Tora-con 2010

Pretty much just pics for this post. I'll explain stuff in the captions.

Once upon a time, there was a group of college friends who, finding that they all liked anime, decided to go to a convention.

They stayed in a slightly sketch, but very cheap motel...

... and did strange things to their hair the next morning.

At the convention, they wore awesome costumes, walked around a lot, and talked to other people in awesome costumes.

They were all very proud of their costumes.

(In this picture, clockwise from left: Lauren as Holo the Wise Wolf from 'Spice and Wolf', Ruzena as Lucy/Nyu from 'Elfen Lied', Caroline as Robin Sena from 'Witch Hunter Robin', and Mark as Lelouch/Zero from 'Code Geass'.)

(Yes, that is the blog author in her costume. The hair sausages are painful.)

The friends stood in some very long lines...

...to see some very cool people.

They baffled Walmart shoppers...

...watched Pedobear dance...

...walked in the rain,

and had a very strange dinner on the way home.

In short, a great time was had by all.

The end.

(photo courtesy of A. Bogotova, R. Thibault, and myself)

'The Tempest' movie trailer.

Here!

I am so far beyond excited.
What's really funny is that they use a very similar theme for the mainlanders costumes; very similar to what our mainlanders had on this summer.

Left to Right: Antonio, Sebastian, Alonso, Holy Gonzalo, Adrian (all played by women of PSTC's 'The Tempest', summer 2010). I don't remember whose facebook I got this picture from, so all I can say to credit is 'I didn't take this picture!'

I wonder if this addiction is chemical...?

There are two things that keep me from saying with any surety "I am never doing this again.".
Due to a disgustingly stuffy and humid heat wave, the kind that comes only once a year in Vermont, this last week of rehearsals for 'The Tempest' has been a rough one. No one feels like moving, to say nothing of throwing the whole self into a scene, though we try our best. But sadly, the weather has been a drain on everyone. A few days ago I got really discouraged, and even though I know a lot of this is just because of the weather (what a silly thing to cause so much trouble...) I feel the little, familiar voices in my head going "What the heck are you doing?", "Next time around I'm taking a break", or even (gasp!) "I give up on this Shakespeare stuff".
First - Shakespeare is my great stabilizer. I remember how this summer was before rehearsals began. While it was wonderful to be home from school and to have basically no set schedule, by the end of June I had been starting to feel almost paralyzed with inaction. In other words, I was too relaxed. Shakespeare gives me something to feel dedicated to. I guess some people get this sort of fulfillment from their jobs, some from hobbies, and so on. People need things to pour themselves into; for me, it's Shakespeare. And besides that, rehearsals are like my emotional anchors - I realized sometime last semester when we were working on Lear that no matter how I felt when I left to go to practice, I always came back in a better mood. This summer has been the same way, with the exception of this past week (which is part of why I was getting down about it).

And second - I know from experience that every time I'm involved in a show, I hit this point about halfway through rehearsals when I think those very same things. And when we get to the end, and we do the show, I always take it back, and the next time around, I'm back at auditions, throwing myself into it again.

I guess these are signs of addiction. But if I really am addicted, please - don't send me to rehab.

New Hampshire Renaissance Faire - May 15th, 2010

(left to right: Katie, my sister Katharine, me, Charlene, and Charlene's mom. Photo courtesy of my mom, taken with Charlene's awesome and gigantic camera)

A renaissance faire is probably one of the best  ways to spend a Saturday. Costumes, knights in armour, tons of cool stuff to buy or just look at - sounds like a fun day to me.

My mom, sister and I just got back from a day at the New Hampshire Renaissance Faire in Kingston, NH. It's 3+ hours away, and with stops for coffee and other necessities, the drive took about 4 hours. Seriously, what is it with Vermont not having ren faires? We've always had to drive fairly big distances to get our fix. Though the roadtrip part of the day can be really fun, and there are much worse places to drive through than New England. We had walkie-talkies, too, which made things fun. As is tradition with our ren faire trips, we stopped for breakfast at McDonald's on our way out. This tends to get us a lot of stares and other strange looks (which makes me think "Yeah, you wish you were this awesome."). Geeks have more fun.

As you can see above, we had costumes. Katie had made hers for the last faire we went to, in 2008. Katharine used parts of a Shakespearean outfit she had made as a school project, and she borrowed the bodice from me. Charlene and her mom got their lovely dresses off ebay. 


For me one of the most fun parts of a ren faire is making the costumes, so in the 5 or 6 days between getting home from school and going to the faire I made the bodice and blouse above (the plan had been to make a green overskirt but I ran out of time and used the tartan instead - which I really really like, so I'm glad I did that). While I was making this outfit, I had in mind an old Scottish ballad called 'Tam Lin', in particular this part:

Janet tied her kirtle green

A bit above her knee

And she's gone to Carter Hall

As fast as go can she.

She'd not pulled a double rose

A rose, but only two

When up then came young Tam Lin

Says, 'Lady, pull no more.'


The bodice is from fabric I had bought to make the black skirt last year. I think I'm going to buy more grommets to put in the front, though, to give it a tighter fit. The green blouse was actually a huge old curtain that my mom let me cut up. And then the tartan is just a big piece of wool plaid that I found in part of what we call "mom's store" - a collection of fabric and other crafty supplies that my grandmother left to us. The wool had a tag on it from the 1950's, and it both looks and feels lovely. Thank you, Mom! I attached the tartan with a Celtic pin I bought at a little store in Chester, VT last summer, and to go along with the ballad, I carried a rose around with me.

