So this is my last week of classes. Next week is finals, then I'm done for the semester. Yesterday I had my final review in painting. The teacher pretty much had negative things to say about all of my work. His biggest criticism was that all of my work was "took dark" and "dull" but whatever. My sense of aesthetics tends toward overall dark images with concentrated, small areas of brighter light. That's what I like. That's not what he likes. We're going to have to agree to disagree. It would be one thing if his criticism served as a guide to help me become a better painter of the style I want to paint, but everything he says is either so vague as to be worthless, or is an attempt to change my style to something he likes. Not helpful. I'm new to painting. I have a lot to learn. I'd love to have a mentor who could truly help me become better. But what I have, essentially, is someone who says "I don't lilke your painting of a starscape, because there isn't enough sunlight in it" or "I don't like your landscape painting because it needs more sofas" or "I don't like your portrait because you haven't painted in a refrigerator"... it's pointless.

Anyway, this weekend Dan came home from his month-long internship in Arizona. He drove for four days, with the last day being Sunday. Dominic and I left Sunday morning to drive 3+ hours to Dayton, where we met Dan coming the other way. We arrived within minutes of each other. Can we plan or what? Anyway we did that so that we could see the musical Spamalot (the Monty Python thing). It was hilarious. There were one or two numbers that I didn't care for (the 'not dead yet' part dragged on a bit long, for example) but overall it was really well done and very funny. We had a great time, then drove home caravan style. We stopped at a very strange Thai restaurant in Columbus for dinner. The tofu looked like little slices of bread. It had the weirdest texture I've ever seen. It tasted good, though.

I put in my petition for residency last week but I'm extremely nervous. There is a thing that says that some types of financial aid awarded in one state will make you ineligible to be a resident in another state for that time period. I was living in Cleveland last summer and fall, but my classes last fall were online from a school in Georgia, and so my financial aid was from Georgia. That may mean that I can't be considered a resident until next spring. Which will essentially mean that I can't go to school again until next spring. The tuition alone comes to about a thousand dollars more than my Pell grant, subsidized loans, and unsubsidized loans combined. Which means that I'd still have to come up with money for tuition, plus have no money at all for things like...oh...rent, food, gas, bills, etc. My mom's not in a position to help much with school right now because the roof came off of the cottage in NH during a wind storm and she's having to spend a crapload of money on fixing that, and things were tight with her to begin with.

So that's fairly scary. It also means that if I can't go to school in the fall, I forfeit the art merit scholarship that I won, because you have to take 12 credits in the fall and 12 in the spring to qualify for it.

Tonight Dan and I took Dominic to the State Theater in Cleveland to see the Broadway musical version of The Lion King. I've wanted to see it for YEARS ever since I saw a clip from it on a tv show. I was very excited when I found out it was going to be here!

Our seats were in the very back row, up in the nosebleeds, but we were dead center. Unfortunately, across the aisle from our section was a family who had brought a baby. I'd guess...six months old? This baby screamed for a lot of the first act, and the family talked in conversational volume levels and got up and switched their seats around, and rustled around in their bags and were in general completely loud and irritating. During the intermission I spoke with an usher and we moved to different seats for Act II. These seats were also much closer, so that was actually a benefit.

Anyway, the show is breathtaking. See it if you get a chance. The cleverness of the costumes and staging, the energy of the cast, everything... it was just great. One thing that was really interesting was how closely it followed the movie, line for line. In fact, many of the actors delivered the lines exactly as they were in the movie, with the same exact inflection. It was almost spooky how dead-on the actors were especially for Scar (Derek Smith) and for Zazu (Michael Dean Morgan). If you didn't know any better, you'd have thought it was Jeremy Irons and Rowan Atkinson. Yet while sounding exactly like the movie voice actors, they also made the roles their own with fabulous physical characterizations.

I want to see it again now. Heh.

Here is a neat site with some video clips. Probably not the same cast that I saw in most of these, but I'm sure it's all similar.

Viktor Kee performing at the Cascade of Stars show (IJA festival).

[I just edited my profile to include a note about these photo posts. You can jump straight to the note here.]

They're doing hula-hoops, in case you can't tell.

So yesterday I spent quite a lot of time in my hotel room trying to rest, since I had barely slept the night before. I did, however, go over and register for the festival and went into the main juggling space and said hi to a bunch of people. That was cool. At 7:30 they had an ice cream social, and the ice cream was actually quite tasty! Event (bulk) ice cream tends to be cheap crap I've found, and generally speaking, if it's junk food I will only eat it if I really like it--why waste the extra fat and calories on something that's only so-so? Well this was actually quite good, but I only had a little bit since I hadn't eaten dinner. I sat with Andy and Joyce (Dan's parents) and a lot of the other Atlanta jugglers, and the general social milling around was very nice. I really like the juggling community, it's full of fun people.

