For the past few days I’ve wanted to write stuff in here but I haven’t been able to. Quite honestly I haven’t been feeling very well in the head. I’ve been feeling very beaten down and low. I know that fall is the season of change, and I should expect things to be changing, but some of the recent changes in my life have been depressing.

One of the major downers has been the death of performance-level improv at the Staircase. The management of the cafe decided that improv wasn’t making enough money, and was taking valuable booking time away from profitable bands and other shows. The end result is that our Theatresports and Saturday Night Jive shows are history as of the end of the month. No one ever got into improv to make money, so this is a very sad turn of events. However, I understand their reasoning behind it and I can’t argue with it. We will have to do shows that pander to the general masses if we ever want to come back, and that depresses me too. Obviously there’s no room for art for its own sake at that venue any more. It’s a shame because The Staircase is the original home of improv in Hamilton, and very few can argue that we were putting on some cutting edge stuff there, especially with the Jive and the Jabberwocky shows.

In other news, I’m happy with my monologue experiment so far. I’ve been finding it easy to get into these characters and just write their stream of consciousness. I’ve avoided doing things like looking up details for historical reference on the web, or editing the sentence structure because I want these to be as true to an on-stage experience as possible. The real fun would begin when you put all those characters on stage together and have them interact with each other. Stephen King apparently writes this way too. He creates these characters and sets them loose on each other to see what happens. They are given life of their own and the stories end up writing themselves. Anyway, I’ll continue with this experiment. More suggestions?