Pippin (for the last time)

Alright, I know I've posted a lot recently about Pippin but this is the last time I promise. This weekend was our three and only performances and they were all fantastic. There were a few mistakes in each one of course but overall the shows were amazing. We sold out all three nights which was fantastic to see a full house every time I looked into the audience.

Going onstage, especially opening night, was extremely nerve-wracking but also exciting. Once I got through half of my first song at the very beginning, the nerves went away. I can't really explain the awesomeness of the show in words it's something you had to have seen.

The past 2.5 years have been such an amazing experience and I'm so lucky to have been given this opportunity with this amazing group of people. There are fifteen of us which means we've only lost one person whereas most other conservatories lose five or six. Everyone in the cast has such an incredible personality and even though the show is over we'll all keep in touch and do shows together and meet up a few times per year.

All this past summer and this school year so far I had the plan to do a sport all three seasons (golf in the fall, track in the winter, and track in the spring) but now I realize that I thought this because I figured I'd still have conservatory to give me some aspect of theater. Since it's over I think a good balance will be doing the school musical, Into the Woods, in the spring. It would be a good balance having two seasons of sports and one of theater and maybe I'll do a show over the summer, who knows.



Here are just some pictures of me with some of the cast members before and after the show, and also a few all cast photos:

This is me (Leading Player, bottom left), Rees (Pippin, top left), Everleigh (Fastrada, top right), and Sydney (Louise, bottom right) on our journey to Starbucks before our final performance:

This is me and Rees after our last show: 

This is me, Zoe, Everleigh, Hannah, Olivia, and Sydney after our show (there are a few tears because it was our last performance):

This is me as Leading Player and Gill as Catherine before our second show:

This is our entire cast just smiling:

This is a slightly more representative picture of our group:

And finally, this is a picture of the Musical Theater Class of 2012 as our characters from Pippin:

I love each and every one of these people more than I ever would have thought and I'm so excited to have future adventures with them :)

Pippin! (again)

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Pippin, the show that I'm in as part of the Musical Theater Conservatory at Imagination Stage. This week is our last week rehearsing until the show opens on Friday so our tech week started today and we have rehearsal today, Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Tech week is just where instead of running through the show completely we focus primarily on where the lights are and when the sounds come in and how the scenes change smoothly. We only got through about a third of the show today cause we had to stop multiple times in each scene but tomorrow we're finishing finding the lighting cues. That will leave Tuesday and Thursday for us to run through the show completely with all of the lights and sounds that are supposed to be there. Since this was part of tech week, we got to wear our costumes and makeup for the rehearsal which made me extremely happy and really excited because of how stellar my costume is. I'll explain it in some detail now. For a base top I have a pinkish-reddish and silver diagonally striped long sleeve shirt and for base bottoms I just have red leggings and jazz shoes. On the top next I have a black cropped sweatshirt with the arms cut off and silver spiked shoulder pads (I always have the hood on). Then I put on a skinny black tie and a leather collar with silver studs on it around my neck. Next there's a thick black waist belt with silver studs and another belt that's the same type as the seat belts on an airplane with old bottle caps on it. Now for my pants it's a bit hard to describe first they were just wide red and black tie-dyed jeans but then our ridiculously artsy and amazing costume designer cut out the part by my knee and put in a few leather straps so that those straps are the only things holding up the bottom part of my pants. That's my entire costume for everything except the last two scenes when I become more sinister and dawn a black opera cape. For my makeup it's black paint in two triangles facing down around my eyes and a black painted on smile sort of like the Joker's.


Here's a picture:

How great is that?! I absolutely love everything about my costume and I'm more excited for this show than I have been for anything else.

Come see the show this weekend, buy tickets here!
https://tickets.imaginationstage.org/public/show_events_list.asp?shcode=427

"Indoor Track"

This week I'll be talking very briefly about winter track, which most people refer to as "Indoor Track". I went into track thinking that we'd be running in the school and going to the weightroom but no, we run outside every day. It's still fun and not too hard but I was surprised that it was outside. There was a scrimmage yesterday at the PG Sports and Learning Complex with every school in Montgomery County. I ran the 55m but didn't do as well as I would have liked. I ran an 8.63s time which the people on my team said was good for my very first race but while I was running I knew I wasn't going my fastest. It was probably because I was really nervous and my legs got pretty tight right before I ran. But I'll keep practicing and next time hopefully I'll be better. I'm aslo learning how to long jump which is really fun. Any kind of jumping I think is the funnest thing to do so hopefully I'll be able to do that in one of the meets.

Capture the Fall

This is my "Capture the Fall" video called "Rainy Days". I went out during Hurricane Sandy because my neighborhood looked very autumnal and pretty. I also took a few shots of what my family did that day which was bake cookies and carve a pumpkin, both are very fall-like things. I upped the saturation on the video a bit to make the colors look brighter and used a cross disolve between shots which kind of took away some time but I thought it looked nice.

