My Face for the World to See (Part II):
The Diary of Sherilyn Connelly
a fiction


March 1 - 10, 2004

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Wednesday, 10 March 2004 (pythagoras, refusing to cross)
11:02am

Was there really a time when sex (or even just the passing of blood) wasn't potentially lethal? When it was something which could simply be done and maybe even enjoyed? I recognize that the perpetuation of the species proves it, but it feels like a myth all the same.

11:45am

Since going through the jury selection process didn't make yesterday long enough, I also had my regular poke-n-prod at the Waddell Clinic. Actually, there was no prodding to speak of, though I did get a poke in the form of the third set of Hepatitis shots. I don't know where I got the idea that they would protect me from Hep C ("three sets of shots" probably correlated incorrectly in my brain with "three kinds of Hepatitis") but thankfully, I was disabused of that notion.

I saw it on an electronic scale in a free clinic, so it's official now: I'm at 170, meaning I've put on about ten pounds since I started this job. Not at all unusual for office jobs, though I'm not necessarily sitting more than I did while I was unemployed. Rather, it's the lack of regular exercise. I had to cancel my gym membership when I got hired—their rates are cheap, but The Boss is even cheaper. My available time had also been reduced to the weekends, so the decline was inevitable. I look, feel and feel like I look and feel less fit than I did before, positively entropic. (Is than an oxymoron?) Some would say I'm still too thin, but, um, no. This picture was taken the week I started this job last June, a different lifetime entirely. Doubt I'll be taking any pictures showing quite as much skin in the near future.

Of course, if you'd asked me at the time, I probably would have said I still needed to get in shape. My diet hasn't changed all that much, although the amount of time in the Mission the last six months has surely resulted in more (tofu) burritos eaten than I would have otherwise, plus Maddy and I have started to eat our own rather than splitting, and if there was nutritional information on the Shakti Tomato Basil Spread I'd probably be able to resist it. But it doesn't, and I don't. Ignorance is not knowing.

Funny what a delicate balance my identity requires, how sensitive my body is. My preferred state of being does not come naturally. Without the certain hormones and activity and sustenance, I'm not quite the same as I am now, and that thought terrifies me. The growing purple in my hair is no more real than any other part of me, and yet I still feel proud that I don't (and never will) have breast implants, like that somehow makes me more natural and virtuous. Could that make me more ersatz than I already am? Not by much. The odd part is, none of my actions are forced. I behave as I'm wired to do. Always have. Okay, I've worked on my voice so that it sounds credibly feminine (even on the phone half the time, which is no small victory), but that pretty much comes naturally now, and otherwise, I'm just making it up as I go along like everyone else.

The rollercoaster, it goes back down.

2:25pm

Whenever I worry that I'm too vain, I remember that I'm living in a culture in which the words "Better than Botox" are just another advertising slogan. By that standard, I'm an utter hag. Yeah, I moisturize and drink lots of water and try to avoid direct sunlight and don't smoke and do other things which contribute to a smooth face (electro scarring around the mouth notwithstanding), but when wrinkles and lines finally start to appear, I'm going to own them. "Better than Botox." Good God. The mind reels—I mean, the stuff sounds like a torture device to begin with (i vill make it so you can never move a muscle in your face again! bwah ha ha ha!), and it's being used as a selling point for other products? Good fucking God. Then again, maybe I'm just unnerved (no pun intended) by the thought of anything which will make my face look weirder than it already does. (Yes, it really does. Anyone have walnuts they need cracked open?)

4:14pm

Hey, wait a minute! Maddy and I have a teevee show, don't we? Seems like I damn near forgot about it. Haven't worked on it for more months than I care to admit. (Well, you know, I've been, like, busy and stuff.) That'll be rectified next week, and as a result there'll actually be a honest-to-gum brand spankin' new episode in April,.

Not that anyone but us will know. At Lit at the Canvas we met an actual regular viewer, who commented somewhat cryptically that he never would have guessed the people behind the show looked like us. (That's a compliment of sorts, right?) I apologized for the fact that it's been all repeats for a while now. He said he hadn't noticed, and it wouldn't have mattered to him if he had. It's easy to forget that most people don't notice every little detail on which we obsess.

