Welcome to Santa Cruz!

So it's been an eventful couple of days. I moved in (and that was its own little adventure) met my fellow interns and the rest of the company, toured the campus, auditioned to find out which play I'll be doing ensemble work for...and it's only been three days. Well, two and a half.

Let's start at the beginning, shall we?

So I was scheduled to move into my subleased apartment on the 19th. My family all drove me down, and we had plans to drop my stuff off and meet the new roommates before spending some quality time at the boardwalk. I showed up to the apartment...and no one was home. And the woman I was renting from wasn't picking up her cell phone or he home phone. Aaaand...well it appeared that I might be homeless.

Thank God for iPhones. I spent the day at the boardwalk finding possible other options on craigslist, posting an emergency housing request on the interns website, and calling a high school friend who I knew went to UCSC to see if she knew of a couch I could crash on if the worst should happen. To make a long story short: my friend from high school came through, and turned out to have an extra room in her house that I could sublease, right across the street from UCSC campus (where Shakespeare Santa Cruz is located). Also: that other girl I was supposed to sublease from? Yeah, she was in Honduras, and didn't tell anyone I was supposed to move in.

But it's all good, now! I'm all settled in my new place, my housemates are all pleasantly nerdy (and also apparently infamous partiers. Aaaah, college) and the location couldn't be more convenient. After I'd moved in to my new place I spent the day figuring out the bus system and exploring the city. And can I just say? Santa Cruz is awesome. I'd never really visited here before--apart from the boardwalk,--but everything from the redwoods that sprawl all over campus to the funky downtown area is just fantastic. I could see myself living here. It probably helps that one of the first places I found was Donnelly Chocolates, a delicious shop that was right next to the first bus stop I used. Five words: dark chocolate sea salt caramels. Just. So good. And there's music, and thrift stores, and good food, and did I mention the redwoods? Gorgeous.


Wow, I've barely even mentioned the internship itself and this post is already pretty long. Bear with me, I promise to post more often in the future so I can be a little more concise.

The basic rundown is this: there are a total of 10 acting interns (5 men, 5 women) ranging from sophomores in college to new college graduates. They're the ones I'll be taking classes with and we get to be the busiest people at the festival this summer. That's not just me saying that, Lori--the head stage manager for the whole festival--said so, and I had a brief premonition of how crazy things are gonna get over the next few months. Apart from acting and voice classes (you can opt out of the voice one, if you don't wanna pay for it. I did that.) we do ensemble work in the productions: Love's Labor's Lost, Othello, and The Lion In Winter. We also understudy all the main actors in the company.

We just had our auditions this morning to find out which shows we'll be ensembling it up for, and I was one of the three to be chosen for Lion In Winter. That's the indoor show, on the main-stage, the two Shakespeare plays are out in the glen and the rest of the interns will be in both of those. I'm a little bummed not to be working on Shakespeare, but the indoor show sounds like it's going to be incredible: Marco Barricelli is playing Henry, and it's being directed by Richard E.T. White (!) so it should be fairly badass. We won't find out until this weekend which parts we'll be understudying for, so Mike Ryan advised us to use the time to relax, because there won't be a whole lot of that later on.

Mike described himself to us as the Intern Uncle for acting, directing, stage management and dramaturgy interns alike. He's our go-to ally should we partake in any drama-droms over the summer and the holder of a lot of very useful information, such as which bathrooms are least likely to be smelly and overused during rehearsals. I'll be talking to him a lot, I'm sure.

Well, I should go. First reading for Lion is in a few minutes, and I want to make sure I know where to be. I'll keep you all posted on the goings on.

So it begins.