The End: A Year in Review
As the snow piles up SIGNIFICANTLY earlier than it was supposed to, I suppose I've got time to reflect a bit on the last year.
New Year's 2008 was spent at my apartment, hanging out with Tessier. Wasn't bad, was actually pretty relaxing. Not much notable about it, which I suppose makes it notable in its own right.
C Term 2008 found me getting a little (read: lot) deeper into club involvement. After a severely exhausting A and B Term with SFS drama, I found myself at the helm, having just been elected President. Awesome. As I watched the cabinet start to fill up, I got more and more excited. Hyde as my VP, Krissy as my Treasurer, Luther as my Secretary. Sweet. We had a meeting and pulled in Rhiannon and Sam as our Librarians, and Jansen as the newly-created Events Coordinator (evolved from the previous year's creation: GAC Head). We got new T-shirts (drawn up by an SFSer who's a rather popular artist on dA, as it turns out), we had two Gaming Weekends that were quite popular, and we had no shortage of smaller events running throughout the year. It's been a gas, but I have to admit, I'm more than a little relieved to be passing the golden coat to someone else for next year.
I started actually getting seriously into comedy, too. C Term I produced the longest Kilroy show to date, "Insert Coin to Continue" (including standup from myself, Luther, Soup, and Nakama), and then followed that up with being a part of the Empty Set movie "Comedy Wears a Tie". (Keep an eye out in C Term, we're working on remastering it and putting out DVDs -- potential for a third showing is pretty high). D Term swung around and I found myself sitting in the senatish spot of SCP Representative for Empty Set, and was selected as VP to Carol. I think we got a lot of good things done this year (still fixing the constitution, but hey). Also got to be a part of the Cambridge Union Society Debates, debating "The house believes we should weaponise space." A fun one, indeed. That same term, I co-produced the comedy festival, "Laughtrack: America Runs on Comedy", and was involved in six different facets of it. Summer came and I found myself sitting on a couch in front of a camera for most of my waking hours, but we'll get to that later in the post. Anyway, we've got big plans for the future, and I'm very excited about it. I think I may run for Empty Set Director/Producer/Representative this year. Probably gonna run for GI Producer too. Not to mention various stuffs in Kilroy. We'll see what happens.
And then there was theatre. Hoo boy. So, after being mostly sideline-guy, I started getting way more involved in C Term. I was the Soundboard Operator for "The Underpants", the C Term Masque show. Only three cues, but hey. Then came D Term. I found myself acting in Pavis's New Voices play, "Sudden Silence, Sudden Heat" across from Tanya. We made out, it was hot, people dug it. Anywho, on top of that, me and Hyde were Assistant Directors to Pavis for Amyface's play "The PUNisher: The Play". He needed two, the cast was 22 large. In addition to that, I was also the Director of Videography, in charge of filming various scenes going on solo, or in some cases simultaneous with the play. Amyface tagged me for possible work with this in the future, we'll see what happens there. Last but not least, I became the Masquot for Masque. Meaning I got to be the monkey telling jokes for a minute or two at the end of Masque meetings. Shaky at first, but I got better at it. Sunburns swung around in the summer, and I found myself playing the Narrator in "The Princess Bride". I got to tell the story. And throw puppets into thorns. Sick. In addition, me and Bebel wound up producing the "Sunburns Summer Showcase", a New Voices-esque festival of original one-act plays written, selected, directed, and produced in under six weeks. I wound up writing a play, "The Morning After" (let me tell you, it is hard to sit still and not dissolve into a pile of "ohgodwhy" goop watching your own work get produced -- Gouv did an amazing job directing it, I'm just embarrassed about my own writing), turging Aubrey's play "Discourses on a Girl", and acting in two of Bebel's plays, "Risk Analysis" and "Thinking of Going Home". Me and Soup made out, it was hot, people dug it. Also, I'm on Reid's hitlist. It happens. A Term came around and I wound up playing Comic Relief Guy #3, Jay, in Haz's original play, "Bower Bird aka Crazies in Love". Went well. Apparently the Comic Relief Guys were one of the favorite and most memorable bits from the play. We seduced the audience through karaoke, it was hot, people dug it. B Term hit, and I finally got my big break in non-summer theatre. In "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde", I got to play some serious bad guys. John Sholto Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry (father of Alfred Douglas, played by Joel); Sidney Mavor (a role that I was apparently really emotionally engrossed in, and legitimately cried, according to The Towers -- I didn't, but that's okay); and Solicitor-General Frank Lockwood (the third lawyer to stand to Oscar Wilde, and the one to finally put him away). I was evil, it was hot, people dug it. And that leads up to now, reading lines for a role I've been dying to play for the last 20 months. More on that later.
So hey, how about that movie? So, Broken Wall Films, an independent film group previously associated with short films, finally buckled down and filmed a feature-length movie called "Something Remote", directed by Alex Laferriere. Based on the story and characters from Kilroy's B Term 2007 show "Sofa King Kilroy" (also directed by Laffraff), it's a movie about three guys Neil (CJ Haley), Mat (me!), and Erik (John Selig) trying to get on with life watching TV, and figuring out what to do about Neil's "crazy psycho bitch" ex-girlfriend Lisa (Rebecca Davis). As with the Kilroy show, it breaks now and then into TV sketches, courtesy of Broken Wall Films, and lots of help from Student Comedy Productions (Kyle Kappmeyer, Eric Sutman, Vineet Barot, Mike Hyde, Jon Zoll, Deke Taylor, Adam Belanger, Andrew Wilkins, Caleb Wrobel, Dan Morehouse, Nick Bebel... I think I got everyone...) The movie is fucking hilarious, and I didn't have a summer vacation because of it, so everyone reading this better go to http://somethingremote.com/premiere and RSVP for the premiere on January 9, 9:30pm at the Elm Draught House Theater in Millbury, MA. It's free, so no excuses.
So, thoughts on 2009? Well, I'm gonna stay involved with the SFS, but to a much lesser degree. I'll almost certainly sign up for GAC. For SCP I'm gonna try to write more material for Kilroy and get back into it full-force, meanwhile running for god-knows-what in D Term. I'm excited to see who takes Masquot next year. It was fun, but haaard as hell to come up with good jokes every week. I feel like that's a really good exercise in standup training. Yeah. C Term theatre'll be awesome, I'm playing Matt, the douchebag, in "Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead", directed by Pavis. (Quoting Pavis:) "If Peanuts was the lighter side of American childhood, Dog Sees God is the darker side of American teenage years." It's got drugs, alcohol, sex, homophobia, and lots (and lots) of swearing. Good times. New Voices is swinging around the bend, and I'm one of the five dramaturgs, so that'll be exciting. I wanna act again, and maybe direct. We'll see.
And last but not least, (Facebook users, feel free to ignore this) this is the last entry in this LiveJournal. I'm trading it in for a newer model. So anyone who wants to keep up with my day-to-day whateverdom, jump on over to rickie-d. To everyone reading here, sayonara! And Happy New Year!