At 9pm was the welcome show, which is notorious for being... I'll be generous and say "not that good". The theater where the shows are happening is about two blocks away and it was raining, so I walked over with a couple of the Atlanta jugglers and we went a twisty, turny way that involved skywalks over the street, tunnels under the street, and cutting through the parking garage where their cars--and more importantly, their umbrellas, which they retrieved--were located. By the time we were actually outside on the sidewalk in the rain I had no idea where we were. Good thing they did.

The theater is gorgeous. It's the perfect size, it's really pretty, it has good lighting and the sound carried well. The emcees for the show--again, a position that is frequently badly filled--were the Fetuccini Brothers and they did a fantastic job. The show itself was tight--no long pauses, no wasted time, just the right length to keep everyone from getting restless--and was actually really good! Now don't get me wrong, the welcome show is generally still worth seeing, but it tends to be lamer, less polished acts, tends to have a very amateur feel to it from a production angle (emcees, staging, etc) and so on. Not so this year! Everybody was terribly impressed.

I was especially impressed by AJ Silver's rope spinning act. Normally I can take a rope act for about a minute and then I'm bored. This guy, however, had one of the most polished acts I've seen in a very long time. Watching the rope (perfectly choreographed to the music, and I do mean dead-on) was like watching a ballet. There was a mix of stuff that was just flat-out impressive and looked impossible yet effortless, stuff that was cool because it was so BIG, and stuff that was just plain pretty. Watch this video to get an idea...(but it's really better in person because the video is a montage, so you don't get the feel of how well it is all set to the actual music). He had the lasso collapse once or twice, but his recovery was so smooth that it didn't really disrupt the flow of the act. I decided that I needed to track him down in the gym or something and tell him how good I thought it was.

After the show I came back to the hotel and went down to the bar to get some food. Ok, and I had two drinks. The bar was full of jugglers (not juggling, of course) and I had a lot of fun meeting people and talking with them. Soon it was time to go to the Renegade show. That's the midnight variety show they do almost every night of the festival. It's always a mixed bag--anyone can perform, you just sign up during the day at the Renegade table (they're a juggling prop supplier). Sometimes you get really impressive acts. Sometimes you get drunk people making fools of themselves. Sometimes you get improvisation that makes you almost wet your pants. It's almost always raunchy--foul language, sexual references, over the top acts (juggling dildos, anyone? Seen it.) and sometimes even partial nudity. Generally speaking, it's a great time. And there is always a bar there. The emcee for last night's show claimed that he was going to stretch his bit out to one hour and 23 minutes, but that he liked single malt scotch and that the more he got, the shorter his act would get. Sure enough, people brought him drinks on stage. Heh.

Ok so anyway, at the Renegade show last night, AJ Silver did a very silly rope spinning act in his boxer shorts, at the end of which he lassoed a member of the audience. Which ended up being me, as I was at a table right by the stage. I've never been lassoed before. Heh. Anyway then he put his hat in front of his crotch and took off his boxers (though from my angle, off to the side and right in front, I could see he had something covering his actual naughty bits)... but he did turn around and he sure wasn't covered in the back! He turned back around and let go of the hat, and it stayed put. LOL. It was exactly the kind of thing that you expect at Renegade. Later in the show he came out and did a Boleadoras act [what is that? Here is one from Cirque du Soleil's Solstrom] that was really impressive. No mistakes, and again incredibly well polished and perfectly set to the music.

So after the show I found him and told him that I'd enjoyed his act (I'd also seen him do the Bolas at the festival in Buffalo in 2004 and liked it then) and he seemed genuinely grateful for the compliment. He also said he's looking for people to practice club passing with and told me to come find him in the gym during the day sometime and pass. Which is what I like best at juggling events so that suits me just fine. Anyway, he seems like a really nice guy and I'm glad I got to talk to him.

I got back to my hotel probably about 2:15 and took one of my prescription sleeping pills (the ones I don't like to take unless it's just absolutely necessary) because I really, really don't want to be a zombie this week, and my travel stress on top of all the other stuff has just got me so wired that falling asleep naturally probably wasn't in the cards. I took a bath, washed my hair, read for a bit, and fell asleep probably between 3am and 3:30.

I slept until 8am, woke up and read for a while, and then, mercifully, was able to fall asleep again until about 11:30. Wow, I needed that.