Saturday, June 6, 2015

what we make of it


On the lean days - and this is one of them - I am grateful for creative opportunities and the roof over my head, that I was taught how to cook, for the food on my plate, and the cheap (but not at all bad) wine in my glass.

Exciting news to come in the next couple of days. Onwards.

Monday, May 11, 2015

Last call: Boomerang Theatre Co's crowd-pleasing production of LICKSPITTLES!

A photo posted by @animasolaarts on

It's closing week for Boomerang Theatre Co.'s production of Johnna Adams' crowd-pleasing verse comedy! Get your $15 discount tickets with the promo code BOOM2015. Come play!


Saturday, April 18, 2015

LICKSPITTLES Returns: May 1-17 at Teatro Circulo MainStage


Boomerang Theatre Company's production of Johnna Adams' verse comedy Lickspittles, Buttonholers, and Damned Pernicious Go-Betweens returns for a limited run May 1-17 at Teatro Circulo MainStage, 64 East 4th Street (between Bowery and 2nd Avenue). I'll be back playing the duel roles of the heartbroken Sestine and everyone's favorite royal shopoholic, Empress Josephine. (Check out the press release goodness here.)

It's a heck of a good time. Get your $15 early-bird discount tickets with the promo code BOOM2015

Sunday, April 5, 2015

Flora & Fauna Report: Spring 2015

Central Park, yesterday afternoon
The vernal equinox has finally hit New York, and not a moment too soon. It was a rough winter. Spring is fresh; it is new. As the pile of snow on the corner subsides, it reminds you to look at the steep pile of clothes that has taken up residence in the corner and address it. Well, maybe it doesn’t do that to you, but it does that to me. There are dusty things in my life that are just taking up space at this point, and all of it needs to go.

Everyone's favorite question these days seems to be, "So, what are you working on right now?" I'll get to the good stuff in a minute, but what I've really been up to is a lot of mental and physical housekeeping. I've been working with a health coach for the last couple of months (one of the perks of my day job), and said health coach has been putting me through my paces in terms of getting my mind-body initiative back on track.

In the last week alone, I’ve been to kickboxing, a Bollywood dance class, a trampoline tabata class, spinning, vinyasa yoga, and Bikram. If you, like me, need a class to get your rear in gear and prefer studios to the gym, I cannot recommend Classpass enough. It has even brought dance back into my day-to-day life, and that alone makes me so damned happy, I hardly have the words to express it.
Trampolines & dance barres! I am five years old.

I’m also on something (not at all) fun called the Autoimmune Protocol (AIP) for four weeks. I hesitate to call it a cleanse, because cleanses are trendy. My Celiac diagnosis - an autoimmune disease, for those keeping score at home - was not something I'd equate to dancing after midnight with bottle service in the Meatpacking District. That said, I’ve been experiencing some ongoing health issues, and the AIP is a paleo-heavy elimination diet which serves as a kind of divining rod in terms of determining what foods might be triggering certain adverse body responses (the details of which I will spare you).

At the end of four weeks, we will begin the process of slowly reintroducing certain food groups back into my diet, one at a time, to see how my body responds. In the meantime, I’m off coffee, sugar, alcohol, dairy, nightshades, seeds, nuts, grains, legumes, and gluten (obviously). I’m drinking bone broth and juicing for breakfast, eating sauerkraut voluntarily, and brewing my own kombucha.
This is the closest I'm getting to Seamless.

This would probably not be the month to ask me to dinner. But in four weeks, you may buy me either a coffee or a G&T.

In other (arts-related) news:

  • I just wrapped up a three-week on-camera class with casting director James Calleri. Highly recommended.
  • I just completed a three-week screenwriting intensive with writer/director Imelda O’Reilly. Also highly recommended.
  • I recently started working with renowned dialect and accent coach Amy Stoller, and she is fantastic.
  • I'm back in rehearsals with director John Hurley for the stage reprisal of Boomerang Theatre Company’s production of Johnna Adams’ verse play LICKSPITTLES, BUTTONHOLERS, AND DAMNED PERNICIOUS GO-BETWEENS. The first production resulted in my being inducted into the Indie Theater Hall of Fame in 2013. This will be a limited run, so mark your calendars now for May 1-17, 2015.


Friday, February 13, 2015

valentine

what if I move the bed 
and make room for you
and throw out all the underpins with holes and things unraveling

what if I fix the drawers that have long gone off their tracks
and buy new sheets
and turn the goddamned mattress

what if I vacuum
and peer beneath the box springs
to find who-even-knows what

something I’d forgotten
something I’d thought I’d lost

what if I throw wide the curtains 
and let in enough light so that you can see
me in all my hideous imagined disfigurement

if I moved my pile of clothes from the chair
to make room for yours
would you still want this   still want me   

would you forgive the remnants of past lives
and scars from old loves
and my ineffective housekeeping

what if I move the bed
and break up all my patterns

what if I’m unable to sleep




© AL Pearsall, 2015