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Tuesday, 9 March 2004 (sleep at the bottom)
8:32am

Ugh. This day has not gotten off to a promising start. Still, it's a paid day off from work. (I doublechecked; we get three days paid for jury duty. How generous.) Isn't that a good thing?

9:13pm

The people thank and excuse Miss Connelly from service. Beautiful, beautiful words.

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Monday, 8 March 2004 (a cold dark night on the spanish stairs)
11:45am

everywhere you go there's a dude on your ass, yo
everywhere i go there's a dude on my ass, yo
hopefully, things will change
maybe soon, i don't know
i'll sit on the equator
waiting for the snow

9:30pm

Talk about harshing a mellow: I have to report for jury duty tomorrow. For real. Not that I had much of a mellow going. Indeed, it'll be nice to get away from The Boss for a day. He seems to be picking me on even more than usual lately, like he's testing me. He's even made vague allusions to firing me; today was talking about "all the little kids in college would be willing to be paid five dollars an hour to break into this business." He wasn't specifically referring to my position, but the way he was looking at me—I know what he was thinking, what message he was trying to send. I wonder if, once again, I've priced myself out of a job by accepting raises.

There's just so much to rise above. Can anyone be expected to not get their heels mushy now and again?

10:17pm

I've been invited to perform at Ladyfest Bay Area on July 31. Oh hell yeah. (Okay, I offered, but they said yes, and that's pretty great.)

Lynnee said a couple times during Twilight Zone rehearsals that my directing style reminded him of how Diane Keaton once described Woody Allen's method. I'm a huge Allen fan—Stardust Memories is one of the most brilliantest movies ever—but I still wasn't sure how to take it. He assured me it was meant as a compliment.

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Sunday, 7 March 2004 (together in free death)
11:45pm

Tonight at K'vetch, Billy Bob drunkenly grilled me on "what it means to be gothic," and a somewhat crazy homeless guy came in just long enough to sit on the edge of the stage during my feature. A fitting end to a memorable weekend.

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Saturday, 6 March 2004 (your lucky day in hell)
sometime after midnight

My beautiful cast. (135KB)

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Friday, 5 March 2004 (commendations)
11:31am

With all due respect to It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage, the best line Lawrence Kasdan ever wrote is in Grand Canyon (although his wife Meg shares screenplay credit, so I'd like to believe it came from her): All of life's riddles are answered in the movies. Sometimes you have to look between the lines, but the answers are there.

Like, the other day I saw the posters for The Passion of the Christ (hey! I finally referred to the movie by its actual title!) and the Dawn of the Dead remake side by side. Both are silhouettes against an orange and red sky. Some might call it a current trend in movie advertising, which goes through cycles just like the movies themselves do, but I think there's something deeper at work. After all, they don't call him Sweet Zombie Jesus for nothing.

By the way, could this other Dawn of the Dead poster look a little more like Deadite Ash from Evil Dead 2? Maybe it's just me.

3:51pm

Oh, man. The Boss chewed me out earlier this afternoon. Mostly he was going on about certain things I'm not doing because I didn't know he wanted me to. He calls it "critical thinking;" I call it "reading his mind." Even made a thinly veiled firing threat. I think I held my own pretty well, though; he even changed the subject halfway through ("Let's forget about the business cards for now"), which he only does when he knows I'm right about something but doesn't want to admit it. That was really what I needed the afternoon of my theatrical directing debut. Oh well. It'll just make me amped up this evening. Not that I'm going to be on stage, but the energy will come in handy when I'm, like, adjusting sound levels and stuff.

On his way out of the office a little while later, as he was on his way out the door, he reassured me that he *does* appreciate my work, that I do a great job. i'm sorry, baby, you know i love you!

