Play Full

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Had my playwriting class this morning and had trouble falling asleep b/c I wasn't sure how I would get my two pieces printed up in time for a 10 a.m. class. Woke up before the alarm at 6:45 and ran to buy burnable CDs and then copied the pieces and made it downtown and went to Kinko's and $9 later, everything was fine, except for that I should mention there are a plethora of homeless people on Market Street around 9 a.m. any Saturday, including a slighly off-kilter woman who appeared to have moved herself into the foray of Kinko's (she had stacks of bags piled there) and was walking around the store clutching folders and yellow legal pads. An academic gone awry? A fired novelist? Shortly after that, I saw an old woman outside of Macy's wearing fashionable grey knit tights with a hole in the knee staring outward as though she were listening intently to an inner monologue. She had painted bright red lipstick around the perimter of her mouth. Not actually on her lips, but more like in the vicinty of them.

Class was good though there is lots and lots of talking about things unrelated to theater including what it's like to be a fireman. The cute fourteen year old boy (gay? straight? He looks like my high school crush, Rob Dittmer, except with larger mouth and he wore a sweater vest) appeared again and we read his piece; I got to play the part of the French whore who said things like "Please to touch my labia." I think he was trying to go for a kind of tongue in cheek parody of Euro trash chic with a dash of Camus. My two scenes went received better than I expected. For next week, the assignment is to put two characters together and one of them lights a cigarette and then gets yelled at buy a foreigner. Where should they be? A funeral home? A hospital wing? Church? How will I escape writing something completely xenophobic? "It would please me if you were to put out your cigarette now. Onto the ground."

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