Remember

As I get further along into acting, I find myself confronted more and more with the necessity of memorizing. For live performances and for the screen, I have found it necessary to memorize not just lines, but actions and positions. It is challenging, although I find that it is within my ability. Even in improv comedy, it has sometimes been necessary. In one form of improv, called the Armando, one must pluck details from a story and create scenes from them. It can be rather hard to remember those details.

In scripted acting, I have had my fair share of lines to learn. Doing my one man show, there was twenty minutes of uninterrupted material, but I was lucky enough to be memorizing my own material, and so I had a considerable margin for error. If I were to have forgotten lines and improvised new ones in order to cover my mistake, who would have been to say that I had failed to deliver my lines as intended? Perhaps I had done a last-minute re-write.

To Eat And Reminisce

I was thinking, with something yet to be written for this blog today, about a restaurant that my school friends and I used to go to for lunch. Maybe I've written about this already, but I don't check anymore, so desperate am I now regularly to fulfill my obligations to myself. Anyway, this was when I was attending a rather informally-arranged school that had broken away from a marginally more conventional charter school. Things were kind of loose.

We went through a few evolutions even in the time I was at this school, which survived my departure more easily than it did that of its lone original teacher. At first, we were meeting in an office park, and ate lunch at its little cafe. We also, it seems to me, ate at a Schlotzky's, which was a sandwich place. I recall eating at a donut place, which doesn't exactly make for a very conventional lunch, I'll admit. As I said, thinks were loose.

Remember

There is a scene in 'Twelve Angry Men' where one juror is questioned by another on his activities of the past several days in order to prove the point that it is often difficult to do so. I have seen the movie plenty of times (and don't imagine I could stand it even one more time) but that point never really hit home, although I basically found it true. Perhaps then my events calendar was too easy to keep track of, and I was then perhaps more possessed of a sound mind in matters of memory.

I recently made the effort to remember what I had done each of the past seven days, the purpose of this being to dredge a few ideas that I might be able to write about for this very blog. I started off well enough, recalling fairly well what I had done that day and the day before. It continued to come in fits and starts, but before I was three-quarters of the way there, I began to blank. I haven't been insanely busy. I've merely had an ordinary (by my standards; by those of others, maybe even sub-ordinary) week.