Wherein we retire an experiment (again) and return to the purpose for which this blog was born

That post is almost Iak-worthy, if the verbiage was a little more high-brow. Oh well, I'm not as cool as Iak, what can I say.

Oh, I can say that I'm tired of trying to blog multiple places, and keep things separate, and pay attention to page rank, and suck off the mighty Google (who ironically seems to have adopted some of the corporate policies that the company used to decry in other mega-corporations).

This is my blog, if you can find it, great. Stop in, have a beer, we'll hang out. If you can't, then you probably weren't mean to be here. If you want to stick an ad on here, let me know, we'll work something out. If you don't, that's cool too, I didn't start this blog for advertising. Don't get me wrong, I'll take any mobneys you wanna throw my way, on or off the felt. But this is MY piece of the interwebs, and I'm gonna scribble about any and everything I want to. So I'll probably redesign my other site to promote my writing and other work, while keeping my blogging here.

With that said, boy, my cast drinks too much.

No really, we drink a lot even by theatre standards. I'm pretty sure this weekend we passed the 3 case mark on wine, and I'm not talking cases of 6. I mean we're well past 3 dozen bottles of wine consumed, along with at least 100 beers and a couple of bottles of tequila and vodka.

And that's not taking into account the musicians, who really are a league all their own as far as drunks go. They have put into their bodies an astonishing amount of tequila for just three people.

But this weekend there were cast parties. Some of you know what that means, but for the unenlightened, let me just say - you should be at my house this Saturday for the next one.

That is an open invitation to anyone who reads this - Party at Casa de Falstaff Saturday night after the final performance of 12th Night - we'll probably start to throw down around 10PM, and I have high hopes that most people will be gone before sunrise, but we cleaned the guest bedroom and dragged out the air mattress just in case.

Friday night was the night of biblical drunkenness, wherein I believe I coined the term "reverse wingman" for myself. I became the designated cockblock for one of the guys in the cast who needed somebody to have his back. I know it sounds like I spent all night in violation of the Guy Code, but his girlfriend is hotter than the chick that kept throwing herself at him all night, and in his rare lucid moments he thanked me for not letting him tag that.

She's a hottie, but his girlfriend is WAY hotter. And nicer. And did I mention hotter?

In his less lucid moments he asked, no implored, nay DEMANDED that one of his fellow actors punch him in the face. Now since this actor (puncher) is 5'1" and a fiesty little black chick from Jersey, and Mr. Punchee is 6' from NC he didn't have the appropriate level of fear in his heart. It took him a good 5 minutes of begging, but finally she reached around and uncoiled a right hook that took her up on tiptoes to bust him smack in the mouth. He later showed us the entry and exit would where his tooth went through his lip. His teeth were all intact, but he was a bloody mess. She was a little distraught, and had a busted knuckle from said tooth, and the first thing his girlfriend said to her the next night was "will you hit him on the other side of the mouth just to balance out his fat lips?"

I haven't had that much fun at a cast party since Cedric used to put on evening gowns and strip down to a sequined G-string while lip-synching Tina Turner songs. Saturday night at my house was a much calmer affair (well, in the sense that no one was bloodied or naked, but there was Reddi-Whip sprayed across the cymbal players' cleavage).

We've got two more performances of each show, and I think the summer has been a success for Shakespeare Carolina. We've easily doubled our sales from last summer, if not tripled. We've put on two very good shows, and brought some new players into our odd little family. Now we just need to figure out what the future holds for all of us. I'm not ready to hang it up on theatre just yet, but I need to find the right project.

I'm not sure Shakespeare wrote that project, so I'm not sure how my involvement with the company may shift in the coming months. I used to want to save the world with theatre, and some of my stuff in the past has had a real positive impact in our community, if on a very small scale. I used to say we were changing the world, one seat at a time. I don't have the socially relevant material to do that with Shakespeare's plays, because it's hard to get the same impact for a modern audience with elevated language, but the desire to do that again is beginning to flicker.

Some of my best stuff in the past was socially conscious theatre, from Bent and Corpus Christi to Boy Gets Girl and God's Country. I think I just need another ball-punch of a script to get fired up over. Anybody out there got suggestions for a play they read or saw that made them want to storm city hall, or at least write their congressman?