Too Much...Little Too Much

There are some actors who can slip in and out of character, and it doesn't seem to affect them at all. Well, I wish I had that skill. Even when I go through a show and think "No...this time it really won't get to me." It does. It always gets under my skin, into my subconscious, and makes me a nutty buddy.

I've written about this before--how being a 1950s schoolteacher this fall made me distrust men. How being sad sack Laura Wingfield in Glass Menage made me self-pitying. How I definitely felt less beautiful as Ruth Sherwood. Well, Robin Hood is supposed to be a comedy. I'm supposed to be big time comic relief. I scream a bunch and hate the forest. No big.


Rex and I horsing around before rehearsal

Yesterday towards the end of our run-through during the full cast scene in Prince Jon's court I noticed there were more bugs than usual. Not like...swarms, but usually there is one fly on set. I could always count five or six. Bradley was breaking character to slap them down. An actor next to me was squashing these flying critters bigger than gnats, smaller than horseflies with his boots from his spot sitting on a stump.

And then he stood up to reveal the top of the stump...completely crawling with hundreds of buffalo gnats. Fat little bodies and big white wings squirming all over each other, pouring out of the wood and streaming down to the rest of the stage.

I screamed bloody murder. That...is not how I usually react to bugs. I like bugs alright--even many freshly hatched larva indoors. But, Lady Quigley is my brain now, and all I could do was shriek.

That's how I nearly fell,
trading clothes and ringing Pavlov's bell.