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On Sunday evening I was picked up from home by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
_audhumla_ and Stevie and we three drove to Bendigo. As much as I'd like to say it was a spur of the moment road trip performed by three mid 20s women in search of wacky adventure to a kickin' 90s soundtrack it was in fact a pre planned event. We were meeting mc_shamo, Helen and Sharon there and in the morning were going to perform Aeschylus' Persians for 70-odd VCE students. The others had already been at a rehearsal camp for Mostellaria all weekend, so were a tad worse for wear...
We managed to find our way to the YHA despite Bendigo's ludicrous amount of one-way streets. The YHA was really nice, we got an 8 bed room for the six of us all to ourselves and one of the lower bunk beds was a double, which was welcome as Seamus had been on rehearsal camp the night before and we'd missed each other. It sounds silly but I don't sleep well without him anymore. We sat and watched the multi media part of the play (John- the messanger- had been pre-recorded to appear as a news-report-cum-documentary) then as Sarah and I were getting noisier and noisier about our desire for dinner we all headed out to a local Chinese place where the staff were incredibly nice and possibly too ready to bend over backwards for us (no, really, what's on the menu is fine, we don't need the chef to make things up...). We then realised we'd prepared nothing for breakfast, silly us. So we asked the lovely Chinese lady about supermarkets and discovered we were a mere block from Coles, awesome.
The Coles, and it's carpark, was surrounded by teens and extremly young adults, most of whom had spilled from old cars with P plates on them. Many were still in the cars and engaged in driving very fast for very short distances. we had to walk through them, it was mildly disconcerting. Once out of Coles we had to walk through again, and we nearly jumped out of our skins when from a car parked near us there came a shriek of "Christina!!!!!" and a slim blonde girl jumped out- my cousin Heather. We hugged and I explained what I was doing in Bendigo and why I had not come to visit her family (feeling incredibly guilty as I did so) she was waiting for her boyfriend to come out of Coles and I would have liked to have met him, but by now it was past 10pm and we still needed to run the show before the next day, so with a final hug and directions to send my love to her family we left her among the youth of Bendigo.
Back at the backpackers we stumbled through a few lines runs before succombing to exhaustion and piling into beds. Best. Sleep. Ever. Oh lordy were we all tired! (Well, except Stevie, who sensibly had brought a book and a reading light) There wasn't even any chat after the lights went out.
The performance the next morning went very well considering. The kids were quiet and seemed absorbed, though turned shy afterwards and didn't ask questions until most of them had left, then a few came up to talk to us. I was feeling a little grumpy as Seamus had accidentally grabbed my ear instead of my hand to fling me across the stage (an easy mistake to make in the circumstances, though hard to explain on paper, and I was not grumpy with him just grumpy it had happened) and it bloody well hurt. We also chatted to one of the teachers who seemed really interested in what we'd done, especially with the concept of comedy within tragedy, with the idea that some of the lines can be comic. He was expecting the scene between Queen Atossa and the ghost of King Darius to be high drama I think, and instead we gave him a squabbling domestic tiff. I think he really liked it, and hopefully we get asked back again!
We walked through the park after the performance and hit the second hand books and clothes shops with a vengence before discovering that the brewery we were planning to lunch in (and drink in) was shut for the day. Bollocks. So we searched and search for a closeish decent pub, found one and walked in. Only on actually being inside did we discover that we'd managed, like the homing pidgeons we old MUCAAS types are, to end up in a Pugg Mahones.
A very nice few hours then passed, til we realised it was nearing 3pm and Seamus had to be back in Melbourne by 5:30. So we walked back to the cars and with a little too-ing anf fro-ing and organising of luggage we were off back to Melbourne, where I has the fun of driving un-accompanied through the city to get home after dropping seamus and Sharon off!
I got home, fed the cats (who had been fed that morning by the obliging_bounce_, thanks again!) and was just contemplating my own dinner when I received a very welcome text from vivienne_astor, asking me to come around, watch dvds and have Thai take away. And thus an evening was very pleasantly passed. :-)
The next day I blitzed through errands and housework like some sort of domestic goddess. I can breathe in my own home, oh joy!
Altogether a wonderful weekend, I'm so glad to have finally had a proper one. It makes up for the fact that I am now halfway through my hell-run at work (Thursday overnight, Friday afternoon, Saturday morning shifts- with only 8 hours between them).
Only three weeks til my next weekend! I think I may have to plan to do something fun with it...