Abstract Designs

Hello all! This week I have decided to write about the little designs that I draw all over my school papers. I started doing this last year around May and found that it's a good way for me to release extra energy and actually stay focused on what's happening in class. All of last year and even throughout the first few weeks this year I would ALWAYS do symmetrical designs. It messed with me if everything didn't perfectly match what was on the other side. I've noticed, however, that starting in like late September I've only been drawing asymmetrical things and that when I try to draw symmetrical things they bore me.

I find this ridiculously interesting (especially since I want to be a neuroscientist) and I really want to know what switch was turned on or off in my brain that made me like these abstract designs more than my previous symmetrical designs, and why now? I've thought a lot about it and about what was happening in my life in September but really the only thing that I can think of is starting 10th grade. I'm taking chemistry and precalculus this year and I have a very loose hypothesis that maybe all of the math involved in those subjects combined with the math aspect of the symmetry kind of overloaded my brain and was too much math. Because of this I think that I have started to draw very abstract pictures with some geometrical aspect to them occasionally. Here are some of the designs I've done.

Here are two of the very first designs I did


This is one that I did during health class over the summer


I did this during the debates in CAP


NSL class


I even drew on my hands and painted my nails with these designs.


Finally, this is my precalculus folder that I drew on.

Pippin

During the summer after 7th grade I auditioned for the Musical Theater Conservatory at Imagination Stage and was accepted. It started in the fall of 8th grade and we have had classes all that year and all of 9th grade (excluding summer and a short winter break every year) on Monday evenings. The way the program works is for two years we receive instruction and technique for acting and singing with a short sharing at the end of every semester to give parents the opportunity to see what we had learned. I've been with the same group of 15 people for the past four years (although we lost one girl after the first year) and we've all become a close-knit group of people. *For CAP teachers, Zoe J is also in this program with me and Christina is in the freshman class of the program starting this year.

This fall, which is our last semester, we leave the teacher's we've been working with for the past two years and are put in the hands of a professional D.C. director to put on a musical, in our case they have chosen Pippin.

Pippin has three main characters. There's Pippin, a young man looking for total fulfilment in life, who is played by the only boy in our conservatory, Rees. There's also Catherine, the love interest, who is played by Gillian. Finally there is the Leading Player who kind of represents a Hades type character who wants Pippin to essentially sell his soul and join the Leading Player's troupe of actors (all of them are secretly the characters in Pippin's life) in return for a short but spectacular life. This character is played by yours truly. I was really excited to get this role because it's a very fun role and I get a lot of freedom with it. There are five other supporting roles in the play and seven ensemble members. Pippin is a really complicated play once you look deeper than the surface because it's not just about his life (the Leading Player controls everyone in the play but Pippin and tries to drag him into the troupe as well) and that's a hard message to convey to the audience, but I have a lot of confidence in our group.

We have the privelege to work in a field of highly experienced professionals who will just make the play even better. Our director is Jay Brock who is a highly respected director throughout the country. We have a great musical director (Andrew), choreographer (Allison), and stage manager (Megan). On top of those four fantastic people we have behind the scenes people who are creating our costumes and set from scratch. At Imagination Stage we'll be in the smaller theater, the Reeve, but there are still high quality lighting and sound equipment although we'll be having live people play our music.

Overall, it's a really exciting experience and I'm very grateful to have the opportunity to A. Learn from a professional singer and a professional actor for two years, B. Get so close to such an amazing group of people and C. Work with this large number of professionals to create what will be a fantastic performance.

Everyone who can come out December 14th, 15th, and 16th at Imagination Stage to see us!!

Here's a video of Ben Vereen (Leading Player on Broadway) singing my favorite song of the show, Right Track, a duet with Pippin.

Cognitive Neuroscience

My past few blog posts have been on my goal to become an Olympic sprinter, but today I'm switching topics from my sports goal to my professional goal. For the longest time I've been convinced that I wanted to be a lawyer. I was going to go to UCLA and study psychology in undergrad then go to Stanford Law School after that. This past weekend, however, I watched three episodes of the show Morgan Freeman's Through the Wormhole on the science channel and I was sucked into the two episodes that had to do with the human brain. The first one was about the brain patterns of criminals and psychopaths and also the people who judge them. It talked a lot about the different parts of the brain and how a small change in one little section can cause someone to ignore the will to be good. They showed a study on the episode that proved people's will to be good started at an early age by doing a simple experiment on babies. The other episode, which was the most interesting one to me, was one about our subconscious. I was basically glued to the tv for the entire hour and I can't even describe how awesome it was.


Here's a link to the episode on YouTube.

I'm actually watching an episode now about eternity and next is the one on evil and then the one on the subconscious comes on. :) Anyway, this got me thinking and I decided that I'd really like to be a cognitive neuroscientist and study the mechanics of a brain and what makes people act the way they do. This website is something that I found that just provides a few recent studies and the overview of what they mean. I think this is a really good way to keep up with what's going on and to learn basic things about neuroscience. Another thing I found was just somebody's quizlet flashcards on high school level neuroscience vocabulary words. I thought that this was really interesting and that it would be cool just to check them out.

The last thing I have today is a summer program on cognitive neuroscience for high school students at Berkley University in California. I really want to enroll in this program because I would get fundamental information on the subject.

Here's a picture of some neurons.