arma virumque cano
Mar. 5th, 2008 02:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raven"There will be struggle. There will be sacrifice. There will be tears, there will be the occasional fistfight. And in the end, there will be transformation."
-Geoffrey Tennant, Slings & Arrows
That line was written in reference to Macbeth, not a student production of Virgil's Aeneid involving swordfights, jokes about penetration, suggestively-shaped vegetables and an enormous cheesegrater costume, but I'm willing to hang onto hope wherever it suggests itself.
It is now four hours until the first performance of the Aeneid, a show I have co-written, co-directed and co-produced, as well as having done the print design for, so I'm somewhat invested in it at this point. And not at all crazy, not at all.
Things that deserve recording at this point:
-Picture the scene. Ten o'clock, the Gloucester Green Wednesday market, lots of little old ladies happily bumbling around picking up their shopping. Meanwhile![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
foulds and I are picking up courgettes and saying things like, "No, no, not phallic enough. Maybe one with more of a curve?"
We eventually bought a Giant CourgetteTM, two bananas and an aubergine. Oh GOD.
-Due to our being fairly tense for obvious reasons, and also spending every waking hour together, my esteemed co-director and I are getting a little frazzled, of course, and last night I might possibly have called him the rudest thing I knew. Oops.
-Further to all of this, of course, I am quite unutterably crazy at the moment. I haven't eaten more than about a thousand calories in four days, despitejacinthsong, shimgray and foulds all trying their best, and last night, I came in to the kitchen and wobbled significantly. When I woke up, Maria was peering at me from a great height and wearing a plague mask. I promptly passed out again, naturally.
I came round the second time, was fed some jelly with a very sharp spoon - god bless Maria and James, really; they petted me and looked after me and did not tell me I'm being ridiculous, which I am a bit (I just can't eat; I look at food, even things I like, and go, "....no.") - and went to bed with a pause to note that my room is rapidly becoming a public health hazard.
-To wake up in the morning and go prop-shopping - hence the courgette - and go off to the auditorium, through Balliol, where I met my History tutor, reassured him that I am slightly less crazy than when he saw me last, I'm all right, really, I will come to the next class, and realised later that all the time we were talking, I was waving a shiny plastic sword at him, because that's an entirely normal thing to do.
-What else? Er, the backdrop for the Aeneid is perhaps the most awesome thing ever to be awesome. Maria made it over the weekend with a handful of sketch maps of the ancient Mediterranean, a handful of brightly-coloured felt-tips, six metres of white fabric and a room full of drunk and vaguely depraved people. We have the Trojans' route done in ecstatic red arrows, around the landscape of Carthage - with a heart drawn around it - and Cumae and Crete (with Minotaur) and the island of the Cyclops (who has his eye back, having had reconstructive surgery), and, in the Eastern world, Margaret Thatcher being eaten by a half-man, half-pig monster. Because.
...okay. A few hours to go. I should try the whole food thing, I shouldmaybe learn my lines do last-minute things, things like that. Er, yes, I occasionally go weeks at a time without doing things like this. I do. I think this has just been an extraordinary week.
And in case anyone in the world hasn't seen this:
-Geoffrey Tennant, Slings & Arrows
That line was written in reference to Macbeth, not a student production of Virgil's Aeneid involving swordfights, jokes about penetration, suggestively-shaped vegetables and an enormous cheesegrater costume, but I'm willing to hang onto hope wherever it suggests itself.
It is now four hours until the first performance of the Aeneid, a show I have co-written, co-directed and co-produced, as well as having done the print design for, so I'm somewhat invested in it at this point. And not at all crazy, not at all.
Things that deserve recording at this point:
-Picture the scene. Ten o'clock, the Gloucester Green Wednesday market, lots of little old ladies happily bumbling around picking up their shopping. Meanwhile
foulds and I are picking up courgettes and saying things like, "No, no, not phallic enough. Maybe one with more of a curve?"We eventually bought a Giant CourgetteTM, two bananas and an aubergine. Oh GOD.
-Due to our being fairly tense for obvious reasons, and also spending every waking hour together, my esteemed co-director and I are getting a little frazzled, of course, and last night I might possibly have called him the rudest thing I knew. Oops.
-Further to all of this, of course, I am quite unutterably crazy at the moment. I haven't eaten more than about a thousand calories in four days, despite
jacinthsong, shimgray and foulds all trying their best, and last night, I came in to the kitchen and wobbled significantly. When I woke up, Maria was peering at me from a great height and wearing a plague mask. I promptly passed out again, naturally.I came round the second time, was fed some jelly with a very sharp spoon - god bless Maria and James, really; they petted me and looked after me and did not tell me I'm being ridiculous, which I am a bit (I just can't eat; I look at food, even things I like, and go, "....no.") - and went to bed with a pause to note that my room is rapidly becoming a public health hazard.
-To wake up in the morning and go prop-shopping - hence the courgette - and go off to the auditorium, through Balliol, where I met my History tutor, reassured him that I am slightly less crazy than when he saw me last, I'm all right, really, I will come to the next class, and realised later that all the time we were talking, I was waving a shiny plastic sword at him, because that's an entirely normal thing to do.
-What else? Er, the backdrop for the Aeneid is perhaps the most awesome thing ever to be awesome. Maria made it over the weekend with a handful of sketch maps of the ancient Mediterranean, a handful of brightly-coloured felt-tips, six metres of white fabric and a room full of drunk and vaguely depraved people. We have the Trojans' route done in ecstatic red arrows, around the landscape of Carthage - with a heart drawn around it - and Cumae and Crete (with Minotaur) and the island of the Cyclops (who has his eye back, having had reconstructive surgery), and, in the Eastern world, Margaret Thatcher being eaten by a half-man, half-pig monster. Because.
...okay. A few hours to go. I should try the whole food thing, I should
And in case anyone in the world hasn't seen this:
