Today, I made out with a 21-year-old girl and then beat the hell out of her.
We begin this post in medias res, so that first line might be a little confusing. Let me explain.
No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
Technically speaking, I made out with a dude, and then beat the hell out of him. But it's cool. I'm from the future, and we do that stuff there.
I feel that I am not really helping you understand yet.
Today, in the stage combat class that I have been taking, I rehearsed a carefully choreographed fistfight with my scene partner, who is a 21-year-old theatre student at Towson University. We are rehearsing (among others) a fight scene from the BBC television program(me) Torchwood, in which two men who happen to be from the future (where coarse 21st Century labels like "straight" and "gay" are antiquated concepts) meet up in a bar and spend a few minutes reliving an erstwhile passionate and tempestuous relationship by alternating between playing tonsil hockey and brutally smashing one another through the furniture.
There, that's got it all cleared up, and nobody should have to read that paragraph more than once to achieve complete mastery of the circumstances.
Now that we're done with the exposition, I can get along to the actual post!
The stage combat class is a lot of fun. I've been driving to Towson University (north side of Baltimore, MD) nearly every Saturday and Sunday for the last four months to learn how to safely perform fights on stage that look convincing to the audience. I'm learning techniques in unarmed combat, knife fighting, and the good old rapier/dagger combination, and if I succeed in passing the Skills Proficiency Tests in those three disciplines this coming Sunday, I will have achieved Actor/Combatant Status, a classification bestowed by the Society of American Fight Directors that lets casting directors know they won't have to spend as much time and money on training me for fight scenes as they will on that other sucker who's auditioning for the role. In short, I'm play-fighting every weekend, and it might actually help me get a role or two the next time I pretend to be an actor.
I've already explained the unarmed fight scene I'm doing for my test. I am also doing a knife scene from the movie Rebel Without A Cause with the same partner. She gets to be James Dean, and if that's not emasculating enough, I think she might actually be carving off one of my nipples when she kills me at the end of the fight.
I am testing for rapier/dagger with another partner, doing a scene from Oscar Wilde's The Florentine Tragedy. My partner for this fight is not actually taking the class, but is a seasoned Actor/Combatant who is testing to renew his status. In other words, he knows how to do this, and he makes me look really good when we fight. I die in this one too, incidentally.
Other than the effort, expense and annoyance of having to drive to Baltimore twice every weekend, the only complaint I have with this class is only indirectly related to it. When we rehearse, we are working hard. We stretch for about 15 minutes before every class, and we just bust our asses for 4 hours each day. And it's usually in a warm room, with a few dozen warm bodies pumping out the BTUs, and I am a cuddly fat guy. Add to this the side effects from my otherwise wonderful prescription brain candy, and I end up sweating so much it looks like somebody's wrung me out like a damp towel.
I usually don't mind this, and I play it off with subtle comedy, like referring to myself as a cuddly fat guy. But my partner for most of my scenes just loves to complain loudly about the sweat, and then later mention that she's only kidding when I start to get a little annoyed and/or self-conscious. My willingness to tolerate this diminishes rapidly every class.
It has also caused me to re-evaluate my whole brain candy situation. I started taking this prescription for anxiety issues while I was in the middle of my miserable, stressful, ill-fated semester of law school. I definitely like the results I get from the pills: it's a lot easier now for me to be who I want to be. I don't get frustrated or embarrassed nearly as easily as I used to, and I actually can talk to a pretty girl now without immediately turning into Rain Man.
But, the pills are expensive, and there's that stupid sweating thing. So maybe I can at least get on a lower dose or something. I'll write more on this as events develop, assuming any of these developing events are as interesting as my excessive sweating problem.
Aren't you so glad you read my LiveJournal?
I think I'll wrap up for the night by actually expressing the thought that I wanting to write about in the first place.
The girl who is my scene partner for the kissing/brawling scene is cute, imaginative and excitable, but she is a very special episode who probably has more severe ADD than I do. Yes, I am also surprised that somebody could have worse ADD, but I have to get her attention with something shiny every few minutes, and hey, do you want to go ride bikes?
So we started to work the kissing into our scene for the first time today, which I was looking forward to. A cute girl is a cute girl, even if she's 21 as hell. The first few attempts ended up with the both of us breaking into laughter several times (I am just going to tell myself that she was laughing for the same reasons I was, and that is how it shall be written in the scrolls). I was actually pretty nervous, because I'm usually a narrator or a clown or something in plays, not the romantic lead. Go figure. So I've never actually done a scene with a kiss in it, and I was worried that it'd be awkward. Turned out not to be a big deal, really. But something felt a little weird.
Even though I have spent the last paragraph laying the groundwork for a fantastic series of jokes based in our finest traditions of ribald and bawdy humor, that's not where I'm going here.
Now that I've had the day to think about it, I know what felt weird. I have never actually kissed a girl who wasn't there before. Maybe it's because we're just acting and everything's fake, or because she doesn't dig me at all, but it just feels off. We're playing this part of the scene in a very over-the-top fashion, and she's all but climbing me like a jungle gym (relax, the kiss itself is actually closed-lips and very tame), but there's just no response in the kiss itself. Maybe it's only the limited size of my sample group, but in the past when I have kissed a girl I have been able to feel her respond from her lips all the way down to her feet. It's like the difference between actually flying a plane and playing a flight simulator game. All the same concepts are in play, but it just feels different.
I have just realized that I don't have any idea where I'm going with this line of thought. So I'm just going to stop here for now, and maybe the peanut gallery will have some clever insight.
Oh, and if any of you happen to be in the Baltimore area next Sunday morning, you should come see the class do our fight tests. There are some really great scenes. And did I mention that I get to make out with a little girl and then beat the crap out of her? It's gonna be awesome!
We begin this post in medias res, so that first line might be a little confusing. Let me explain.
No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
Technically speaking, I made out with a dude, and then beat the hell out of him. But it's cool. I'm from the future, and we do that stuff there.
I feel that I am not really helping you understand yet.
Today, in the stage combat class that I have been taking, I rehearsed a carefully choreographed fistfight with my scene partner, who is a 21-year-old theatre student at Towson University. We are rehearsing (among others) a fight scene from the BBC television program(me) Torchwood, in which two men who happen to be from the future (where coarse 21st Century labels like "straight" and "gay" are antiquated concepts) meet up in a bar and spend a few minutes reliving an erstwhile passionate and tempestuous relationship by alternating between playing tonsil hockey and brutally smashing one another through the furniture.
There, that's got it all cleared up, and nobody should have to read that paragraph more than once to achieve complete mastery of the circumstances.
Now that we're done with the exposition, I can get along to the actual post!
The stage combat class is a lot of fun. I've been driving to Towson University (north side of Baltimore, MD) nearly every Saturday and Sunday for the last four months to learn how to safely perform fights on stage that look convincing to the audience. I'm learning techniques in unarmed combat, knife fighting, and the good old rapier/dagger combination, and if I succeed in passing the Skills Proficiency Tests in those three disciplines this coming Sunday, I will have achieved Actor/Combatant Status, a classification bestowed by the Society of American Fight Directors that lets casting directors know they won't have to spend as much time and money on training me for fight scenes as they will on that other sucker who's auditioning for the role. In short, I'm play-fighting every weekend, and it might actually help me get a role or two the next time I pretend to be an actor.
I've already explained the unarmed fight scene I'm doing for my test. I am also doing a knife scene from the movie Rebel Without A Cause with the same partner. She gets to be James Dean, and if that's not emasculating enough, I think she might actually be carving off one of my nipples when she kills me at the end of the fight.
I am testing for rapier/dagger with another partner, doing a scene from Oscar Wilde's The Florentine Tragedy. My partner for this fight is not actually taking the class, but is a seasoned Actor/Combatant who is testing to renew his status. In other words, he knows how to do this, and he makes me look really good when we fight. I die in this one too, incidentally.
Other than the effort, expense and annoyance of having to drive to Baltimore twice every weekend, the only complaint I have with this class is only indirectly related to it. When we rehearse, we are working hard. We stretch for about 15 minutes before every class, and we just bust our asses for 4 hours each day. And it's usually in a warm room, with a few dozen warm bodies pumping out the BTUs, and I am a cuddly fat guy. Add to this the side effects from my otherwise wonderful prescription brain candy, and I end up sweating so much it looks like somebody's wrung me out like a damp towel.
I usually don't mind this, and I play it off with subtle comedy, like referring to myself as a cuddly fat guy. But my partner for most of my scenes just loves to complain loudly about the sweat, and then later mention that she's only kidding when I start to get a little annoyed and/or self-conscious. My willingness to tolerate this diminishes rapidly every class.
It has also caused me to re-evaluate my whole brain candy situation. I started taking this prescription for anxiety issues while I was in the middle of my miserable, stressful, ill-fated semester of law school. I definitely like the results I get from the pills: it's a lot easier now for me to be who I want to be. I don't get frustrated or embarrassed nearly as easily as I used to, and I actually can talk to a pretty girl now without immediately turning into Rain Man.
But, the pills are expensive, and there's that stupid sweating thing. So maybe I can at least get on a lower dose or something. I'll write more on this as events develop, assuming any of these developing events are as interesting as my excessive sweating problem.
Aren't you so glad you read my LiveJournal?
I think I'll wrap up for the night by actually expressing the thought that I wanting to write about in the first place.
The girl who is my scene partner for the kissing/brawling scene is cute, imaginative and excitable, but she is a very special episode who probably has more severe ADD than I do. Yes, I am also surprised that somebody could have worse ADD, but I have to get her attention with something shiny every few minutes, and hey, do you want to go ride bikes?
So we started to work the kissing into our scene for the first time today, which I was looking forward to. A cute girl is a cute girl, even if she's 21 as hell. The first few attempts ended up with the both of us breaking into laughter several times (I am just going to tell myself that she was laughing for the same reasons I was, and that is how it shall be written in the scrolls). I was actually pretty nervous, because I'm usually a narrator or a clown or something in plays, not the romantic lead. Go figure. So I've never actually done a scene with a kiss in it, and I was worried that it'd be awkward. Turned out not to be a big deal, really. But something felt a little weird.
Even though I have spent the last paragraph laying the groundwork for a fantastic series of jokes based in our finest traditions of ribald and bawdy humor, that's not where I'm going here.
Now that I've had the day to think about it, I know what felt weird. I have never actually kissed a girl who wasn't there before. Maybe it's because we're just acting and everything's fake, or because she doesn't dig me at all, but it just feels off. We're playing this part of the scene in a very over-the-top fashion, and she's all but climbing me like a jungle gym (relax, the kiss itself is actually closed-lips and very tame), but there's just no response in the kiss itself. Maybe it's only the limited size of my sample group, but in the past when I have kissed a girl I have been able to feel her respond from her lips all the way down to her feet. It's like the difference between actually flying a plane and playing a flight simulator game. All the same concepts are in play, but it just feels different.
I have just realized that I don't have any idea where I'm going with this line of thought. So I'm just going to stop here for now, and maybe the peanut gallery will have some clever insight.
Oh, and if any of you happen to be in the Baltimore area next Sunday morning, you should come see the class do our fight tests. There are some really great scenes. And did I mention that I get to make out with a little girl and then beat the crap out of her? It's gonna be awesome!