In the plus column—at least, I think that's where it would go, it's so hard to tell anymore—it looks like I won't have to go in for jury duty on Monday morning, but call after five that evening. At least it probably would have been a few hours where I could have gotten some reading or writing done. Maybe Tuesday.

sometime after midnight

Well, heck. I guess I'm officially a director now. Of community theater, it's true, but it makes me happy all the same.

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Thursday, 4 March 2004 (speaking ill of tone-deaf divas)
12:47pm

Tech slash dress rehearsals were last night, the first time we've done the play with sound and light and Rod Serling narration and the whole bundle of sharp pointy sticks. (That's a metaphorical bundle of sharp pointy sticks, mind you. There are no sharp pointy sticks in the play, although Lynnee does brandish a knife which I presume to be sharp and pointy.) In my six-month theatrical career, I've observed that first dress rehearsals always suck, or are at least error-prone.

Last night was no exception. The first rehearsal, anyway. In addition to a few performance glitches here and there, I, my own self personally, the writer and director and therefore someone who should know it all like the back of her unseasonably dry hand, completely fux0red one of the sound cues. No excuse, except that I didn't have the script in front of me, which was an act of monumental stupidity in and of itself. It did, however, give us an idea for a different approach to take to the sound, one which I think will increase the overall experience for the audience and which wouldn't have occurred to me otherwise. So, hooray for small miracles.

We ran through the play twice, though, and our shit was much more together the second time. One of the operating theories was that the cast actually had a chance to get something to eat in the meantime. Plenty of time, in fact, since the other episode runs considerably longer than ours. Indeed, it's going to have a different look and feel entirely, with sets and a much flatter lighting scheme—I don't think there's a single white light used, except for a brief strobe. It finally occurred to me last night how much my David Lynch influence is show, especially if you know where to look.

I'm painfully aware of all the play's imperfections: the exposition-heavy second act, certain aspects of certain performances which we simply didn't have had the opportunity to hone (don't ask, because I'll never tell), the minimalist staging which could also be interpreted as a lack of imagination on my part, the Night Gallery-ish rather than Twilight Zone-ish length (I have yet to time it, but I doubt it's more than fifteen minutes), the utter banality of some of my dialogue...and so on. But I'm also really proud of it. And of my cast, too. I had some doubts early on, but everyone's bringing something unique to their part. It was especially gratifying to see Lynnee, Liz and Seeley outside of Spanganga, riffing on the backstory of their characters. Any actor worth their salt will tell you that backstory (what happened before the curtain went up?) is essential to understanding a character, and it says to me they feel the play is worth that kind of effort. It's hard to explain, but it made me really happy.

Not to mention the fact that my cast is so fuckin' beautiful. Okay, I stacked the deck by writing the characters so they could plausibly dress like punks. Pure self-indulgence on my part, even though I'm not going to be on stage. (This 110KB press photo is fairly accurate in how Jon will look, though not the others.) Lynnee especially seems to be enjoying going old-school; he even brought in a bunch of punkrawk shirts from his collection. Maddy and Liz aren't looking half-bad, either. Y'know, with no sets and minimal effects, I think making the actors interesting is a good thing. A little bit of eyecandy to sweeten the mindfuck.

10:49pm

and if my thought-dreams could be seen
they'd probably put my head in a guillotine
but it's all right, ma
it's life, and life only.
Exceeding your own expectations is dangerous, since it becomes even harder to tell where the wall really is.

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Wednesday, 3 March 2004 (creeping emptiness)
1:09pm

Publicity is a good thing, as a general rule, and the SF Weekly article is certainly positive. Still, while I like how excited the writer sounds about both the show in general and my episode in particular, I wish she hadn't been so specific about the effects in the original:

Along with "Nightmare" (playing March 19 and 20 with the spookariffic "Living Doll," featuring malevolent manikin Talky Tina), look for Ohanneson and company's takes on the robot-fetish fantasy "The Lonely," the post-apocalyptic Burgess Meredith vehicle "Time Enough at Last," and (ooh! ooh!) "It's a Good Life," best known for a scene in which a young Billy Mumy (Lost in Space) transforms an unlucky fella into a jack-in-the-box.

