Laugh at yourself.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from celebrity nude leaks, it’s that everything on the Internet is forever and nothing on the Internet is sacred. That’s two things. But you get my drift. For artists who are trying to get their name out and get hired, this can be a terrifying revelation. What if a potential employer Googles you and finds all that awful fanfiction you wrote in middle school?! I’m pretty much writing this post in the hopes that it will push my LiveJournal account further down into the depths.

But sometimes, you just have to let the embarrasment roll in.

My friends and I like to entertain ourselves by going as far back as we can in one another’s Facebook photos and commenting on the most embarrassing ones. When this game first started last year, my first instinct was to go through and delete all of my unflattering photos so as not to deter any potential suitors (LOL) or embarrass myself to important people (whatever that means). Example:

 

(Because I didn’t always understand the imortance of eyebrow game.) 

I stopped doing this for a number of reasons.

First of all, it’s an extremely tedious process. I’ve been using social media since 2009, and in that time I’ve uploaded more photos to my various accounts than I can even begin to comprehend. Combing through my more than 45 thousand tweets and however many more thousands of posts to Facebook, Instagram, and whatever else just sounds exhausting. 

Second, who cares? We all went through awkward phases where we dyed our hair to dress up like Sarah Palin for Halloween. It’s a lot more fun to laugh at yourself and see how far you’ve come than it is to hide these parts of your past and shame yourself for having bad hair.

And who knows? Maybe 20 years from now, you’ll look back at your overpriced headshots and wonder what you were thinking.

  
(But I will never regret this hair color.)

Upcoming projects

I’ve got a lot on my plate right now — I’m in rehearsal for three productions! Here’s what’s going on:

• Dog Sees God: April 2-4, Pacific Lutheran University
• Dance Ensemble 2015: April 10-11, Pacific Lutheran University
• Dare to Dance Seattle: May 1-2, Broadway Performance Hall, Seattle

It’s been great to get back into dance, and also a great reminder of how out of shape I’ve gotten! But it’s so rewarding to feel my body get back into the swing of it and get stronger. I’m also very excited to start doing some work outside of PLU.

xoJane: I Drank My Own Vomit

Remember that time I said I was going to post to this site more regularly? Yeah, me too.

Anyway, I got another article published to xoJane last week, this time in their Gross-Out Fridays series. It’s about this really charming time in high school when I drank something gross, puked it back into the cup, and then drank it again. You can read it here.

In other news, I’m in my final semester of undergrad, which means CAPSTONE TIME! For my capstone, I’ll be focusing on the production process for Passion Play and, as I look toward the future, examining the current state of the arts and freelance artists. I think, for the next few months, I’ll be using this blog as a place to synthesize my thoughts as far as that goes. I’m really excited to finally feel like I have a solid focus for this blog, as it’ll make posting regularly so much easier and hopefully open up the door to conversations with other artists around the Internet.

So that’s an update. Expect another one soon!

Let’s go back to the beginning.

Hello there! As you may have noticed, I’ve been terrible at maintaining this blog and posting regularly. It seems like I’ve been using social media for so many years, but mainly in more micro forms: Twitter, Facebook, the more sharing/art-focused aspect of Tumblr.

So, to get myself into the mindset of more long-form blogging, I’ve enrolled in a Blogging 101 course which will force me to write every day. I find it’s easier for me to start out with given prompts, so hopefully this will give me the tools to branch out into writing about my own things!

To start: My name is Amelia Molly Heath. I’m a senior BFA Theatre major at Pacific Lutheran University with a concentration in Acting and Directing. I’ve created this blog as a component of my capstone project, to keep a public portfolio of my work and to document the projects I work on through the remainder of my college career and after.

As I continue to post, I hope to connect with other artists at different points in their careers to talk about how we are and aren’t being supported in our fields, and working to turn that around.

LUST, WHIMSY, AND FISH: We have a set!

Sometimes you need to sit in a box.

We spent Saturday hanging lights and constructing the set for Passion Play, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how things went! We got a lot done, and now we have a usable set for rehearsals which is FANTASTIC.

Going into this production, I didn’t want the technical side of things to be any more of a headache than it needed to be; I will do just about anything to avoid staying in the theater all night painting a platform during tech week. So when I talked to my set designers, Josh and Emily, about the set for this show, we decided that, in Sarah Ruhl’s words, “to be most simple is to be most good”. All we needed were a few platforms to add levels to the playing space. Not only does it mean we can build quickly, but it also means we can use a lot of stock material without having to buy very much new lumber, and more people will be able to help with construction because it’s not a complicated design.

Building the set

I’m really glad I ended up at a liberal arts college rather than a conservatory school, if for no other reason than that it’s almost impossible for me to stick to one specialty. I want to do it all! And I’m incredibly grateful for the other people in the PLU Theatre department who are willing to come in on a Saturday and help make this play a reality, regardless of whether they’ve studied any aspect of technical theatre or are involved in the play in any other way. It makes for a close-knit group and good vibes all around.

In other news, tonight was our first off-book rehearsal and it went much better than I expected! This show is a huge undertaking in terms of how much there is for the actors to memorize, and I’m so proud of each and every one of them. Even in the last week, every night that they came into rehearsal they had a little more of their scripts memorized than they did the night before, which is a beautiful thing for a director. I feel incredibly fortunate to have a cast and crew who are so excited to be involved in this production and who are constantly working so hard on it.

Required reading: Demonology by Rick Moody

Not my favorite cover art, I have to admit. I also have one featuring a package of Smarties on a robin’s egg backdrop.

