest installment! Soon I will tell you all about the lovely production of Twelfth Night with Derek Jacobi as Malvolio that I saw last night, but for right now, my fingers are about to fall off and I'm sure you have better things to do than to read more of this, so farewell my dears!