To balance the record, I should point out that while Rob Cline of the Press-Citizen thought my Chelsea bit in On Golden Pond was "compellingly" delivered, and pretty much liked the play at dress rehearsal, Ruby Nancy of the Quad City Times hated it and thinks I basically suck at this whole acting thing. On the other hand, Bob from One of Many liked it just fine, as did her grandmother.
Reminds me of a paper I workshopped in an upper-level fiction writing course at the University of Iowa. I was feeling particularly silly that day, and whipped out a Monty-Python-meets-Douglas-Adams type of story involving corporate spies from Russia trying to steal the secret plans for a machine to revolutionize the art of precision paperclip configuration. As I recall, it also involved several toasters and a siamese cat. Nothing brilliant, way too derivative, but decently written for undergrad, and I had a good time doing it.
Three responses are seared into my brain. The first was an intellectual analysis, using the toasters as a metaphor for the excesses of the bourgeoisie. Fortunately, he also saw some humor. I did start to worry about him for a second. The second was from a sorority type who said I made her laugh so hard she peed her pants in the library. The third was a scathing denunciation of the story as juvenile and basically assinine, with a suggestion I return to high school if I wanted to write such drivel. It was written in blue ink, but had a P.S. penciled in the bottom margin of the last page. In it, the guy noted that everyone else thought it was pretty funny, and in retrospect, he probably took it too seriously. I kept those three for the longest time, to remind myself how to take critiques, reviews, and criticism in general.
Last night, we had the entire OGP set struck before 10:00. I even brought my own power tools, which really scared some of the guys. So tonight I start focusing on that Scottish play with the Moongarden Acting Company in Iowa City.
We open when?
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