paperwork, Paperwork, PAPERWORK!

As you may have been able to guess by the title, I am completely overwhelmed by paperwork. Scholarship applications, homework, and job paperwork are just the tip of the iceberg. Each one of those categories branches off into other things that need to be taken care of. After being sick with mono, I have fallen behind on my schoolwork.

Many people assume that a theatre student has little to no homework; ESPECIALLY if they are also a fine arts minor. Boy, are they wrong. Sometimes I actually end up with more homework in my theatre classes than in all of my gen eds combined! For example: for one theatre class I have to find and memorize 5 monologues. Two must be contemporary (one comedic one dramatic), two much be Shakespeare, and one must be a wild card (preferably something with a dialect). This is great and all, but as many performers know, finding a monologue is not an easy task. You can spend hours and hours scouring over hundreds of scripts and find absolutely NOTHING! Either the character is all wrong for you, it doesn't fit within the guidelines of a good monologue, or you just absolutely hate it.

For those of you who are wondering, here are the guidelines for a good monologue that I've been given:

(Please note that these mostly apply to contemporary monologues)
-Cannot be about sex
-Minimal to no swearing
-It must be something you could play within the next five years
-Screaming does not make it emotionally interesting, it just scares the person you are auditioning for
-Skip topics like abuse and death. ESPECIALLY death.

and finally:

-NO LOSER MONOLOGUES

What's a loser monologue you might ask? A loser monologue is anything where the character portrays themselves as not being good enough. "I'm too fat, my boyfriend hates me, I hate myself, etc..." This proves to be an extremely difficult rule to follow as a young woman because many characters for this age range (and for women in general) only have monologues written like this. On the bright side, once you find something that fits within these guidelines, it normally ends up being a very powerful piece!

On top of these five monologues, I have also been assigned two 5 page papers to make up for the classes I have missed. Which is completely ok with me and great because I WANT to make it up. It's just very stressful.

Not only have I had a hard time finding things, I have also been too sick to leave my room to go to the library and look for things. I will admit that I did leave to go to rehearsals while being sick, but in my defense I was not only a principal character with no understudy (at the time) but I was also giving rides to another castmate who attends the same school as I. The rest of which I'll explain in another post.

Back to my point, PAPERWORK! There is so much of it. Valleyfair will be my first real job and I didn't realize how much paperwork actually comes with being employed. I'll also explain the whole Valleyfair job in another post.

Moral of the story:
-Don't get mono
-Finding monologues is hard work and requires a lot of dedication (for those of you reading this who are theatre people or want to be; always keep this in mind)
-I need to find a good way to organize everything and get this all done!

 -Jackey