Adventures Of Atom Smith

So, Wednesday… Well, I was a PA on Wednesday. Some of you have asked what exactly a PA does and what the heck it means… P.A. means Production Assistant, and is the title assigned to a person who assists a production in whatever way happens to be needed at a particular moment.

I was involved in helping set up Craft Services. (Setting up all the sandwiches and other food that are supplied to keep cast and crew from falling over.) I spent some time as a boom operator. (You know those guys who have really long shotgun microphones on poles.) I spent some time as a reparker. (“Reparker” isn’t a real word, but we were told that all the cars parked on the street past 2:00 am risked being towed in Downtown, so I had to run around at 1:30 in the morning finding cars parked on the street and moving them into a lot. One of the cars had a large dog in the back. I forget the exact breed, but of those kinds that people sometimes train to be mortally deadly fatal killer attack dogs. Thankfully, this one just tried to lick me a bit.)

At one point, I was manning a sound mixer, and monitoring levels. All these things are the work of a PA at various points. There were several other activities which are vastly more hilarious in which I was involved, but to specify them might be to reveal details about the production.

Friday’s shoot got postponed, which is all well and good, because I was tired enough as it was. Hell, I’m still a bit off.

I may or may not have learned an amazing secret at some point in the recent past. However, if I did, I still have insufficient information to truly gauge the significance.

So, that part I finally got? The one I couldn’t discuss? It got written out. So, I’m going to be a P.A. for twelve hours tonight from 6:00 am, until 6:00 pm. Now, normally I would have no problem with this schedule, except that the property manager came by the house yesterday and said the owner might be here today at 9:00 am. Yeah, a 9:00 am, and a 12 hour gig starting at 6:00 pm on the same day. Explain a good plan sleep schedule for last night that makes that work. ::grumble::

I called my dad and I asked, “hey, is it cool if I crash at your place tomorrow morning?”

Also, it seems my allergies have exploded. I mean, just crazy. Those of you who know me well know I am not much of a pill popper. Excepting cough drops, the last time I took medicine was the great headache of 2003. I took some aspirin for that one. Now, I’m on allergy meds and tylenol. This did not help my ability to get a good nights sleep for today’s estimated 23 hours of uptime. (Awake by 8:00 am to prep for 9:00 am, followed by shooting until 6:00 am plus travel and toothbrushing time for bed around 7:00 am…)

So, I saw the last performance Mall Mart the Musical last night at Curious Theatre Company. I had a good time. I’m not really much of one for musical theater, so if I liked it, you know it was at least a bit unusual. Of course, I was supposed to have somebody come with me, who bailed at the last minute, which was annoying. I also had a very chatty perfect stranger sitting next to me. I guess that made up for not having a friend to chat with during intermission. Also, I was sitting near the band, so I couldn’t hear some of the songs very well, especially during solos.

After the show, I was supposed to have been hanging out with the friend who had bailed on me at the last minute, so I just went home and was bored for a while. Started searching for some information on Mall Mart to see if it was going to be playing anywhere else, and apparently ran across the MySpace pages of a couple of the performers. One of whom, according to her blog, seemed to hate the writing of Mall Mart. Maybe it was actually a good thing that I was sitting to close to the musicians?

I want to see Mall Mart turned into a movie. I never see musical movies, so this is very odd for me.

The thing I can’t talk about thanks to NDA, I didn’t get. They never called me back, so I finally called the person I shouldn’t name to see what was up. Apparently, they can still use me in an auxilliary role I shouldn’t discuss for one day of shooting. So, for reasons I can’t discuss, I think I am still quite an emotion I’m not certain is covered by the NDA but I won’t specify.

Denver’s 48 hour film festival is coming up. The man known as The Markle sent me an email about it. Team registration starts tomorrow. Markle used to be in Mouth Off. He also emailed Dave, so we may have the start of a team. I also emailed Jon, the director of intercourse, PA, to see if he is interested. If he can bring a crew and Markle and I can assemble a team of in front of the camera type people, we may have an ueberteamforwinning. Feel free to contact for more informationses.

I hate flag-thumpers. You know, like radical Bible-thumpers, but they use patriotic themes to try and convince people that anybody who doesn’t shout that America is the best country in the world, and is by definition infallible, is a satan worshipping commie terrorist sympathizer poopie head.

So, today, it has again become my the birthday.

The Dilbert cartoon in the paper today was about a birthday.

The Onion “Your birthday today” horoscope, which they seem to leave up all week, is “This is an important week for you, as you’ll learn the valuable lesson that people will forgive the well-dressed man almost anything.”

NASA is supposed to launch the god dammed Space Shuttle tonight. (I assume this is in celebration of my the birthday.) So, I get a bigger candle than anybody.