Demonology, a collection of short stories by Rick Moody, has been my favorite book for a few years now.

For fans of Garden State (which I just started), these stories almost seem like they’re written by another person. The style is much more informal, even a little abstract at times. There’s a different hint at fantasy than the one you get reading Garden State, likely because of the different moods brought on by such widely varying characters in so many different settings.

The stories in Demonology deal with human connection and the ways that connection has become damaged or lost, or perhaps was never there to begin with. Relationships vary from familial to romantic to platonic and sometimes float in uncomfortable in-between spaces. It’s gritty, it’s harsh, it’s sometimes hard to read, but that’s what makes it beautiful.

What’s in my iTunes: Jagged Little Pill: Acoustic (Alanis Morissette)

I’m not sure this is the most appropriate album to listen to at work (read: in a church), but no one’s come to yell at me yet.

I was first introduced to Alanis Morissette in my sophomore Honors English class when we did a literary analysis of the lyrics to Perfect, and was later re-introduced through Alice Ripley’s Daily Practice cover of You Oughta Know. I just about screamed when I found this album in my mom’s things – if there’s one thing I’m a huge sucker for, it’s acoustic versions of basically anything.

In the liner notes, Morissette describes her songs as “sacred yes un-precious diary-excerpts-as-songs.” These are my favorite kinds of songs. I wish her other albums had spoken the way Jagged Little Pill – in all its forms – did and continues to.

It’s on Netflix: The Aristocats

One of my favorite things to do is go through Netflix and try to find two things: 1) really bad old movies starring my favorite actors and 2) throwbacks to my childhood. Between moving into a house with three theatre kids and Netflix adding Disney movies to its streaming collection, the adventure has only gotten wilder.

fanpop.com

Tonight I’m watching The Aristocats.

You can say what you want about this movie (my roommate Mark had plenty to comment on – he prefers 101 Dalmatians), but I will always think it’s great. The characters are cute, if a bit cliche, but that’s how Disney does. The artwork is amazing. You can’t pretend the music isn’t awesome. And you really can’t pretend you don’t know all the words to Everybody Wants To Be A Cat.

Weekend in Summary: Sir Paul and the Tea Bag Nail Wrap

Man, this week has been crazy! I spent Monday through Friday at church as a preschool group leader for Vacation Bible School (who knew spending three hours with 18 preschoolers could be so draining?!) and on Wednesday ran a color battle (like a color run but just throwing the powder at each other) for the youth group.

Between helping with arts and crafts and wrangling the tiny humans (I’ve decided my official job title is Summer Cat Herder), my nails got pretty raggedy. I used this tutorial from Alle at xoVain to make tea bag nail wraps!

I got lazy and didn’t even bother painting over the wrap. Maybe I’ll start a trend.

Friday was incredible, though. My stepdad did a lot of business with Key Bank at his old job, so to celebrate his retirement they bought out a suite at Safeco Field for the Paul McCartney concert and my brother and I got to go!

Out There…in an hour of traffic on Edgar Martinez Drive. WHICH WAS TOTALLY WORTH IT.

It was an amazing show, not to mention the first rock show since the field was renovated. As much as I love bacon, I’m seriously considering going vegetarian again – I can’t believe Paul played for three hours straight and with so much energy! The guy’s 71 and in better shape than 20-year-old me. Hopefully he’ll stick around long enough that my biological dad (aka the guy who first taught me about music and gave me all my Beatles/Wings/Paul McCartney/John Lennon albums) and I can go see him on another tour.

Sushi the Dancer, parte deux.

I have a dream that one day I will be served a tako taco. I think I saw that in a Hello Kitty Gameboy game or something.

My friend Cori and I went to Sushi Revolution for dinner last night and had an awesome time gossiping and catching up. And I got to eat tako! And I dipped an apple pie gyoza in my wasabi and soy because it wasn’t properly labeled. Oops. But I’m pretty sure the main thing people (or at least PLU theatre kids) go there for is the cream puffs – you know, the ones you can get by the metric ton at the Costco down the road.

After sushi, we went to Krispy Kreme to get hot donuts (SO GOOD) and ate them while we walked around the mall and checked out all the things we can’t afford until payday (I can’t buy gas or groceries or…anything that costs more than ten dollars, actually, until next Friday. Prayer circle.).

We headed downtown to see our friend, PLU alumn and former castmate Frank in a production of Neil Labute’s The Shape of Things. Awesome play. Frank nailed his role, as he tends to. Another alumn and my former director, Myia, stage managed. She has beautiful hair and a sparkling personality.

After the show ended and we got to chat a bit with our friends, we started the dive down Pac Ave back to Parklandia. It was on this journey, as our sushi ceased to satisfy, that Cori had a brilliant idea: Domino’s delivery. We got back to my place and ordered online. She got cheesy bread, I got a pasta bowl. I don’t think either have been so excited for crappy food while we were sober. It was awesome.

Today and early tomorrow morning, I’m putting together the finishing touches for my church’s/work’s Vacation Bible School program. You may recall me mentioning that the commute from my house to this church is about 40 minutes in good traffic (I had great traffic this morning, so I got there in 30 minutes. Party on!!). Lucky for me, my friends John and Dorsey have become like my other parents over the years, and they let me stay with them the week of VBS every year.

Love note to my housemates. We also adopted a no-pants policy last night: pants are optional but discouraged in the heat we’ve been having.

It’ll be my first time leading a preschool group. Fingers crossed! I don’t know how much I’ll be posting this week, but I’ll try to still post something every day!