I am sick of all of the above, but we are finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. My woeful lack of journal entries is mostly due to the fact that my sister somehow convinced me to aid her in the herculean task of costuming the local theater's production of Beauty & the Beast. This is the Disney version, so as most of you are aware, there are a great many characters who are "objects", i.e. candlesticks, tea services, plates, napkins.. all of that good stuff. In this production there are 27 Object costumes, and that is not including the Beast or Wolves, who are counted as Creatures. For the Creatures my sister and I shanghaied my best friend, Kat, into the project, and I can only say THANK GOD WE DID because she's doing an unbelievably fantastic job on them and my sister and I surely would have fucked them up.

In fact, the three of us have worked out our areas of specialisation quite nicely. If your name begins with a K and ends with a T, you have the last word on anything requiring Creative input. If your name starts with a D, then you have the last word on anything requiring sewing. (My superrpowerr is that I can sew anything. I once slipcovered a piano.) And my sister, whose name begins with an Sh, is the organizer and facilitator of the group. And again, THANK GOD she is because Kat and I readily admit that we are two of the most unorganized fucks in existence.

The last four weekends have been spent invading my sister's house and turning it into a close approximation of a Singapore sweat shop. At one point her dining room had 5 sewing machines in it, there were glue guns on every flat surface, fabric pieces and pvc pipe all over the floor, and the husbands were trying to hide. But, it's starting to come together. I think we're actually going to pull this shit off, and I think it's going to look absolutely fantastic.

Oh, and to make things even more interesting, I have ended up IN the play. Sort of. I have a part, but I don't have to go to any performances or rehearsals. See, after the play was cast, a series of unrelated crises happened to various cast members, and nearly a third of the various cast members ended up having to drop out. This caused the dirctor no end of stress as she then had to struggle to find replacements for said cast members. She managed to fill the empty roles, often by using members of the production staff and any other warm body she could get her hands on, and if not for the fact that I was going to be gone (to Nasfic) over the Labor day weekend--which is a performance weekend--I am certain that I would have ended up with one of the more significant available roles. But then they decided to the do the beginning scene where the Enchantress turns the Prince into a Beast with a series of pictures projected onto a screen shaped like a storybook, using photo-morphing to make the transformation from Prince to Beast. Which meant that the person playing the Enchantress did not have to be available for performaces.

So I became the Enchantress!

Anyway, that's why I've been barely posting, and once the show opens I intend to post pictures of all of our creations.