I had a potentially important audition two days ago, and I should be hearing back today. I happened to be fairly well dressed at the audition, which may suggest that the Onion knew about it.

I won free tickets to Mall Mart the Musical, which I need to use by tomorrow.

Everything seems to be all lined up for my the birthday. This is my day, bitches. Be warned.

Had an audition this evening in Denver. Had to sign an NDA, so I’m not going to say much more about it.

Feel good. The producer did say that I nearly made her wet herself from laughing. That may be a good thing.

I have added some pictures of the Boulder area to my gallery at http://forkforge.org/forkgallery — I think they were all in my facebook gallery by the same name, so probably not too much new if you have seen those. If you haven’t seen them, some are rather fun, if you are into that sort of thing.

My birthday is coming up. I know this because several people have asked me what I plan to do for it in the past week. If nobody had pointed it out, I may well have made it to within 24 hours of being 24 years without noticing. I managed that last year. It was June 7th when Molly, a coworker, asked me, “So, what have you got planned for the big day?” Slightly confused, I tried to remember any major events that I had heard about on the radio on the drive to work, and responded, “I don’t really follow soccer, so I wasn’t planning anything.” She just sort of blinked at me as loudly as one can just blink, then gently explained that the next day was going to be my birthday.

The previous year, I visited Ashley in Fort Collins. It just didn’t occur to me to mention to her that I was visiting her as my birthday celebration until after I got up there. Another year, I celbrated my birthday by having dinner with Ashley at the Gunther Toodies near where I was working. Unfortunately, Ashley decided to tell them that it was my Birthday, so they felt obliged to sing at me and try to get me to perform The Twist in front of the several other patrons who had assembled for dinner.

This year, however, is apparently different. It seems I’m obliged to do something special. I won free tickets to “Mall Mart, the Musical,” which only runs until the 9th. So, I am probably going to see a show within a day or so of my birthday. Need to sort out who gets the second ticket. The usual suspects are apparently constantly busy nowadays, or not interested. I’ll have to double check if Always-Busy is actually going to be busy, and then I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll just start blanketing Craigslist with invitations or something equally daft. Just seems so silly to show up alone on or about my birthday after winning two free tickets. I did that the last time I won free tickets to something. You know, as much as I enjoy my current period of living as an unsociable recluse who spends for too much time alone, being an unsocial recluse sure does cut down on one’s active social circle…

I haven’t yet gotten any of the emails I was hoping to get today about auditions and such and so forth. Still only halfway through the day, but still annoying.

Ah, Freak Train… Last Monday was Memorial day, which naturally occurs on the last Monday of the month. This makes it the one holiday Freak Train is guaranteed to overlap with every year. So, full of barbecue, I headed to the Bug. So full, in fact, that I had no particular interest in performing. Alas, the life of a performer is no so simple as that. You see, when I got there, I was the 13th Freak. This is the one person arbitrarily selected by a number picked the previous month to perform without having bothered to sign up.

Now, generally speaking, the 13th Freak is given some guidance about what to perform, and some items to use and whatnot. Geree (the host) however decided to give me absolutely nothing, except to put me suddenly on the spot by telling me to ask for suggestions from the audience, since she knows I am a member of an improv troupe. They were “Lindsay Lohan,” “Florida,” and “spelunking.” The result was the single crudest performance of my life. The people who went before me opened the door for crude humor. It’s not like I was the first one to do any. I don’t specifically recall if the joke about getting a handjob from somebody who has shit in their hands came before or after my slot, but I do recall that the girl who talked about her mother getting a vibrator and how a vibrator should be washed before be used nasally came before me. However, I still feel that my routine was a particular kind of crude because it managed to be both sexually crude, and also make use of really terrible stereotypes. Yes, friends, I spent five minutes on stage as a Cuban immigrant to south Florida who spent his time spelunking in Lindsay Lohan’s fiddly bits, for the purpose of charting them because “you can fit four or five immigrants living in an apartment the size of a celebrity coochi.” If I ever try to re-use that character, for the love of coochi, please shoot me. Apparently, I was in a sour mood from not having wanted to perform in the first place.

About half the audience left after intermission, and the second half only had about half the usual number of performers. I guess it was an off-night all around. The guy after me (and the last before that intermission) rambled for five minutes about how he has a dog that is sometimes noisy. It was sort of the highlight of the night because he didn’t manage to offend anybody. At least not that anybody noticed. Nobody actually payed much attention to him, so we weren’t quite sure what he had been talking about.

Had an audition this morning. Wasn’t great. I was running late, because I couldn’t find the place, and I stumbled through my monologue. Also, it’s for a musical, and I don’t sing. Meh, should hear back within a few days. Also, heard about a project apparently related to “America’s Next Producer,” which is being made here in Denver. I’m going to try and schedule an audition. Wouldn’t surprise me if there is an NDA associated with that one, so I may wind up not mentioning it again on the off chance it goes well.

