Wednesday, May 18, 2011

My Off Off Broadway Debut

Saturday I took the train into NYC to perform in a show at The Tank called American Decameron. This show was a collection of monologues given by several people - mine was about how I'd found a book at the local Goodwill that had previously been owned by a classmate of mine, Waylon Lenk. My monologue went something like this:

"I was perusing the woo-woo section of the used book shelf at a local second hand store this afternoon and came across a most interesting book: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Plays by Women. Oooo! Now this is a truly fascinating collection, but what really struck my curiosity is the previous owner of this book had crossed out the book's previous owner's name and written his own name in large Capital letters on an inside page. Jeez, that name sounds really familiar but I cannot place this mystery man. Where have I seen that name before? I really am cudgeling my brains about this because I know that name from somewhere. But where? Is he that Cambridge spy who defected to the Yukon over the Norwegian moose scandal a few years back? Didn't he co-author that novel about Florentine artifact smugglers who got embroiled in a VAT scam with what's his name? Or was he the director of the vintage classic motion picture movie Gidget Goes to Hell and its sequel Gidget Goes All the Way and Gidget Goes Down...to Rio?

I am at a loss. If you know who this guy is, give me a shout. I'm pretty sure he didn't mean to donate this ultra-fantastic book of restoration plays, and if you find him, tell him he can have the book back for a nominal fee. Now, I'm not talking blackmail or anything, so don't get your knickers in a twist over this matter. It's just that used book stores don't give books out for free, especially ones that have been autographed by famous people..."


As it turns out, a man from the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival was in the audience and really liked the show and encouraged us to participate in their festival:

Wednesday, May 04, 2011

Making Stuff, Packing Stuff...

The term is finally winding up here at Stony Brook and I have been packing all my stuff in fairly-easy-to-ship boxes and sending them out to Washington in batches. I'm down to only a few projects still due for my classes; one is a Powerpoint presentation on Ibsen's "The Master Builder" due the end of this week and another is a performance in "American Decameron" at a place called The Tank in NYC on May 14th. I am performing two monologues - one of them is a video that will be broadcast during the show; it can be viewed here: Invisible. I called it Invisible, partly because most women over 40 are invisible to men and partly because the character is...well...dead...It was inspired by something Linda Shaffer told me years ago from when she worked in a funeral home.

And here's a puppet head I built for a raggedy puppet to be used in "American Decameron"
Apparently it lost its head in Korea somewhere. It was fun to build it a new one out of paper clay and styrofoam. Here he/she is next to a buddy puppet who had somehow managed to keep his head screwed on tight.











And here are some flip-flop socks I managed to finish last week.
They are only one-tenth as cool as the Easter socks Tini knit and sent to me!













The flowers are in bloom here on Long Island; here's the view from my basement apartment window

Saturday, March 05, 2011

A New Term at School

Man! This term is sooo kicking my ass! I have so much writing to do, a ten page paper here, a twenty page paper there, that I've been wondering lately what I've gotten myself into. On Monday I have a paper due on Arab interpretations of Hamlet since 1975.....ehdhashasdhadlkwrtn (incoherent mumbling has ensued).
And...I have to write 50 blog posts for one class...arrrgghghghghghghhh! Here's a link to the blog where I post those entries...Grant Group. You can tell which ones are mine - my name is in the taglines...Can I just go home now???
Luckily, some of the posts can be vlogs (video blogs); so far I have posted a couple of them on the Grant Group blog. Here's a silly one called Two Aspects of Abandonment; we each had to create a video with the theme of Abandonment. Most of the other students got all angsty with their videos, but I thought the whole thing was a total joke. In it I talk about a 61 VW bug. I never owned one; I did, however, drive my brother's 67 VW around until I crashed it into a telephone pole and got a ticket from an uptight cop for parking in a moving zone!
Here's some test footage for a project I am working on with a fellow student - this shows my new haircut. Admittedly, this little video snippet is a bit unsettling and...well, in the words of my fellow student, a tad bit creepy...

I was busy over the Christmas holiday knitting mitts for the long hard cold winter that overtook the Northeastern part of the US. Lucky me, I still love snow, I find it quaint, charming, picturesque, etc. etc., but as of yesterday I am officially SICK OF WINTER.