Well, okay, she never spoke to me, so how could she have known I nixed the jack-in-the-box idea after about thirty seconds? Besides the fact that there's no way in hell we could have done the effect even halfway convincingly, I wouldn't have wanted to since most of our terminally hip audience would flash on The Simpsons. Oh well. Much of the article is about the quality of the writing on the original series (mind you, I've rewritten about three-quarters of the episode) and the lo-fi approach of the adaptations, so that helps. Besides, she doesn't promise that it's in the play, just that it's what the episode is remembered for. For that matter, we don't have Billy Mumy, either. We've got someone even better.

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Tuesday, 2 March 2004 (syllogistic piece)
4:46pm

We rehearsed the play for a couple hours last night, and this evening I worked for about an hour with Ty on the lighting. I'm not getting nearly enough time for these things, but I'm doing the best I can, and it's coming together. The pressure and sense that it could all fly apart at any moment is actually rather exhilarating, mixed in with stomach-twisty moments of anxiety and fear that I suck, that it's all a bad idea poorly executed (and would it have killed you to have at least come up with something resembling a set?). Kinda reminds me of my guerrilla filmmaking days at SFSU.

There's going to be an article about the show (the Twilight Zone: The Plays series, not my silly little melodrama) in the SF Weekly on Wednesday. Interest is expected to increase as a result, so you're planning on going, get tickets soon.

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Monday, 1 March 2004 (maybe after all)
4:10pm

The office is back to normal today, both in that The Boss is here and the DSL is back up. Bum deal, being disconnected those last two days of the week, but that's how the Universe operates. On the plus side, he hasn't grilled me on what I did every moment of last week—it helps that I've actually given him the stuff I finished—and by tomorrow he'll probably have forgotten to ask.

Tonight's our last regular Twilight Zone rehearsal. (I have to miss the writing group because of it. First time. I know it's for a good cause, but I'm feeling guilty all the same.) Wednesday is a full dress and tech rehearsal, and the show itself is Friday and Saturday. Then I feature at K'vetch on Sunday. Then, if all goes well, I can stop moving and die.

Entirely too many of the daylight hours of this weekend were spent working on my hair, lots of bleaching and dying. The roots now have an definite purple quality to them, as well will the rest of it as time goes on. I'd reached the point where I had to do something with it.

As for colors, I've been talked out of going blonde from several different directions. Maddy's already doing blue—in fact, Anodyne recently bleached and colored all of Maddy's hair blue—and it's been concluded that red is all wrong for me. I seldom look at anyone with green hair and wonder if it would look good on me. So, purple. What the hell. Even now, so much of my life is about not taking chances, and I'm in a position where I can do it and get away with it, so I'm gonna. Still keeping it cut the same way, though. For now.

Although we erred on the side of caution, being careful to avoid extensive follicle fryage, I was happy to discover that it's actually possible to bleach out my hair to not-too-shabby blonde without hurting it too much. Bleaching is by definition damage, I recognize that, but it's not as messed up as I would have guessed. It's good to know, for future reference.

On Saturday night, we went to see Sid's current play. If he wasn't in it and hadn't found another role, I probably would have worked him into my Twilight Zone. Anyway, I haven't been to too many plays outside ones I've worked on, so it's still fascinating to see a bigger, more elaborate production. Damn, but it looks like a lot of work. Not even just the sets and effects—Night of the Living Dead was arguably more complex—but it just felt so different, so much more...I don't know. It was longer, that's for sure.

I ate a bit of a pot cookie on the muni ride out there, so by the time the play began I was thoroughly baked. It was a drama about the internal and external conflicts of a war photographer named George Brownie (you know that National Geographic cover of the Afghan girl with the piercing jade eyes?), really not the best thing to watch while stoned, but, well, you know.

When you haven't eaten for several hours except a small bowl of pretzels and the aforementioned cookie, it's astonishing just how good sushi from 7-11 can be. Extreme circumstances can do odd things to taste buds.

By the way, Mel's squickfest has grossed $117 million so far. See? Toldja it would earn its budget back. And to think, you didn't believe me. Silly you.

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