Forgetting

I have been having dreams where I forget to do things. Big things, like paying expensive checks at restaurants or taking care of my grandfather who has Alzheimer's disease or making hotel reservations when I travel. It's like I've left something behind or haven't remembered to take care of something very important in my life. What am I forgetting?

Or maybe this is all about regret. I suppose that's more likely. I must feel like I'm missing something, but I'm not dealing with it.

In other news, the conference was really great. I met lots of cool grad students who are doing exciting work, and a couple of very interesting junior scholars. Plus I met David Ian Rabey courtesy of my advisor. She was the chair of a panel on dramatist Howard Barker, so I went to that panel, and then my advisor invited me to go out with the panel to chat. So my conference roomie, my advisor and I went out for drinks with the two grad students on the panel and David Ian Rabey. We talked about Sarah Kane and David Rudkin and Howard Barker and all kinds of other stuff. Rabey is going to help with my thesis, too. Or so he said. It was all kind of unbelievable.

I also met a very cute grad student from Virginia Commonwealth University who teaches voice. Serendipity, I guess. I've been thinking about voice again a lot. Those who knew me in college will remember that voice was my main passion in undergrad. I even went to Canada's National Voice Intensive in 2002, an event which changed my life. Of course, here at FSU, I haven't had much time to do any voice work (or directing for that matter). But lately I have returned to the practice of yoga (something I also used to do religiously in undergrad) and so I have been thinking about my voice and my body a lot more.

So while I was in New Orleans, I ran in to (purely coincidentally) Christine Menzies, my voice teacher at CSU Pomona (actually, my first theatre teacher ever), a woman who I was completely devoted to. I also bumped into Gerry Trentham, who was one of my movement instructors at the Voice Intensive. I've been thinking about the voice and the body so much, and then I met these old teachers and new grad students of voice. In addition, my research interests seem to be bending toward the effects of the body in performance: the importance, representation and fear of the queer body in performance spaces. So it all seems to be coming back together.

Oh yeah, and I'm an idiot and I said that my old castmate Brian Robert Burns was at NYU, when of course he is at the Yale School of Drama. (Sometimes those schools are the same in my head.) I must have been on crack when I typed that.