Where have all the jobs gone?

Hello again dear readers! I do hope you are all well.
It’s been a mixed week in my life. Unfortunately with my severe lack of funding, I’ve still only been able to apply for unpaid work, but I did end up doing things that I’d been putting off or had forgotten about, as well as having time for playing too! Marvellous!

So, Monday’s offering of jobs was poor, very poor. I had decided that with rehearsals for ‘The Wild Things beginning very soon, that I would try to start waking up early so that my body didn’t have too much of a shock when I could no longer sleep til noon. So on Monday I woke up early. Ish. 9am. Therefore I was checking my casting website of choice regularly throughout the day. Nothing, not even a celebrity lookalike job. Not that I look like any celebrity, the only thing I’ve ever been compared to is a spaniel. But I dragged myself downstairs and began to choreograph a routine for the show. And I finished it! Being the lazy girl that I am, I set myself the challenge of completing it in an hour, and that’s exactly what I did! I was proud! I also received emails from Beth, who is directing the film I’m doing next week, and she arranged all of my travelling for me, all I have to do is turn up! Brilliant! Such organisation!

On Tuesday, I found a casting for a short film that I applied to. It was a student film in Stoke. I had shot a film there earlier this year, and it was fantastic, so I thought I’d give it a go. It featured a couple who were in a car crash, and flashed back to moments of their relationship. I liked the sound of it so off went my application. It was only after I’d sent it that I realised I couldn’t make one of the shooting dates as I was scheduled to do a schools workshop in Bedford. Oops. Thankfully they never got back to me. Phew. I followed the day up with an evening of singing rehearsal for ‘Fame’. We sounded good and it put me in a very good mood. I went to bed happy.

Wednesday was another slow day on the casting front. No applications again. I was feeling creative though, and picked up the script that I had been working on and put to one side a couple of months ago, gave it a read and impressed myself with what I had already got. I picked up my pen, finished the scene off, and added five new pages of dialogue after that. It felt good. I was on a roll, so I turned my laptop on, found the Wild Things music on my iTunes, and choreographed a second routine. Done in another hour, boom! I then realised that I had a princess party coming up next weekend and filled all of the party bags that I needed. I was on fire! If only I was this motivated every day…

Thursday was play day. It was my lovely other half’s day off, and we had a day out in Leicester. Mainly because he had to go to the Apple store to get his broken iPad looked at, but we turned it into a day of wandering around the city centre and eating. The Apple store is a very strange place to be. We had had to postpone our Leicester trip for a week, as he had found out that you have to book your piece of technology in. Yep, you have to make it an appointment. It’s like some sort of surgery for broken toys. We walked up to the store and stood outside for a while, as we were early for iPad’s appointment (and we didn’t want to catch anything from the other poorly technology!). I didn’t like it. To me, Apple try to make things seem all shiny and exciting, but the décor in the shop was anything but. It was grey and miserable, and seemed really dark. I think I even joked that it looked seedy. The brightest things in there were the staff’s blue t-shirts, and the customers faces from the glare of computer screens. After we had checked in (!), we were told to make our way down to the Genius bar, where iPad would see it’s surgeon. I will say that I was more impressed with what actually goes on in the store. Customers were sitting down with Apple staff sorting their problems, people were getting training on how to use things, and next to the genius bar, there was even a little table with iPads on for children to use. There were no children there, so I stood and watched what the little thing could do. After explaining what was wrong with iPad, the Apple ‘genius’ tapped away on what looked like a brick of an iPhone, and decided that he would just replace the whole thing with a brand new one. As far as I could see, he didn’t even touch it. Genius? Schmenius!

We carried on our banter over Apple later on that day while talking about the iPhone. Upgrading to the iPhone5 seemed ridiculous to me. Although the staff were very helpful in the store, I couldn’t help noticing that nearly every customer in the shop were going in with faulty goods and having them replaced with shiny new ones. Surely you might as well buy something that won’t break after a couple of months, say a Samsung Galaxy s2…? ;) I think I won the argument!
We stumbled home and rounded off our evening by watching the new Sherlock Holmes series from the US of A, ‘Elementary’. I love the Robert Downey Jr films, and absolutely cannot fault our British series ‘Sherlock’. I’m slowly warming to ‘Elementary’, but I’m still not won over by having a female Watson. We’ll see how I feel at the end of the series.

Friday had some truly marvellous castings on offer. They all sounded too good to be true. It turned out that they were. Every role I tried to apply for said that I was either too old or too young. I’m 27, why is this such a difficult age?!? I sighed a heavy sigh and clicked to see if anyone had read my blog this week. And they had! That cheered me up! I had thought that only people in the UK would be reading it, but I was wrong! So before I continue, I would just like to say hello to all readers in the USA, Ukraine, Latvia, Philippines, Russia, Thailand and Uzbekistan! Of course hello to you lovely UK people too!

I continued my day by travelling to the job centre, which was relatively painless due to the loveliness of my favourite member of staff who makes me feel as if he really cares, and then I made my way to the dance studio for Fame rehearsals. I was very early, so I whipped my notebooks out of my bag, and managed to scribble out a few more lines of a scene for my play, and attempted to start my final choreography. Unfortunately, this was more of a challenge than I anticipated. Being in a dance school, there was a lot of noise coming from the other rooms. My monster music was contending with a piano in someone’s singing lesson, tiny little girls ballet and tap lessons, and a boys ballet class where they seemed to be dancing to Celine Dion. Only at Starlight! Fame rehearsals went well, but I was relieved to get home to a nice pizza, watch a bit of Derren Brown, and lay my head down until 11am the next morning!

I’ve had an incredibly lazy weekend, but I think I need it. Tomorrow is the Wild Things school workshop in Bedford, I have a make-up test on Tuesday for the film I’m shooting in Birmingham on Wednesday, I will return on Thursday, before I do a princess party and a murder mystery on Saturday, and have my photo taken for the ‘Fame’ programme on Sunday! I’m exhausted just thinking about it. See you on the other side!

Nxxx