Day 80

Happy 1: Acting Exercises. My Fine Arts class is attending the very last event of the semester tomorrow evening (sad face); Lookingglass Theatre is performing Peter Pan. It should be pretty fantastic. You really can't go wrong when it comes to Peter Pan and Neverland. One of the founders spoke to the class today about the theatre company and the play. As an actor, he was quite animated and definitely not boring. Much to our surprise, he made us do a series of acting exercises. The Hey Game - stand in a circle, one person runs across the circle to another person, jumps up, says "Hey!" and gives that person a two-handed high five, then the person that was approached runs to another person, eventually five different lines are going and it is utter madness. Freeze Frame - get in a group of five people (that I didn't know very well), given a word, silently make a scene representing that word in four seconds, then freeze. Sculpting - sculpt a partner (in my case a boy) into a form that represented a given word. My word was "perfect" so I had him hold a halo above his head and look angelic. Numbers and Sounds - with the same partner, turn and face each other, count to three  (I say one, you say two, I say three, you say one, I say two, you say three, you get the idea), but then we had to make up sounds and actions to take the place of each number. We were selected to do ours in front of the class (Doink, Plop, Holla!); numbers one and three were my creation. These were actually really good exercises for me. It helped me to loosen up a bit and not take myself so seriously.

Happy 2: Accordion Mike. In between classes I went downtown and came across Michael, the accordion player. Of course, I saw this as a prime opportunity for my Final Art Project. I stopped and asked him a few questions (he was not very talkative) and filmed him playing a song. When I bent down to place my donation (for his time and cooperation) in his accordion case, he grabbed it out of my hand and stuffed it in his pocket. Well, okay then.

Crappy: Lousy Neighborhood Presentation. My Practicum group gave our Hyde Park presentation today. The people in my group were very hard to work with because they all have strong personalities. I absolutely despise group projects. Rather than have someone else in the group do a crappy job, I generally take the leadership position. This time, however, I just threw up my hands and let them do what they were going to do. When we met on Monday to make a poster and put the final touches on the presentation, I had a good feeling about things. But when we gave the presentation today (which we gave four times because every group rotated rooms), they just read off boring facts and figures about their topics. Lame. I talked about religion in Hyde Park and had a good time with it. (I took Public Speaking last year and discovered that I kind of have a knack for it.) The people in my group were competent speakers but they did a lousy job picking out and presenting their material. And they didn't tie things together like I thought they would. Whatever, it's over and done. But this is why I lead group projects.