I actually knit four pairs of these cuties but only have one pair left because the rest were given away to fellow students. They were very simple to knit up, which is always a big plus in my book. Lookie! There's a tea towel with darling little hedgehogs behind my hand! Woooeee! I love hedgehogs!

Friday, December 31, 2010

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! May 2011 be a great year for all of us. Tonight I am in downtown Snohomish, Washington at a friend's house. This morning at dawn the roads were just a tad frosty and icy.










But Jynx didn't seem to mind. She slept right through it.











Yesterday Chris, Linda and I drove over to Port Townsend. On the way we stopped at Fort Flagler - Here's Linda scouring the beach










Here's Chris examining a b-i-g- g-u-n










And here are some deer we came across at Fort Worden which is in Port Townsend.

Corn Snow

I've been busy creating wire knit bracelets for my online store on ArtFire;












I knit beads and wire together on a spool:











My brother Chris, his wife Linda and I went over to the peninsula yesterday to take a look at Port Townsend. On the way we stopped at Fort Flagler where we found the ground peppered with what Chris calls 'corn snow' - that is, snow pellets the size of corn kernels.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Finger Monkeys!

In case you were wondering what to get me for Christmas, may I suggest...
a finger monkey! Oh, okay. It's probably illegal to own them in the States, but still...Finger Monkeys

Party Time!

My first term of graduate school is finished - now just waiting to see what grades I've gotten...
I've opened up a store on ArtFire, too. Here's one of my new seed beads and knitted wire bracelets which I think could also make a mask...

Wednesday, December 08, 2010

OMG! A Play Reading!

It has been two months since my last entry here mainly because I have been consumed by writing papers and creating PowerPoint presentations on things like Cardenio - Shakespeare's Lost Play, The History of Tanztheater in Germany, creating a Regie Buch/Dramaturg's Protocol for a Steampunk version of The Tempest and 14 one-page papers on various Shakespeare plays - Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, King Lear, the Merchant of Venice, Henry the Fourth, part 1, and one other play, but I can't remember which one...
Sheesh! Such is the life of a graduate student.
Tomorrow night is the first public reading of a portion of a play I wrote for my playwrighting class - we're just going to get through Act one and a tiny bit into Act Two, but I'm happy that I've written that much!
I am exhaust-a-pated!

So here's a collection of images from the past and present.
Can you spot my high school yearbook picture from 1976?

This is the reflection of the writing on the back of my monitor in the morning sunlight:
Here are two photos from the beach a few miles away; I love how the water carved rivulets in the sand.

This last photo is my little basement studio apartment's window looking out onto the garden in the backyard. Note the bat-winged pumpkins!

Saturday, October 09, 2010

Some Frou Frou Ideas

Here are a couple of ideas I have been toying with. I just took all of my glitzy junk rhinestone jewelry bits and placed them on the back of an old hand mirror and the top of a glass jewelry box. These two pieces are visual mish-mashes of sparkly kitsch. I haven't glued the jewelry bits in place yet - I'm still playing!



Whaddaya think?

Sunday, October 03, 2010

College Life

Sorry for the bloggery hiatus. I think perhaps I've been recovering from the shell shock of moving cross country in the sweltering heat of early August to find a place to live close to campus and lately, settling into college life. Whew! What a transition! But a much needed one. I can't say I've fallen in love with Long Island yet, but I am adjusting to the rhythm of life meted out in semesters and the weekly workload expected of a first year grad student of dramaturgy.
After a summer of inactivity creative-wise, I've also managed to work on a few smallish projects this past month. I FINALLY finished the Sami bracelet kit Karin sent me from Sweden:


I had a cold last weekend and worked on a cross-stitch pattern of a medievallish gryphon I found on an Italian embroidery site - I'll post a picture of it later.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

My Apologies

I have been away from this blog far too long. But at least I have been busy elsewhere; so many little projects begun and in varied stages of completion, including a cape








made of the most silky soft houndstooth with a silk charmeuse lining. I think I found the houndstooth suiting at Pacific Fabric last summer; the silk charmeuse was (let's all chime in together) A Find at Goodwill.










Last month or so I joined a Mini Cooper club and went on my first rally.


