The Girl on the Tube With Roses

These are the lovely roses I found waiting on my chair today when I got to the theatre. They were given to me by Tracy, the stage manager/light and sound op for the show. It was pretty fun riding home on the tube and seeing people glance at the roses, wondering where I got them.

I was also given a really nice card from the other actress in the show. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I can't believe how welcoming they've all been to a girl who popped up the day before they opened.

The reason I got these things was because tonight was closing night of the show. Sad :( But we ended with a bang- it was a great crowd tonight! Afterwards, I went with everyone to the pub next door, where the director insisted that he "owed me a drink." However, since I don't drink alcohol and I've given up soda for Lent he ended up getting me orange juice. That's how we non-drinkin' girls do it! :p I didn't stay for long- everyone was spread out talking to family and friends who had come to see the show and I didn't know any of them. But I'm truly grateful for this experience.

Earlier today, I went to the Evolving Language exhibit at the British Library, which was mostly awesome. the drawback was that there were so many people. The drawback that stems from that one is that they were all super-slow readers, which meant that it took forever to get through the displsays and I got so frustrated that I ended up skipping around. I did see most of it though, and it was really interesting. Because of my linguistics class, I actually knew a lot of the history already, but it was a tad different because it was told in the British point of view. They were casting a lot of words high on the wall all around the room, and some of these words were the foreign equivalent of British words... but since I don't know all of them, it wasn't always a translation for me.

There were some pretty cool things on display there- there's a letter from Jane Austen to her sister, as well as part of her hand-written manuscript of Persuasion, which held an alternate ending! There was also an original (printed) copy of Pygmalion with George Bernard Shaw's personal dialect notes in it! I geeked out over that a little bit.

The library's store was also a dangerous place for me to go- besides having souvenirs from the exhibit (I got a mini-poster and a few postcards), they also had a permanent book shop. I saw a ton of books I wanted to get, but held myself off and only bought some more postcards (only one of which I plan to send. All of the others are already on my wall.)

Speaking of books, on the tube ride home tonight, I finished The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox. What a stunning, wonderful book. It's the best book I've read in awhile, one of those that you devour fast but wish you didn't because that means it has to end. I was so into it that I missed a lot of my history lecture yesterday because I was thinking about it and I seriously considered taking it out while waiting for the snail readers to finish up at the exhibit. It's just an amazing book and I am definitely buying it as soon as I can.

(Side note: I picked up the book because the cover looked interesting. Guess what it's about? A girl in the 40s who gets put into an asylum [and how it affects her family, immediately and generations later.] The author used the same source material I used for my essay, as well as other studies I've done in my history class. Either I was oblivious to how present this issue was or it's suddenly getting more popular, because now it's EVERYWHERE. And I'm glad- I've now been studying the subject, both independently and at school, for over a year now, and it's nice to see something I'm passionate about in other sources. It also made me smile because when the main character, Esme, finds out where her parents are sending her, she says the exact same thing that the main character in my play does when she gets the same news.)

Script Frenzy update: I'm a teensy bit ahead, though a lot of those pages were just edited today and not written. Tomorrow I start the real writing, as I've edited everything I had before. I'm really scared of this project and I don't know why. It's probably best that I'm going to a write-in tomorrow; no excuses!