6 days to lift off

So I still haven't looked at the kit list which is frankly disgraceful and will I'm sure come back to haunt me at some point. To redeem myself slightly in your eyes, yesterday, I sought out a breakfast so healthy I thought my heart was going to stop with the shock. Now everyone this side of Hadrian's wall with half an ear and half an eye on whats going on in the media knows we're supposed to be eating 5 portions of fruit and veg a day. Well, if you trust me not to poison you -which you shouldn't mwahahah - here is the way I dubiously managed to do it:

ingredients:

1 x can of peaches
1/3 x mango
2 x pears
ice to taste

1. so you take the ice which you prepared several hours earlier blue peter stylie and smash the hell out of it. Then chuck it in the blender.


2. open can of peaches. chuck ALL of the grape juice and 1/2 of the peaches into the blender
   


3. Try as hard as you can to hack the flesh off of a mango without loosing any of your fingers.


4. celebrate that all your digits are in tact


5. skin and quarter the pears. *Warning* unlike any other fruit they blush when they are naked.


6. add all the lovely stuff to the blender


7. press 'on'


8. get into an argument with the dog who is convinced because it makes a whirring sound that it is another dog. Bigger than her.


9. pour some into a cup. Lacking one of those any other vessel that can serve as a drinking device is good. A shoe will do.


10. prepare the smug look you will give everybody else that attempts to use the kitchen as you shrug casually and say 'Nah its not from a carton, I made it fresh myself.' Even though they didn't ask and on hearing this, don't much care.

If you you do manage to survive a sip of this please let me know -there are 3 people currently lying very still on my kitchen floor with my dog nibbling on their toes. Don't mind too much myself, I'm quite a hospitable person but my twin keeps reminding me that for legal reasons I need to work out whether it was my food preparation or the vitamins reacting with their medication that got them...

With all that goodness now in my stomach, it was sort of inevitable that I would spend the first part of rehearsal being a bit of a dick, playing a 3D version of Mario Kart with Erina using a chair stacking thingy we found in the corner. Was fun though. Once we'd calmed down I proceeded to bore Dan P'vic, Sarah and Erina silly by living up to my cinematic name and relaying the life and times of Orson Welles. What? I can't help it if he was a bit of a dude. To prove myself right and a little less egotistically, in order to live up to a promise I made to my aforementioned friends, here is one of many little gems involving the actor, director and raconteur that I was talking about:

Lunch made me smile -despite it being a mammoth task to assemble - thanks to my free nandos 1/4 chicken, my Sainsbury's salad, my Doubledecker choccy bar and can of ice cold coke - I haven't left the primrose path just yet - and stellar company. Which reminds me to shout good luck at the top of my digital voice to Becca who had a big audition yesterday evening which we were talking about over lunch.


After the remainder of rehearsal we just had to get ourselves home. Which sounds easy enough but we were all so tired after a good hard days work that we'd lost one of our 3 dimensions. Still things are really starting to take shape now.





here's some more stuff wot we did:

Us in action in the belly of the beast:
My persepective from the completely-safe-not-remotely-disruptive
chair stacker ride:Murugan using his x-ray vision
on Dan:
Murugan, Spirit and Daniel. Aaawwww:

Dunja, Phoenix and Spirit at Alk Far Station:

View from the DLR. Sun puts London City Airport to bed:

Until next time

Peace out

The Celluloid Kid

7 days to go....

Okay so yesterday we saw the sets for the first time at this slightly surreal place right in the heart of east London called Trinity Buoy Wharf. The fact that it was one of the wackiest places Id ever seen made up for the non stop rain and the slightly unappetising toilets. To start with there are a series of shipping containers-come-houses stacked one on top of another in a corner of the court yard. There is a boat located right in the middle of our workshop - yes, you heard me - and a micro climate which would see polar bears evolve to leave the womb with woolly hats on.

Nonetheless, I found room for a hot dog at the diner - American style so the bread was so full of sugar it tasted like a sausage, kraft cheese and onion croissant -and way too many cans of fizzy drink. One of these days im going to give up anything with the letters K and A written on it. Even if it's flavour is Karribean Kola or Black Grape. So if you do see me in a few weeks time carrying an axe and walking like a zombie you'll know why.

In order to stay warm Becca, Jared, Sarah and I decided to hide away in the diner to devise amid the giant bottles of ketchup and mustard and a mini juke box. We managed to be quite productive - which was either down to a 'secret' ingredient in the Earl Grey or Becca' s strength in the face of an almighty hangover - but getting our ideas on their feet in the actual performance space for the first time was really quite rewarding. We even finished half an hour early so that I could roll back into bed at 1 o clock and watch the latest episode of South Park. All in a days work people. All in a days work.



The sort of house that looks like
it escaped from a nursery rhyme:

In case anyone was wondering

what an East London American

diner would look like in the rain...

well...yeah...thats it:
Operation go devise:

The worlds strangest workshop:

peace out

The Celluloid Kid

8 days and counting....

The thing about me is that I am a germ freak. Can't stand them. The fact that I had to spend half an hour first thing this morning on the DLR, beside a man who seemed completely incapable of bringing his hand to his mouth, meant that I was never really going to start the day in anything other than Saturday morning mode. Luckily for me I was not the only one with the weekend morning blues and as soon as I got to reception had my good buddies Sinister, Spirit, Becca and Erina to cheer me up.

Today was a pretty mess free day as rehearsals at the Roundhouse go. Without wanting to give too much away, lets just say we are encouraged to get very interactive with the material and the past couple of months of creativity have been unlike any I've ever known. We are lucky little things as we are in the great hands of staff Emma and David (who runs his own live performance company 'Shunt'). This means that for every bead of sweat, there are at least three laughs - its true. I've counted - and time seems like its flown by really fast. In other words after the stress of auditions and umpteen weeks of work, Glastonbury festival the great stage (or field) on which our work will be performed is only a little over a week away. This leaves very little time to get a tent but plenty of time to panic about it.

But in true theatrical fashion, we decided to allay all signs of a hissy fit with some drama games. Fun times ensued. There were about 10 of us today in all. After the sun salutations led with lots of flexibility (literally) by Dani, we played this instantly-comprehensible-not-remotely-weird version of duck duck goose. The way it works is that every one takes the name of a fish (cod, haddock etc) and then some one else runs around the perimeter of the circle yelling 'The sea is agitated, the sea is agitated!' with graceful liquid like arm movements. It was quite something when we got it down. In my humble opinion, only Selina who taught us the game was able to remain cool and calm looking whilst pulling it off. She made it look like an art. But what is it they say? if you're shy about looking stupid in public you're not an actor.

The rest of the day was spent finalising content, trying pieces of costume, dashing between the Camden branches of Nandos and KFC in search of the best chicken fillet burger -we are victims of the most sophisticated pallets-and almost walking head first into fashion designer Henry Holland at Chalk Farm station on the way home (although from the puzzled looks on everyones faces, seems I'm the only one who reads Vogue. Sad times.)

All in all today was much fun despite the slightly disappointing turn out. Hope those that were poorly are good little thesps and drink their hot Ribena so that we can 'Wooh-Haa' them all again soon. Now I'm off to try and figure out what this so called 'tent' contraption is. They sound kind of handy. And water proof.

Peace out from the Plaice

The Celluloid Kid

Micheal with the present his mum gave him aged 7. Nowadays they live in the attic next to the Polaroid so we were all very privileged to see them.

Boeing 7 4 Emma: 99% of the time she's concentrating intently and is really on the ball. 1% of the time...not so much.

Daniel outside Sainsbury's being his bad self. And Armed.