And, Action!

In the past couple of weeks I've had the opportunity to do something that I have never done, act. My friend Matt was shooting a three minute short film that he asked me to play the male lead in. He also had to shoot a PSA, which I was in as well.

The short was a lot of fun. It consisted of two nights of shooting. The first call time for me was right after the Super Bowl. After I help throw a friend into a pool I proceeded down to One Place to begin shooting. We spent a couple hours getting all of the parts that just had me in them. It was painless and I really enjoyed it. The parted I played was a musician playing a show, so it wasn't too out of the ordinary. But I did have to do a little acting.

The next night of shooting was that Tuesday night. The rest of the people in the film were there this time. Matt and the crew finished up the rest of the shooting. I was only in two more shots, and then the night was over. We all had fun and can't wait to see the final product.

Then we shot the PSA. This consisted of me riding a bike around next to a car. Matt and his amigo from Colorado took turns driving and filming me while I tried to not collide with anything. Then the three of us all got on bikes and we rode around and got some more shots. I have seen a 30sec cut of this, but it will eventually be 60sec. So far what I have seen is sweet, and I can't wait for the final cut.

All in all it was fun doing something out of the ordinary, but I don't think I'm going to stop playing music anytime soon.

Silence is Full of Gold

Last Wednesday in the middle of work my voice began to slowly deteriorate. And by the end of my water shift it was gone. I could barely talk. Nothing makes me feel more helpless than not being able to speak. I need to speak, we all do. Without talking I can't communicate with the toddlers I teach, the kid I nanny, and I definitely can't sing to people.

So I started on a quest. I needed to speak by Friday morning. But I really didn't try that hard. In fact the only thing that I did was whisper. And by work time on Friday morning my voice was even worse off than when I started my quest. I was later to find out that whispering put twice as much strain on your vocal chords than normal talking; oops, looks like I just worsened my situation. Now it was on.

By Sunday morning I not only had to be able to speak, I needed to be able to sing! Talk about impossible. No matter how much strength I could muster, I really could only get a few coherent words out. This was terrible; there was real money relying on this: $75+tips. How am I going to make rent? Buy food? Fix my damn car? My new quest began around 6:30pm on Friday night...no talking!

This is really harder than it seems. Not only was it Friday, but it was First Friday. And that meant I would normally be doing a lot of talking to friends, a lot of friends. But instead all I had was a folded up piece of paper I ripped out of a notebook, and one clicky ball point pen. One by one people would come up to me and start talking, and I wouldn't respond. They would think nothing of it and just keep talking, when I would strike the news upon their clueless eyes, "I lost my voice, and I'm not talking." I wrote upon my feeble communication device. This happened countless times, followed by a conversation with lots of gestures, and a ton of speculation on what I was trying to convey. It almost became comical to me by the end of the night.

My favorite span of time were the hours that I spent with Kevin. He walked in on me sleeping around noon time. He was talking, I wasn't. He still had no clue. Finally I climbed out and grabbed my paper and started writing. "Are you serious?" Kevin giggled. "Yes" I wrote. I explained my situation with the help of my interpretor Sam. Then we worked on his bikes for awhile, and then took them to Slippery Pig. Our time was filled with laughter and tons of big gestures. At one point Kevin forgot that he could talk and tried to get me to pull his sleeves down by motion and saying mmmh. We had some good laughs for sure.

What I hated the most was meeting new people and them not knowing, and me finding it hard to explain. This all happened post Kevin when I met up with Sam at Palatte. We were going to ride fixies with just the chef, but it eventually turned into him and two of his friends, not to mention the waitresses at Carly's. So at 6:30pm on Saturday evening, sitting at a table with my new friends I began to talk again. I don't even know if they noticed that I hadn't been talking, but we had some enjoyable conversation, and then I headed out to meet up with the people who thought I wasn't talking. What a big surprise to them when I spoke. The 24 Hours of silence was over...I was free.

As I reflect I think that this time was a great, but totally hard example of abstinence. Not speaking is really very hard to do. But I'm glad I did it, and suggest losing your voice sometime, it'll help you appreciate talking.

Oh...I did sing on Sunday, it wasn't that great of singing, but I did it.

P.S. I have an I.O.U. for $1 in my pocket from Kevin.