Monday: This Monday took me back to Bedford to work with some delightful boys at Bedford Prep School. Myself, and 2 others from the Wild Things team went in to deliver 2 workshops based on our fabulous show, each earning ourselves a few pennies, and hopefully getting a few more ticket sales out of the bargain!
I had grumpily set my alarm for 6.30am, but woke up surprisingly cheerful despite the lack of daylight coming in at my window. I hitched a ride to the train station with my mother on her way to work, hopped on the train with the daily commuters and weaved my way through the streets of Bedford to find the school. On reaching reception I felt like I had gone backwards in my career. I thought my days of going into schools to perform at atrocious hours of the morning were long behind me, but I settled in nicely in the staffroom, where biscuits were offered! I declined, I should still be sleeping! Another perk that I had forgotten about was finding very handsome male teachers to look at while waiting for the others to arrive. Oh how I miss that!
We got started on the workshops, and they went quite well. The kids knew the story and some of them were performing their own version too, so they were very eager to join in. I even put on costumes for them so they could see what our interpretation would look like. They, and I had enormous fun! We retired to a local cake shop to reward ourselves, and after a quick chocolate brownie, I headed back home in the rain, slightly richer and extremely tired. On reaching home, I switched on my TV for my daily viewing of ‘The Big Bang Theory’ and promptly fell asleep for two whole hours, waking up just in time for dinner! Oops!
I logged on to my usual casting website that night to see if anything excited me and inspired me to apply, and my eye was immediately drawn to a theatre-in-education tour, I think I still had the mornings work on my brain. I clicked the casting for it to reveal more information about the job and my heart stopped beating for a good few seconds. I won’t say who it was, for fear of getting into trouble, but it was a company that I have worked for previously, who I had a very bad experience of touring with. As have some of my friends. Needless to say, I won’t be applying to go back. Swines. That was enough to halt my search for the evening.
Tuesday: Tuesday was a very lazy day for me. I had every intention of getting up and learning my script, but did I? Of course not! Monday had completely zapped me of energy and I couldn’t find any motivation anywhere. I picked up my script, only to put it down again 5 minutes later, I didn’t even learn one page. Shocking. I even found it difficult to get motivated for Fame singing rehearsal that night, and that always cheers me up. Not on Tuesday though. I quickly visited my brother after rehearsal, and was appalled to see that he has already put his Christmas tree up! 13th November! No! Christmas decorations should go up on December 1st at the very earliest! That boy!!
I stumbled home and opened up my emails to find one new email in my party inbox. There was going to be an extra guest at this weekend’s party. This was fine for me, more money headed my way, but one problem showed its angry head… I didn’t have enough party bags! Last week I had counted out just enough for everyone and was feeling incredibly smug, but now that had come back to bit me on the behind. I had to come up with a plan. I could cobble together half a party bag, and buy something a little bit extra for the birthday girl for her bag! Sorted! Crisis averted.
My work email also had an email waiting for me… We finally had our final cast member to play Max! Huzzah! Now I really had to do some work!
Wednesday: Also known as shoot day! I was off to Birmingham to be a rabbit! I wasn’t due on set until 3, so I had a lazy morning just packing my bag, which didn’t happen on lazy Tuesday! 2 not so fragrant trains and a short taxi ride later, I arrived at the house where we would be shooting. It was a lovely little holiday home in the centre of Birmingham, but it looked like it should belong in the middle of the countryside. (Which was what was desired, as it was our rabbit house!) The crew had decorated the set by the time I had arrived, and everywhere had leaves and twigs and little touches that made it look like a proper rabbit home! I made my way up to the top floor of the house where the make-up lady, director, and the man playing my rabbit husband were located. After a quick hello, I was straight into the make-up chair being transformed! I had a mask stuck to my face, latex added so it looked like it blended in with my face, and lashings of face paint. There was no mirror in front of me, so I had no idea what I looked like, but people kept popping into the room and saying how good it looked. Once I was finished, I took a photo of myself and was quite startled, I wasn’t as cute as I thought I would be, but that’s not what was needed. Once I had put my rabbit ears and my costume on, it looked pretty amazing!
While Father rabbit was having his mask applied, I was taken downstairs (making my way down on my bottom as the ceilings were too small to accommodate my rabbit ears!) into the kitchen to do a few shots by myself. This involved chopping carrots. I’m not the best person in the world at chopping food up anyway, but for the camera angles they wanted, I had to chop them left handed. I am not left handed! I went through several carrots and a few takes before I managed to chop sufficiently without pieces of carrot flying all over the kitchen. I hoped this was as stressful as it would get.
Matt came down after being bunny-fied and we were able to get on with the main shot. We had a sequence of events set around the breakfast table, going along in our happy rabbit ways, until something startles us. There were no lines so it was pretty simple to remember and get on with. Take one went a treat. Unfortunately, during the rest of the takes, a protest march was going on over the road, and various people were hurling abuse at each other in the streets and making a lot of noise. We had to carry on, but it was quite distracting working against it. I think we coped well enough.
