Daily Minutes...

12am; load car for following day of fittings, trunk full, arrange blanket covering costumes in back seat to look more like a sleeping (or dead) body than costumes (hope that nobody breaks into car to hassle the corpse).
1:30ish; sleep?

6:02am; wake sharply with the feeling of having slept in and missed all appointments
6:11; convince self to go back to sleep
8:06; wake up again... decide that it's close enough to 7 hours of sleep to get up.
8:40; oatmeal
10:11; crap! I woke up two hours early and I'm already 15 min behind...

10:35; arrive at rental shop (located next to the methadone clinic) to find that nobody is answering the door.
10:40; make friends with locals
10:48; get into the rental shop
12:15pm; leave rental shop with a new 50lbs of costumes, haul it all back to the car stepping over puddles of unknown origins

12:30; arrive at Shakespeare offices...
1:55; haul another 40lbs of costumes to car
2:15; chicken wrap lunch

2:55; arrive at rehearsal hall and try to pull costumes from the bottom of the pile out into the top
3:30; still sorting fittings on the sidewalk
4:00; haul all costumes up to rehearsal hall in three batches
4:35; finished hauling
4:36; get asked if I "need any help"

5:30-7:50 fittings...
7:55; realize I've left a good 15lbs of costumes I was supposed to fit today in my f***g studio (rearrange fittings for later)
8:02; meeting with director
8:35; hurredly gather everything back into piles and have stage management and director help shove everything into car

9:15; left over pasta and a tangerine (wait for theatre crowd to leave the street my shop is on)

10:17; meet my lovely friend Alisha who helped me reload ALL of the costumes back into the shop

10:45; re-sort costumes for returns and re-load car for following day

10:55; return home.

12:33am; decide to blog because sleep isn't coming any time soon...
Wired.
Can't sleep.


**exact times are mostly guess work with the exception of 1st wake up time and blog time.

Brevity/creativity in progress

I cannot reveal the full picture... but then that is the essence of where my latest show is right now. There are bits and bobs and we are working very hard to make them into a complete picture.

UPDATE:

Easter in the Castro

Lately posts have been few... I've been in tech, I've been swimming in a blue mess of my brain... I've been curling up in my own shell. It's not something I reccomend. 

Today was Easter and San Francisco is not to be outdone for any holiday, especially holidays that allow for dress up.

 I though it would be a good idea to see the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence up close and perhaps check out the"Easter bonnet" and "hunky Jesus" competitions.

This is Dolores Park in San Francisco's Castro district;

(Poem store; made me laugh because my best friend and I have a running joke about how people are always trying to sell you bad poetry in SF... I was tempted to buy him a poem today but I'm poor and there was a line)



I found that although I wore an outfit that my Grandmother would have been horrified of (tall black boots with my summer skirt and a black top and cardigan) I grossly underdressed. I would have been much better to have worn bright yellow with blue hair... alas, perhaps next year.
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are a tongue in cheek community service group... really think of them as the rotary club, but in neon habits and white face drag make-up. (Really, I just learned about them, their website is lots of fun if you're interested)



I left long before the "hunky Jesus" competition started... which in all honesty sounds like it's in good fun, but perhaps is still a little too disrespectful for my taste, so I'm not sure I would have actually enjoyed it as much as those around me.


I made a few rounds about the park, talked with a sister about how she made her habit (ah yes shop talk), watched a good drag/lip sync act, a girl rock band and then the polka group started...   The slight searing on my un-sunscreened shoulders and my lingering anti-social mood finally got the best of me when confronted with  "oom-pah oom-pah-pah" ... such is the power of polka.  However a day in a sunny park with drag queens and easter bunnies is a good way to cheer up.

Color on the BART

My friend Shaggy and I saw this lady on the BART, crazy embroidered and beaded tunic and all. Our favorite was the button hat.



We asked her why she was wearing such an outfit. Apparently she was going to a Nick Cave concert.


Got to love Berkeley.

What Monkey Tunic?

My work day began with a flurry of finishing normal Renaissance style robes, hems and closures and whatnot... knowing that later in the day I would be trying to figure out how to make a suit for a cow...
This afternoon the client came into the shop to take away the first set of costumes and answer questions we had about the next round.
Our most pressing questions revolve around the actual dimensions of the cow. Right now we have intricate measurements of the cow's head (measurements that do little good in determining suit size)  and the fact that the cow is 6' long and 87" around (at what point isn't quite clear). We hear that the legs are 37", but we don't know where that is being measured from. What the easiest and most logical solution would be is to actually drape the suit on the cow (by the way this is an armature of a cow, not a real bovine). In a faint hope we ask if it would be possible to have access to the cow.

"Well, no, the cow is actually in pieces. The head is in LA, the body is in New York and the legs are in Arizona"

We ask "When you do the Peter Pan shot, could you tell us where the legs are fitting so that we can adjust the sleeve placement?"

"Well, no the Peter Pan shot isn't until after I need to pick up the suits next week so we just won't get the chance"

With people there are usually standard proportions that clothing makers get accustomed to. Generally you can tell where legs and arms are supposed to be. Necks are usually within a given range and arms are also within a reasonable variety of possibilities. Cows however are not something we are accustomed to and therefore guess work is a lot more risky.

So with given frustrations we sit back and figure we just have to do with what we've got...

The woman looks through the costumes and says
"oh no, this monkey hat is totally the wrong color"

"You just said it should be tan"

"Well it needs to look just like the one we rented for the man holding the monkey"

"oh. I don't think you sent us that information"

The woman digs into her folder and pulls out a print out with two teeny tiny pictures on it. One is about 1" by 3/4" of a little brown and gold tunic, below that is a smaller picture of a hat.

"the hat and monkey tunic need to look just like these"

"What Monkey Tunic?"

"oh, Didn't I tell you we need a monkey tunic? Will that be a problem?"

The shop manager told her that we could build the tunic. 

"Do you have measurements for the monkey?"

"Sure we do, here they are."

I am handed the measurements as the client leaves the shop.

 After finding  fabrics that looks similar to the tiny thumbnail I sit at the cutting table to look at how big to make the tunic. On the paper is the following information;

Head to Butt; 18"
around head; 8"

I forgot my good camera!

In my haste I left my film camera in Berkeley... leaving me to take pictures of Troilus and Cressida with my digital. The digital camera, she screams at me "I cannot do this." "There is not enough light!" "I hate you!" and so on... Thus I have about five photos I think I can use in the actual portfolio. It's kinda crappy but it's better than nothing... anyway here are a few interesting shots (quality aside)

Photos

Publicity photos online for Octopus... getting tired... hope to return to the world soon. This show opens on Saturday, the next begins next week.

No rest for the wicked.

Stinky swans

I have been fortunate this week to find a little work. I've been helping with the final push towards tech and opening of Swan Lake as a stitcher. If you want to get an idea of what my job was like today you can do this simple experiment;






1. find a really old shirt that has been worn so many times that the body odor is never coming out.
2. turn on your iron with lots of steam
3. iron the arm pits, steam and take a deep breath

Now imagine doing that all day with the whole room full of stinky shirts.

I'm beat! But I'm grateful to be breathing fresh air now.