Clonopin is a Beautiful Thing

We are in London. What the heck am I doing blogging? I am on my way to Harvey Nick's after a gorgeous stroll through Kensington Gardens.

I have been in London for two hours and am loving it. The cab drive from the train station was surreal, because he dropped me off on the wrong street, though it has the same name as the street we are staying. Huh?

Luckily, I have been medicating my sleep with a lovely cocktail of Clonopin and Sonata, so the anti-anxiety effects of the former have carried on during the day.

So the festival is over and I have such a sense of post partum.

BUT WE'RE IN LONDON, BABY!

It was a mixed experience, mostly wonderful for us. We had a great time with our cast and director, as well as our colleagues and friends from BMI. Having our Dads there added tremendously - in a lot of ways, they acted like our agents. They even took some of our business cards and demo CDs and were going to stroll around Cardiff hawking for an audience.

The audience is the locus of most of our disappointment. Teh black box theatre was never quite full, and the first two performances had tepid audiences, though an inordinate amount of people responded quite well to the show, comign up to us or our director. We have a few meetings tomorrow and maybe can set some up for later in the week.

BUT I AM IN LONDON

Yesterday was the best performance of all of the shows in our programme and the most enthusiastic audience for Like You Like It. It felt great to visit this show again and have a great time with it again and have all these people, who have never seen it before, love it. It reminded us why we have been toiling at its wheel.

Will something happen with it? I don;t know. On Friday afternoon, when the audience was NOT LAUGHING and fumbling in their seats, I thought I made a big stinky and why did I come all this way (both literally and metaphorically), but it subsided. Again, Clonopin is a wonderful thing.

Cardiff is a great compact city. The Welsh are not very good at giving directions and estimating distances. Dan and I have been travelling with our Dads, who are not as fast-paced as we are, so when you hear (in a think Welsh accent) that "it's only up a pace" and find yourself a mile down the road walking and exhausted, it can be a problem.

Our landlady is so kind - she did our laundry and IRONED Dan's shirts! It was cool to come hom eto all of our clothes drying everywhere along the three stories of the house - on radiators, racks, rails, etc. We got to hear quite a bit about her family. Dan's Dad felt ill one day, and she drove him and Dan to the doctor. What is the Welsh word for Mensch?

The Welsh word for exit, by the way is my Dad's name, Alan (though they of course mispell it with two L's - lots of double-L'ing in Welsh - and I think it is a vowel...)

We had some dining adventures =- not as exciting as the Haggis moment, bu some good cuisine. Service, however, um.

Yeah.

We ordered starters as our main courses and some of us ordered main courses and the waiter AND manager could not seem to understand the concept. In this society that does not rely too heavily on tips, now we know why. Ironically, at a pub (where you usually get NO service), we got great service./ Of course, it was my Dad who went up to the bar to sweet-talk a woman into serving us.

We had Indian food twice in a 18-hour period in Wales. AMAZING.

One thing I must say about the currency here other than the obvious "DAYAM IT'S 'SPENSIVE" is because one pound comes only in coins, you can go through them like pennies. Like a two-dollar penny.

I have been fairly responsible financially for the last ten days, but now

I AM IN LONDON.

Most important plans:

Get a shave on Fleet Street.
Go to the Tower of London and sing Gilbert & Sullivan "Yeomen of the Guard" songs to myself
Harrods
And as soon as I post, Harvey Nick's. I hear it is, pardon the pub, Absolutely Fabulous.

Dan is meeting me later at our BnB. Our accomodations have only gotten better and better. We are however on the FIFTH FLOOR without an elevator - I didn;t have to travel 3500 miles for that. Though here in London at our BnB there is no slope in the floor nor does the roof leak, so that is a plus.

Dan has some amazing stills from teh show. Between him, our Dads and me, we must have 1000 photos. I'll post some when we get back - or maybe we will have some time over the next few days to download and post.

Yeah, right. Time?

WE ARE IN LONDON!

Okay, I must go explore...




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