We had a break for some food, which turned out to be a more difficult task than anticipated, With my mask on, I had to constantly lift it up to get my food anywhere near my mouth,, while trying not to rip it off my face! Food done, we headed back down to do the same thing again from different angles. And then it was death time! This was pretty easy for me, all I had to do was lie down on the floor and pretend to be dead! We did the scene in 2 takes, job done. While we de-bunnied, the crew packed up their kit and moved out of the house. I was staying there for the night, and as soon as everyone left, I had the feeling that I didn’t really want to be there on my own after all. It was quite creepy, so I put a film on and decided to watch it until I could keep my eyes open no longer, before running to the bedroom and falling straight to sleep. It had been a good day, I was exhausted again.
Thursday: I woke up on Thursday bright and early so that I could hand the house keys back and catch my train home. As I approached the train station I chuckled to myself. I spotted a poster that stated “Crime is going down in Birmingham”. It hadn’t looked like it the day before when upon exiting the station, there were two people being arrested right in front of my eyes! I bought myself a magazine and made my way to the appropriate platform, after noting the extortionate price of 30p to use the toilet, and began watching a fat pigeon waddle as if he were dancing. He seemed to be having a good day. It took me the whole of my journey home to get through my magazine, and despite it making the journey much more enjoyable, I was annoyed at myself for neglecting my script again. I had packed it specifically so that I could learn lines on the train. Did I? Again the answer is no. Fool. I’m going to be sacked!
A quick sandwich later, and I was back out of the house again, and on my way to watch two of my lovely friends in a college performance of the play ‘Two’. They also had a physical theatre piece after this that I stayed to watch too. I’m normally not a fan of college shows, but I was really swept up in it, and not just because of the people that I knew in it, some of them that I didn’t know were fantastic! As much as I enjoyed ‘Two’, their physical theatre section was phenomenal. There were perhaps about 30 words spoken and the rest was done to music. I almost cried at one point because it was so emotional! Good job guys! Fantastic!
I spent the evening with the other half watching the new episode of ‘Elementary’. It really Is growing on me!
Friday: Friday rolled around quicker than I thought and brought with it a great deal of stress. I had lots of things to do, including sorting out the rogue party bag for Saturday. Of course with this being my life, I decided to stay in bed and watch the latest episodes of ‘Glee’ and ‘New Girl’ before getting angry at the world. My parents were also going away that day so I waited until they had left and got to work. I received a new script for ‘The Wild Things’ so I furiously printed that out, as well as some more treats, to be revealed at a later date. After jumping in the shower to remove the final pieces of rabbit from my face, I stupidly decided to use a hairdryer and gave myself an afro. Not my finest look. I sped to Tesco to buy something for the birthday girl, and picked myself up a cheeky alcoholic beverage for the weekend. I sensed I’d need it. After Tesco came a quick trip into town to pop a cheque in the bank, I also managed to grab another Christmas present off my list! I’m almost finished! Huzzah! After racing around like a mad woman, I had one hour to learn my lines for my ‘Fame’ rehearsal. They didn’t go in. As soon as it came to the troublesome scene that just won’t stay in my head, they were gone. But rehearsal flew by, and I could finally relax with a glass of bubbly alcohol. Before I went to bed I gathered together all of what I would need for the princess party. What did I find? A spare party bag! Grrr!!
Saturday: Saturday went a lot smoother than I had anticipated. As I had already prepared everything in advance, I was ready in plenty of time and could chill out before the madness of the rest of the day. I arrived at the birthday girls house at 1.30, ready for a 2pm start. She was very excited and was running around the house like a complete loon! Her guests took a while to arrive, but once they were all there, we played games and everyone had fun. After they had eaten, her dad brought out her birthday cake. As everyone sang to her, she suddenly screamed “I don’t like singing!” and burst into tears! I was trying so hard not to laugh at her! It was her party and she’d cry if she wanted to!!
Party done, and I had a quick pit stop at home before on to my next job of the day. The murder mystery! It was the same story and character that I had played in the last two that I’ve done so I knew what to expect. I didn’t know the other two actors, but they were lovely and we all had a good night, despite finishing 45 minutes later than planned. The hotel never gets it right!! I didn’t get too many difficult questions asked of me, and only 1 out of the 5 tables guessed correctly that I was the murderer. I successfully put the rest of them onto the other female characters trail!
I was absolutely shattered when I got home, and happily climbed into bed to watch ‘Merlin’ with my second alcoholic beverage of the weekend, careful!!
Sunday: And so we come to Sunday. I awoke at the hour of ten, had breakfast and cleaned the whole house before my parents got back from their weekend away. I didn’t have too much time in the house on my own to enjoy it, but it was nice to not have to creep around the house like a mouse with everyone’s different sleeping patterns. They made my cleaning worth my while by bringing me back some Bakewell tarts from the real Bakewell(!) and a lovely candle. Aaw! There was a small time frame for me to look at their photos before I had to leave to have my headshot taken for the ‘Fame’ programme as well as a small rehearsal while we were waiting. I was hoping that my headshot would be good enough to use as my professional headshot for a while, but my face wasn’t playing!
And here we are now! Blog writing! I’ve been back for almost 2 hours and I still haven’t looked at that pesky script! There are 17 hours to go before rehearsals start, take away my sleeping and travel time, plus time to watch the Strictly Come Dancing results and I probably have about an hour to cram all of my lines in! I suppose I should take a little bit of time out to prepare for being told off too!! Haha!
Next week, prepare for a wild read, we begin tomorrow at ten! See ya!
Nxxx
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