_audhumla_ and Stevie and we three drove to Bendigo. As much as I'd like to say it was a spur of the moment road trip performed by three mid 20s women in search of wacky adventure to a kickin' 90s soundtrack it was in fact a pre planned event. We were meeting mc_shamo, Helen and Sharon there and in the morning were going to perform Aeschylus' Persians for 70-odd VCE students. The others had already been at a rehearsal camp for Mostellaria all weekend, so were a tad worse for wear...We managed to find our way to the YHA despite Bendigo's ludicrous amount of one-way streets. The YHA was really nice, we got an 8 bed room for the six of us all to ourselves and one of the lower bunk beds was a double, which was welcome as Seamus had been on rehearsal camp the night before and we'd missed each other. It sounds silly but I don't sleep well without him anymore. We sat and watched the multi media part of the play (John- the messanger- had been pre-recorded to appear as a news-report-cum-documentary) then as Sarah and I were getting noisier and noisier about our desire for dinner we all headed out to a local Chinese place where the staff were incredibly nice and possibly too ready to bend over backwards for us (no, really, what's on the menu is fine, we don't need the chef to make things up...). We then realised we'd prepared nothing for breakfast, silly us. So we asked the lovely Chinese lady about supermarkets and discovered we were a mere block from Coles, awesome.
The Coles, and it's carpark, was surrounded by teens and extremly young adults, most of whom had spilled from old cars with P plates on them. Many were still in the cars and engaged in driving very fast for very short distances. we had to walk through them, it was mildly disconcerting. Once out of Coles we had to walk through again, and we nearly jumped out of our skins when from a car parked near us there came a shriek of "Christina!!!!!" and a slim blonde girl jumped out- my cousin Heather. We hugged and I explained what I was doing in Bendigo and why I had not come to visit her family (feeling incredibly guilty as I did so) she was waiting for her boyfriend to come out of Coles and I would have liked to have met him, but by now it was past 10pm and we still needed to run the show before the next day, so with a final hug and directions to send my love to her family we left her among the youth of Bendigo.
Back at the backpackers we stumbled through a few lines runs before succombing to exhaustion and piling into beds. Best. Sleep. Ever. Oh lordy were we all tired! (Well, except Stevie, who sensibly had brought a book and a reading light) There wasn't even any chat after the lights went out.
The performance the next morning went very well considering. The kids were quiet and seemed absorbed, though turned shy afterwards and didn't ask questions until most of them had left, then a few came up to talk to us. I was feeling a little grumpy as Seamus had accidentally grabbed my ear instead of my hand to fling me across the stage (an easy mistake to make in the circumstances, though hard to explain on paper, and I was not grumpy with him just grumpy it had happened) and it bloody well hurt. We also chatted to one of the teachers who seemed really interested in what we'd done, especially with the concept of comedy within tragedy, with the idea that some of the lines can be comic. He was expecting the scene between Queen Atossa and the ghost of King Darius to be high drama I think, and instead we gave him a squabbling domestic tiff. I think he really liked it, and hopefully we get asked back again!
We walked through the park after the performance and hit the second hand books and clothes shops with a vengence before discovering that the brewery we were planning to lunch in (and drink in) was shut for the day. Bollocks. So we searched and search for a closeish decent pub, found one and walked in. Only on actually being inside did we discover that we'd managed, like the homing pidgeons we old MUCAAS types are, to end up in a Pugg Mahones.
A very nice few hours then passed, til we realised it was nearing 3pm and Seamus had to be back in Melbourne by 5:30. So we walked back to the cars and with a little too-ing anf fro-ing and organising of luggage we were off back to Melbourne, where I has the fun of driving un-accompanied through the city to get home after dropping seamus and Sharon off!
I got home, fed the cats (who had been fed that morning by the obliging
_bounce_, thanks again!) and was just contemplating my own dinner when I received a very welcome text from vivienne_astor, asking me to come around, watch dvds and have Thai take away. And thus an evening was very pleasantly passed. :-)The next day I blitzed through errands and housework like some sort of domestic goddess. I can breathe in my own home, oh joy!
Altogether a wonderful weekend, I'm so glad to have finally had a proper one. It makes up for the fact that I am now halfway through my hell-run at work (Thursday overnight, Friday afternoon, Saturday morning shifts- with only 8 hours between them).
Only three weeks til my next weekend! I think I may have to plan to do something fun with it...
