Exploring Louisville

Life has settled into a sort of rhythm here, with weeks that are long but overall pleasant. We’re making steady progress in rehearsal, and I’m getting a little more of a feel for my place in the order of things. I’m definitely more comfortable in the reherasal room than I was the first week, though I still have moments of feeling a little bit out of my depth.

I still have a fuzzy grasp of what day of the week it is sometimes since we have rehearsal on the weekends the same as the rest of the week, but I worked weekends at home as well so it’s not been too hard to get used to. Mondays have been glorious days–or at least this past Monday was (the Monday before that was less glorious in that it involved grocery shopping and getting caught in a thunderstorm, but it was still a fairly relaxing day off).

This Monday I spent the morning hanging about the house, but in the afternoon I had the sudden feeling that if I stayed inside another minute I’d go mad, so I went a-wandering.

I wish I had taken more pictures, because the places that I wandered ended up being quite pretty. First I went up to the river and visited Waterfront Park and just sat in the grass for a bit, which was so lovely–I forgot how much I had missed trees and grass and unobstructed sky living amongst city streets and buildings. Louisville’s tall buildings are not terribly abundant, but they’re enough to make me appreciate the park. Plus it was nice to be able to just lie in the grass with absolutely no timetable or list of things to do–I moved on when I started getting hungry and the sun was having a hiatus behind some clouds.

The other stop on my mini-tour of as-yet-unexplored Louisville was East Market Street, in a part of town called NuLu (I assume short for New Louisville). It’s a very hipster-ish sort of place, but in a way that was quite pleasing. A lot of the places were closed on Mondays (SAD DAY IT’S MY ONLY DAY OFF GUYS WHY) but I wandered in and out of some neat antique/vintage/vintage-inspired shops and “green” shops with fair-trade and environmentally friendly things. One of the shops had this beautiful patio in the back that was straight out of a magazine:

But my favorite places I visited on my jaunt were the last two:

• Please and Thank You, the perfect coffee shop (except for its unfortunate distance from EVERYWHERE), in that it has excellent coffee and chocolate chip cookies, great decor, and is also a record shop. Just sitting at the little table by the window with my thick mug of coffee made me feel writer-ly and creative.
• Taco Punk, a sort of indie-Chipotle that serves tacos made with fresh, delicious corn tortillas and really excellent chips. It’s actually probably a good thing that this place is not an easy distance from my apartment. I would go there all the time.

It was refreshing to get a chance to explore Louisville beyond the fairly narrow radius I frequent on a daily basis, and also to see a side of the city I hadn’t seen yet–I don’t miss driving, but I do miss the level of mobility it gave me, especially since the bus system here is not the greatest for the places I want to go/times I want to go there. So it was nice to have the time to wander farther afield, knowing that I had no obligations and more than enough time to get back home, even it did take over 45 minutes.

I’ll leave you with one last image of the wall outside a tiny (closed) art gallery on Market Street. I love interactive art like this, and this one was a cool concept:

 

The longer I’m here definitely a lot more to this city  than meets the eye. I can’t wait to explore more and see what else Louisville has to offer.

First day in rehearsal!

The problem with only having Mondays off is that I’m already losing track of what day it is, which is problematic when you need to know what you’re doing at work tomorrow. Yesterday I thought it was Monday, and the day before I thought it was Sunday, or maybe Tuesday and I’m just all sorts of turned around right now. But now that we’ve started rehearsals, I think things should fall into a rhythm and hopefully it will be easier to keep track.

We started rehearsals for Noises Off today, which was both awesome and it’s own strange brand of overwhelming. We’ve been prepping all the past week for the start of rehearsals, so we were all set to go. The first thing on the agenda was a “meet and greet”, which I had thought would be just the cast and production team all going around and saying hi and who they were and all that. It turned out to be EVERYONE – the cast, production team, costumes, props, lights, sound, marketing, development, a few volunteers, and all the apprentices. There were a lot of people in that room, all talking, very few of whom I knew. It was loud and hot and I was kind of glad when it was over, but was also really cool to see just how many people were working to make the things we’re doing at Actors possible. And that wasn’t even everyone.

It was really cool to be in the rehearsal room of a professional show, seeing how things run here and how the actors work. Noises Off is not an easy play to read–there’s so much action going on all the time, and the second act is completely insane (a column of stage directions for what’s going on backstage next to a column of the dialogue that’s happening onstage), but even at this first readthrough it was already highly entertaining. I’m really looking forward to watching the actors and Meredith (the director) work, especially once we get on our feet and start actually blocking and moving around.

I’ve gotten used to working on shows where the stage management was just me, or me and one other person, so it was a bit strange being one of five, with actually very little to do in this first rehearsal besides listen. I took notes on some things, but our biggest job today was making sure the coffee stayed plentiful (there’s more an art to it than you might think, as we discovered). I know I will have things to do in the future (tracking props, among other things, including a multitude of plates of sardines), but having come from shows where I was stage managing, it’s sort of weird being back in the assistant position. I wouldn’t have it any other way, though–there’s so much for me to learn here. The process of putting up a show at a regional theatre is so different from the theatres I’ve worked at, simply because it’s such a big organization and there are so many more people involved. I’ve already picked up some new things, and I can’t wait to learn more as we go along in rehearsal.

Last week was really good, and a great introduction to the program and the theatre, but I’m so happy to be in rehearsal. Now it feels like my internship has really started!