Week Two - Acting & Expect Respect

This week I ran into the wonderful crisis that many non-profit organizations run into time and time again. I said last week that I had booked the sheep barn for our retreat. Well, once we booked it they came back saying it was going to cost $600.00 in order to use the space. Even with a Case Alumn it ended up being way too expensive, we basically have no money to spend on the location if we want to feed anyone. Also, with this, we ran into the issue that now it looks like we will probably end up using a synagogue for our location. Our initial plans was to provide a kosher dinner, running through a jewish organization means we have to have kosher meals, and then have everyone pack their own lunch. Now that we are probably going to be in a synagogue all meals have to be kosher so we now have to provide both meals for the day. I spent most of my time my first day in the office this week working on figuring out new location options and figuring out the logistics of feeding everyone.

I left out last week that when I showed up the first day they actually gave me my own desk, computer, log-in and e-mail address so I have been using all of that everyday. The other big thing I focused on this week was the callbacks for the program. After auditions we had about 20 kids that we called back. We called back a lot of talented actors but we needed to figure out a way to find out what all these kids knew about dating violence and who of them are leaders and are going to step up to the plate. I was put in charge of this. I decided with Dahlia that it would be a good idea to show them an example of a story in the news and then have some sort of discussion on it. I ended up researching and then writing up a one page article on the story of George Huguely and Yeardly Love, two lacrosse players from the University of Virginia. Recently, Love was found dead after Huguely had broken into her apartment swung her around by the neck and then shook her, causing her head to hit the wall multiple times, all of which he admitted to doing. It was amazing at how clear cut this story was and how much of what we teach as warning signs and such was shown. It was hard to come up with questions because we couldn't expect them to know all that we knew. In the end, I came up with four questions. Two, were to be answered in a small groups and then they would report back to the rest of the group. One, was to be answered in a full group discussion. Lastly, a fourth question was to be answered alone on paper. I made sure we had the last question because in a discussion setting someone may know something right or worth while but they won't say it because they don't want to repeat what someone else said. This way everyone got a chance to show their leadership skills and show what they knew so that everyone had a fair chance.

Finally, I was hoping to get some video up this week of a scene or two from the show but I had some technical difficulties when trying to get all the film from Mr. L. I'll figure it out for next week, but that is better anyways because the scenes will be a lot better by then. It's officially a week and a half until the show so this week I will be finalizing the set plans with Mr. L and building it or putting it together if needed and we will be doing out last minute crunch of helping the scenes that really need help and then finalizing all of the transitions so that the show runs smoothly. This week I really just worked with the kids on running the scenes and memorizing because they were all paraphrasing way too much. I don't want to bore anyone so I'll stop there.