September beginnings

It's mid-September and parts of my regular weekly routine are resuming.

Saturday afternoon my acting class resumed, Nancy being back from her work vacation on the Irish farm.  But only she, Chris and I showed up. (There should be more people next week.) We're going to be doing more scene work, and this week we did a scene from The King of Comedy with Chris in the Robert de Niro role and me as the police detective dealing with him.  I also did my monologue "The 26-Year-Old Bar Mitzvah Boy," which I'd finished memorizing the week before.  Nancy's only suggestion was putting my hands in my pockets for the first part of the monologue.

Yesterday afternoon was the latest ROLT event, "Our Friends to the South," focusing on American writers.  A week before eight people said they were coming so I made a reservation for five, then the total rose to over a dozen as people RSVPed at the last moment.  But that afternoon the Bloor-Danforth subway service was interrupted and only four people made it, including two who were late. (I walked from Spadina to Bathurst station and was lucky to be on time.)

I read my acting monologue; the Robert Frost poem "America is Hard to See"; the James Thurber story "Draft Board Nights" from My Life and Hard Times; and the section of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn where Huck witnesses a murder and a failed lynching.  Coincidentally, one of the others read from Cormac McCarthy's The Road while another read from McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses! (I'll have to read The Road sometime.)

We're still getting more people at the memoir slam.  The library publication What's On, which has previously only mentioned us in the summer issue, is now including us in the fall issue as well.

Tonight was the first choir rehearsal of the new season.  Several people were missing but will come in the next week or two.  We learned the Andrea Bocelli song "Time to Say Goodbye." We're also going to do a Christmas song from Mame!