Class - Day 17 (Week IV)

Okay, I’ve just about had it with all the rain. I know its Ireland but we were doing so well the first few weeks and now it’s just rain, rain, rain. The only saving grace is that it’s not terribly cold. Actually the temperature is quite nice it’s just that once you get wet it takes hours before you try off and then you get wet again so no matter how warm it is you still feel cold. Okay enough of my complaining I’m getting on my own nerves.

Class was incredibly entertaining today and Julie had the best exercises for us. We have quickly gotten very attached to one another in the class and it’s just pure pleasure to be with all these people. Not matter how stressed we are about the work we can all just laugh and have fun and Julie is great to join in but still manage to keep us on track and getting all that is needed to be accomplished done.

We spent part of the morning working on intonation and I have to say it was probably my favorite lesson thus far. Why, you might ask, well it certainly didn’t hurt that I got to do some acting. Yes, it was a great morning for role play.

First Julie had put us in pairs (me and Niamh were a pair) and we had to write a short dialogue where Niamh was talking and I was just responding in sounds like ummm and ahhh. I was to do my part to see if I could get across my meaning without using any actually words. We were great, if I do say so myself, and the rest of the pairs were equally and sometimes better than us but I can truly say collectively we were pretty impressive.

Then came the real fun. Julie re-paired everyone and put me with Darren (so adorable and so young) and we were given a paper with a script for character A & character B. Our scene was set in the morning and it said that our two characters were in love. Darren and I took our roles seriously and began rehearsing our scene right away. We only had about 5 minutes so we had to get cracking. We had a pretty good handle on things by the time Julie called time and we then heard the first group read their scene out loud. Aoife and Niamh read the exact same lines as ours but I thought their choice of a mother arguing with her teenage daughter was great. It really was exactly the same script as ours but they just put the emphasis on different parts of each line and it really changed the meaning completely from what Darren and I were working on. This clearly emphasizes exactly what Julie was trying to teach us about intonation.

It was our turn next so Darren and I quickly got into character and began our romantic morning scene. We were only two lines into it when I heard Aoife make a sound of disgust. I broke character and just responded with “It’s what the scene says.” Of course I was thinking Aoife’s shock only came from the fact that I, Debra, was now seducing essentially a 22 year old kid. Darren and I being the professionals that we are quickly composed ourselves and got right back to the scene. I heard more odd sounds coming from the rest of the class but we pushed on and managed to pull off a pretty decent performance. It wasn’t until the class had settled down that we were made to understand from Julie that yes, every other student in the class had the same scene but like Aoife and Niamh, their directions said they were a parent and adolescent child having have a disagreement while Darren and I were the only ones who were instructed to have a romantic conversation. As you can imagine by now the whole class was in hysterics because we all realized they thought Darren was playing my son and I was seducing him. Yeah, I’d be horrified as well if I thought one of my classmates had chosen to do an Oedipus Rex scenario instead of what was written.

This was just the beginning of a great deal of laughter today. Six of us spent the afternoon in a classroom working on assignments and pretty much laughing the whole time. Eoin had us laughing so hard I was crying. He spent a summer on Long Island with two other Irish lads awhile back and their escapes should be part of a comedy routine. Actually Eoin is just funny most of the time so he really should consider turning his stories into a comedy routine and performing it for what would surely be a very grateful audience. Laughter, as we know, is the best medicine.

After all that homework Jean Marie picked me up at school and we stopped off to get Ellen at the café and we all headed to the gym. It was so nice to be in the water and I took another water aerobics class while Jean Marie took a land one. The water teacher is so sweet and I just love when she refers to the foam noodles as waddles. It’s silly but it makes me smile every time she says “now lift the waddle, push the waddle, jump up and down on the waddle.”

So enough fun for today, I am off to bed and looking forward to some rest.