Anyways, enough about costumes. Compared to the faire we'd previously gone to (the Northern Catskill Mountains ren faire in Cairo, NY.), this faire was a pretty good size, though I know compared to most others across the country it's still pretty small. A nice size for a wandering around and hanging out without getting lost. What made it really nice in comparison to the Cairo faire was how it was in the midst of the woods - my mom and I even found a trail and went for a nice walk in the woods. When we got to Kingston we went deep into the woods to find the faire. They had it set up in two general locations with a short trail in between. Much of the main area was  filled with vendors selling all the beautiful things that are usually found at ren faires, while at the other end of the trail, a historical reenactment group called Neville and Company had set up their camp. This group is amazing - we saw a duel that two of the guys did, and they told everyone at the beginning that the fights they do are not choreographed. It's the real thing. These men in full suits of  15th-century armour really are fighting, not pretending, and yes, there are injuries from time to time. 

The knights of Neville and Company, before their duel.

Other small episodes that took place that day...


A familiar ren faire attendee was there that day, a fellow called Rufus who we've seen before at the faire in Cairo. There he's always appeared as a mud wrestler, but in NH that day he was a jester. Man of many talents, he is. He stopped me and Charlene as we were walking through the faire.
Rufus: Oh look, someone got you a rose.
Me: Actually, I bought it for myself...[it was a fake rose, too]
Rufus: (very serious face) That's sad.
Me: Yeah, it is. You know, you could buy me a rose...
Rufus: (looks in his satchel, pulls out a short rose stem with one or two withered leaves on it) There you go. It used to have a flower on it too, but I ate it.
Me: Aw, thank you Rufus.

That is Rufus, playing the two recorders with his nose.

We also struck up a conversation with a guy who was carrying a bodhran around on his back. He's in a band called the Granite Men that does gigs throughout mostly Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and sometimes in Vermont.

 All in all, a wonderful day. We all came back with fun stuff - I found a booth that had a rack of woven trims, some with beautiful Celtic designs (which I haven't seen on trim anywhere else), so I bought a yard of black and green Celtic knotwork trim to sew onto the collar and cuffs of my shirt. Charlene got chain mail earrings for the three of us girls, because they're awesome. And Katharine bought her first sword, a claymore, which she is very proud of.

I can't wait til our next faire, whether it ends up being later this summer, or a year from now.

Savor a poem, don't count its calories

I was talking to my mom earlier today, and was venting my problems with the sanitized and over-analytical way that some people treat poetry. This is a spiel I go into periodically, since being an English major, I sometimes run into this kind of person at school, and they really get under my skin by taking the joy out of just reading a poem. It's not that I don't enjoy analyzing and thinking about the poems I read, I just see a poem as an art form to be enjoyed, not a lab animal to be dissected (it's just poetry, not science, for Pete's sake).

Anyways, my wise mother put this into what I thought was a very accurate analogy. She compared reading a poem to eating a gourmet meal - if you like the taste of the food, you wonder "Hm, what's in this stuff? What makes it taste so good?". The critics - the kind of students I hate to listen to in my English classes - are like nutritionists. As my mom put it, they want to know how many calories are in each part of the food, what the fat content is, and so on and so forth. They don't seem to like the flavor of the poem itself so much as they like analyzing simply for the sake of analyzing. And because of this, they can sometimes even look down on poems that are simple and accessible, with a royal attitude of "Those are the poems that the commoners read".
That's all. I just wanted to share the analogy.

Introducing the Blogger

Lear: Who is it that can tell me who I am?

Fool: Lear's shadow.

My name is Caroline, and though I may occasionally feel like a shadow of Lear, I am not. I'm a full-time student, theatre geek, and a part-time (ie: not professional) actor. Shakespeare is my first love in the theatre world - my sister has dubbed him my husband, because of how much his plays have occupied my time, thoughts, and energy. But if that is the case, then William is a very good husband, and one that I love dearly.


The part I consider to be my first real role was that of Mrs. Boyle in Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap. My character was strangled on a dark stage, much to the amusement of my sister and friends. It was great fun. After that I've played a lot of small Shakespearean roles - Harem Girl #1 in The Merchant of Venice, Barmaid/Nun in Measure for Measure (yes, it was that awesome), and Boatswain/Ceres in The Tempest, all with the Houghton College Shakespeare Players. Besides acting, I've made costumes for several plays, and have directed one - King Lear, also with the HCSP, this Spring of 2010 (still recovering from that; will post about it later).

That's my theatre resume in a nutshell. I decided after King Lear (which ended 2 weeks ago), and after my first anime convention last week, that making a blog to record and share all my theatre-related experiences, including things like conventions, costume-making, renaissance faires, etc. might be a fun idea.

Outside of theatre (yes, I have a life outside of theatre), I'm a junior in college - English major, with a double-minor in Writing and Communications(Theatre emphasis). It's kind of a mouthful. The plan is to graduate in May of 2011.

I'll probably be starting a lot of posts in this blog with quotes, often from Shakespeare as I am doomed to have his words follow me wherever I go (especially lines from 'King Lear').

Backstage during a performance of Measure for Measure.