Finally uploaded the baby buffalo pictures to my picture gallery…
http://www.forkforge.org/forkgallery/

Haven’t updated in a good while…

Auditioned for another student movie last week. Got an email saying that they are redoing the auditions in June. Not callbacks, they are just redoing the auditions. That makes the first audition just an annoying waste of time.

Went to Wyoming, camped in Yellowstone. Took pictures. Installed Gallery so you can look at the pictures. I’ll be adding some more pictures over time. Ashley and John, with whom I was camping, both took pictures, but I haven’t gotten them yet. I’ll probably also add all the pictures currently in my facebook profile and pictures from my trip to Europe a while back once I make time for it.

Visit the gallery here!

Got an email from a fellow at the Bug Theatre about bringing improv to the Bug. Haven’t had a chance to talk to him about it, but we’ll see what happens. (That’s the theatre where they have Freak Train.)

I know Intercourse, PA still isn’t up. It will be.

Well, the movie didn’t make it into the film festival, annoyingly enough, so I still haven’t seen the final version. I’m going to be catching up with El Diréctor today to get the movie and some footage of it. I’ll try and get permission to throw it up here alongside the vector. I have also been making some progress in getting Monkey Tango turned into an AVI. Pete did something crazy when the DVD was made, so it has been giving me all sorts of fits and issues.

I’ve been busy lately, so I haven’t updated, so I’ll post about a whole bunch of things in one hyper-mega-uberpost in multiple topics. Enjoy.

I’ll start with some positive press I recently recieved. It was for my last Freak Train, and you can read the Freak Train blog post at http://myspace.com/freaktraindenver and reading the blog post called “April’s Freak Train and 365!” If you aren’t a member, you may not be able to read the post, so I include the relevant excerpt here:

Slot 1: Saint Lazarus Points Out the Saints: Will Rosecrans signed up for this play that night and, asking for all the lights out, ducked behind a platform with his script and a flashlight and created a radio show of it. Brilliant.

yeah… Somebody thinks I’m brilliant. One down, something like five billion nine hundred ninety nine million and some odd to go…

Westminster Wife Show (Part Deux) — Last week, the guys from Westminster Wife Show called me back and I got to do another day of shooting with them, and also I got to know the crew a bit better than the day I was an extra. New Frontiers Media Group is apparently not just a front for TEN. They are said to be a substantial group with their fingers in all sorts of productions. Also, the day of shooting that I did last week involved no nudity. Lastly, the crew was actually quite good, and clearly was trying to do good work. So, it looks like my brief impression of the production that I got while I was an extra was quite biased and unfair, and I’m actually quite looking forward to seeing the final movie. (I may or may not share it with family…) I actually made a point of calling one of the guys on the crew today to inquire about getting some of the raw footage from what we shot so that I can use it in my demo reel. Hopefully, that can get pulled off.

The Markle was in a student production called “Gumshoe” recently. It was “premiering” at a student film festival at Front Range Community College, so I decided to check it out. Unfortunately, it was just about the first thing played, and I was running late so I missed it. However, it seemed I was extremely lucky because they were giving away DVD’s of the show, with “everything” on them. And “definitely Gumshoe is totally like on there.” So, I excitedly got the DVD home, and tried to find Gumshoe. The only little quirk is that the DVD only had six clips on it, and none of the was Gumshoe. So, I still haven’t seen it. If you see it pop up online, let me know. Also, I got to see like seven different skin cancer PSA’s. That sort of surprised me. I also saw the worst demo reel I have ever seen in my entire life. Seriously. I know you are supposed to be nice to student work, but I just really want to say that one of the demo reels I saw was absolutely the worst I have ever seen in my entire life. The other demo reel I remember was merely bad, but not so memorably so.

An email forward is going around lately declaring May 15th a day when you shouldn’t pump any gas. Maybe Atom Smith needs to have an episode about “Atom Smith and the concept of an inelastic fucking good?” Hey, let’s all buy gas the 14th or 16th and not reduce actual demand for gas and all by having (for example) a day of no driving. That’ll teach the bastard oil industry. You all realise that per-week sales figures won’t even show this “protest” right? ::sigh::

The comment period for Real-ID ended yesterday. You all send comments to DHS, right?

Intercourse, PA’s probable premiere is Thursday – directions and everything are a few posts down.

A friend of mine and I have an idea for a reality TV show. Need to figure out how one pitches such a thing.

Craigslist is filled with scammers. Tip for the day: If they have stuff available “In your area” but don’t know where you are, it’s a scam. Doubly so if they try to use poorly executed high pressure sales tactics, “If you are serious about this, you need to call me right away…”