I was to go on another Mini event this weekend, which was held at Maryhill's Stonehenge on the Columbia Gorge, but last week I broke a toe and it is really painful trying to shift gears for more than a short trip at a time. So I missed out on the photo op here:







Sigh. I did finish my next pair of socks, a lovely soft bamboo wool blend in purple stripes They're a bit big, but my poor abused toe is quite happy and warm. I also dyed a couple of skeins of wool with Kool Aid and am waiting to knit it up and then felt it into some elf slippers...

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

My Hero...

I was perusing DudeCraft's blog just now and came across a photo of my beloved Hero robot...oh how I miss him! I received a Heathkit Hero Robot kit as a Christmas gift sometime in the mid-80's (Thanks, John! You always gave me the coolest stuff!) and set about putting him together immediately. I think it took me 3 or 4 days to get him finished to the point where he could roll down the hallway and sing "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do..." My cats hated him with feline fury and swatted angrily every time he came within range.

I finally let him go one day in early 1999 when I took him to Goodwill's to drop him off with a couple of bags of old clothes. One of the attendants was so thrilled by the prospect of owning his very own robot I said to him "Oh hey, this guy is for you -I'm giving him to you, not Goodwill."
My final memory of Hero is looking back in the car mirror and seeing that excited kid clutching him as I drove away...Miss you, little guy...

Monday, February 08, 2010

Still Up to No Good, As Usual

My apologies if you are put out by my lack of blogging these past two months. I have been busy but unsettled, trying to figure out where my life is going to go next. I'm employed once again which is always good for the ego.
Recently I got crazy busy and knotted up several bracelets to put on Etsy but nary a one has sold yet. I'm not all that surprized; I think Etsy is besotted with jewelry already.
I finally got around to skeining up a big uhhh wad of single ply wool I bought off a guy from New Zealand. It took me three nights but I now have 24 skeins of lovely yarn to play with.

It took me another week to wash the skeins because they were lanolin sheep sweat stinky. But now they smell fresh as cheap shampoo!









I also knit a pair of plain old socks for myself. I like the southwest colors especially on dark dreary rainy winter days.











Two weeks ago I had the great good fortune to see the Firesign Theatre perform live at the Kirkland Performance Center. I am still absolutely smitten by those crazy guys after all these years.

And last week I was blown away by a broadcast of a live performance of "Nation" which was aired in a little theatre in Mount Vernon, about 40 miles north of Seattle.
The National Theatre in London has been broadcasting performances of some of their shows all over the world by satellite and the Lincoln Theatre in Mount Vernon is one of three venues in this area that participates in the live broadcasts.
So I have been out and about, making mischief and bon-vivanting around town.

Thursday, January 07, 2010

Stuff Around the House

I don't have a whole lot to say right now, so I thought I'd just shoot some stuff around my house.
Narnian Lamps











Shoes I bought for $1.49!











The Avon critters who took roost on the bathtub














Some ornaments I made for Christmas that I didn't get to put up because I had such a bad cold I didn't really have Christmas this year...

Monday, December 28, 2009

Hey! Book Giveaway Contest on My Other Blog!


Hello! Today is the first anniversary of my micro-macrame blog and I am giving away a copy of my book Micro-Macrame:30 Beaded Designs for Jewelry Using Crystals and Cords to the lucky winner who best describes what it is they like so much about micro-macrame...So click on this link to get over to the micro-macrame blog and leave your answer in the comments field there (not in the Annika's Atelier blog comments here). The winner will be announced this Friday, January 1, 2010! What a great way to start the new year!

Friday, December 18, 2009

Long Time No See...

Okay, okay, I have been gone a long long time. I've been quite busy with other things like: finding a new place to live, moving house, teaching classes, the Swine Flu, traveling to Oslo, Paris and Kiel annnnd sorting out my new place and looking for a job. I suppose you'd like to see pictures of at least some of these excuses. Like maybe Paris and Germany.

Obligatory Eifel Tower group shot. Tini, Clare and I weren't taking any of this seriously.







The Sacre Coeur in Montmartre. For some reason, I kept returing to this place, first with one group of friends, then again with another.








Hanging with Val at Versailles.












Dinner with friends old and new.







Tini's turkey, in Daenischenhagen in Deutschland. The poor bird barely fit in the oven. It was magificent, but that's not surprising, since Tini is an excellent cook.





Me learning to spin. It's all Tini's fault; she made me do it. Now I am addicted to spinning.







King Tut! Who knew we'd find the King Tut exhibition in Hamburg?