Lovely Bus Driver .. ;)

June 3, 2009
Wednesday

I was at school from am homeroom to the5th period. At 11:15am, students who were going to the trip to see West Side Story on Broadway gathered in auditorium. The play was from 2:05pm-5:15pm (more or less). It was amazing, the music was beautiful, and the dance was spectacular. I just LOVE Broadway show!!
We had round trip by school bus. The school bus got back to school. I still had to catch a bus to go home. I walked to the bridge with Joanny. It was raining. I was waiting for the 10 bus. There was no building that could cover me from the rain,because they don't have terrace.
A BMx1 bus stopped at my bus stop. It's an express bus, $5 each ride. The passengers are usually people who work, because it's more expansive than a local bus.
Several passengers got off the bus. After that the driver honked. I thought he honked at other driver on the street. He honked again. I looked at him but it was not that clear because of the windshield. All I know was he talked to a lady who was standing about 5 ft from me. I thought that he could not be talking to me, it's not a "student bus". He honked again. I looked at him and I saw him talking again. "Me?", I pointed myself. he nodded. I came up the the front door of the bus. "Are you waiting for the bus?", he asked. I said, "Yeah, for the 10 bus actually". "Where are you going?", he asked again. "261 st.", I answered. "Alright, come on up", he said, "You can be sick soaking wet like that". I thanked him and tried to take my Metrocard from my bag. He refused and asked me to just sit down. What a nice guy. He was an African American guy. He even dropped me of on 261 st without me pushed the stop request button. I thanked him again when I was getting off the bus and wished him a good night. Sure enough he wished me back.
Subhanallah. ;)

Drama Behind Drama

There is always drama behind the other drama.

I have worked with theater after school program at my school for two production. The first one was "Fools" (fall) and the second one was "Beauty and the Beast" (spring).

I did set design for "Fools". There were a lot drama going on when I was working on that. We did not have enough people to work on set design, well we always don't. People are more interested in being in the play instead of working backstage, which I was too. I did set design because I did not make the audition. You know, it was a comedy play, there weren't many characters needed (around ten people as I recall), and I wasn't good in acting I admit. So, I ended up working with one adult (E) and two kids (C and K).
E is a set designer, so she drew the set and then C, K, and I had to paint it. E is really really a slow worker, well she even walks slowly, no offense. C and K didn't know what they were doing. I know it sounds mean, but the only thing they could do was screw everything up like dropped some paint on random places, fooling around, eat and then leave without helping, and stuff like that. E and I struggled to finished the set. Like I said, E was very slow so we ran out of time. We did finish the set, but it wasn't perfect. Look at the picture on the top right corner. I was standing in the center of the set. You can see that the right side (my left side) is better than the left side (my right side). I'm not being cocky, but I did the whole right side of that set. C and K supposed to finish the left side while I was doing the other one, but I ended up help them after I did my side because they couldn't finish it. As I said, we ran out of time so that's what we got for the play.

I was Wardrobe in Beauty and the Beast the musical. I also the witch, dancer and the ensemble. The kids did not behave whatsoever. It caused the original choreographer yelled, cried, and then left two weeks before the show. The director also yelled most of the time. There was nothing better with the pianist. Thank God we got a new choreographer. She was okay.
I had not seen my costume until a day before the performance. I understood that my costume was huge and took more time than the other costumes, but as a matter of fact it made me quite nervous.
During the performances, the kids still did not behave. The kids who were off stage were talking when somebodies were on stage. Some kids were playing or sitting on properties. It screwed up the show. Fortunately we could hide the mess, so nobody knew that it was a mistake.
I had drama myself. I had schedule conflicts between my play and my dance recital in The Harlem School of the Art. Thank goodness I could handle it, even though the director yelled at me when I asked his permission to come to my dance rehearsal instead of to the play rehearsal. It's actually because the play rehearsal was not in the schedule before and I could not miss any rehearsal for my dance recital whatsoever. But finally the director let me go when I promised him that I was gonna catch up. So, it was fine.

Those are some drama that might happen when you are working on theater thingy.