Monday, September 17, 2007

The Play's The Thing

I was really nervous about the auditions, but I left feeling like I did pretty well. The question was: is "pretty well" good enough? I went in competing against people of quite varied talent level, and some of them I wasn't worried about. But there was a group of guys who knew the director quite well and had been in the Theatre Department at PGCC for at least 2 years. The other trouble was that the show consists of only 3 parts - 3 male parts. The director had said she was willing to accept females for a mixed-gender cast if she found the right ones.

And I got in! The play is The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: Abridged, and it's hysterical. 3 of us do all of Shakespeare's plays in 90 minutes, switching out roles and condensing the plays until there's nothing left but the funny parts.

The best part is that I get to play Hamlet...you can just picture it, can't you? :)

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Pride of the Police Force

It had already been a long day. I had taken a Sister in my ward to the hospital at 2:45, and now it was a little past 9pm. We sat in the drive-thru at CVS, waiting for her prescription to be filled. A cop was parked near us, in the small and dark parking lot around the side of CVS that the drive-thru was on. He seemed to be having fun playing with his car - fiddling with buttons and knobs, flipping the lights on and off, and inspecting the decals that said "Police". His buddy drove up. The second cop's car was identical to the first's, but the two officers went through the whole fun process - again - of examining the features of their cars. Their conversation went from their cars, to inappropriate comments about some girl they know named Emily, back to their cars.

"Hey, man, I tried the lights yesterday. I turned 'em on, just to see what people would do, and zhoop, zhoop (imagine this sound accompanied by hand gestures indicating cars pulling over), all those cars pulled over!"
"Yeah, it's great, isn't it?"

The two looked extremely impressed with themselves. The pride of the police force then proceeded to turn their flashing lights on, backed up few steps to admire their handiwork, and began practicing whipping their guns out of the holsters reminiscent of the Old West. I rolled my eyes.

I admit I was tempted to get out of my car and confront the second cop about my feelings on his bragging about his misuse of authority entrusted to him by the city (or county, or state - I can't remember which level of government his car revealed that he worked for). But I didn't - even though I did confront some random guy in traffic the other day and told him I thought he was a jerk (I walked up to his car while he was stopped at a stoplight). But he couldn't arrest me and didn't have a gun.

I doubt that criminals who were in mid-crime last night realized how lucky they were that these two officers in particular happened to be on duty.