Spoiled rotten.

I cannot express how grateful I am at this moment. 

In one weekend I celebrate my birthday with friends at my favorite low key Richmond restaurant, Sticky Rice, with my favorite food on earth-sushi and Sticky Rice tots.

I pampered myself shamelessly with a mani/pedi and professional hair appointment (I've never done this other than for weddings and prom I swear!) 

I had an unbelievable night out on Sunday (see previous blog). 

And then tonight I went to Mamma Zu with my mom, dad, and brother and ate my other favorite foods (squid, arugula and bean appetizer, fried oysters so delicate you could have sworn they were raw, crab pasta with literally a pound of lump crab meat in it, lots of good red wine, and homemade red velvet cupcakes).

I got to chat and catch up on the phone with my best friend who just moved to Georgia for over an hour this morning.

And then I got a call from my sister and heard my one year old niece sing "Happy Birthday" to me and say "I love you Aunt Yiz." Earlier today I happened to look through my Facebook album of pictures from when she was first born. I met her on Christmas Eve, the day she was born, and I had the utter privilege to spend a good portion of her first six months of life with her as her nanny. I love this little girl more than anything on this planet, and I miss her every day now that I can't see her every day. I had an unbelievable birthday, but her birthday message was the absolute BEST part. It was the proverbial icing on the cake.

Thank you universe. The last few weeks have been hard and draining, and I've felt several times that I had nothing left in the tank. But then you gift me with a weekend like this, and well, life is good. Life is great :)

RTCC Awards Highlights

Last night was my first RTCC Awards (RTCC standing for Richmond Theatre Critics Circle for those of you not in the know), and I had an absolute blast. I got gussied up, pretended it was the Oscar's to justify getting my hair done professionally, was accompanied by an equally gussied up date in a tux, ate a delicious pre-show dinner at Lemaire (which I had never been to before, I fail as a Richmonder), and basically sat back with a few glasses of wine, did absolutely zero work (compared to what I'm sure was a ton of hard work put in by a lot of people to make the night so great), and enjoyed a thoroughly entertaining evening. A few personal highlights:

• Unbeknownst to us at the time, me and my date tried to sit in Tim Kaine's seats, because of a mix up with the ushers and other people occupying our actual seats. A nice young man smiled at us and told us it was the "governor's box." I smiled back and 1) assumed governor's box was just a fancy, made-up title, like king's box and 2) tried to think of what play I had seen this nice, young man in. Later in the evening who should appear in those very same seats but Mr. Tim "ohhh that's where the governor comes from" Kaine and his lovely wife. The young "actor" immediately began chatting with Mr. Kaine and I thought, wow, what a lovely moment for him, hob knobbing with the former governor. It took about five more beats for me to realize that it was U of R basketball coach, Chris Mooney, sitting in the place of honor, and that I was an idiot, an idiot who tried to steal Tim Kaine's seats. Thank God for Chris Mooney's intervention or there would have been a slightly awkward moment when Mr. Kaine arrived.

• Local news people are my kryptonite. Show me an NBC affiliate anchor and I get as starstruck as a thirteen year old girl in front of Justin Bieber. I simply cannot handle it. Once when I was little my best friend's dad took us to "media day" at King's Dominion and we ate lunch in a tent bursting with news anchors. I think I hyperventilated with Andrew Friedman sat next to me eating a hamburger. And so at this event, where there were none other than Heather Sullivan (in multiple outfit changes by the way, eat that Lady Gaga), Juan Conde (disarmingly handsome in person), and Gene Cox walking around, I could not have felt more overcome. Luckily I was sitting on the balcony and could hide my spazziness at least somewhat. I don't know what is wrong with me. 

• I felt slightly crazed with power knowing who all the winners were before they did. This is not a trait I'm proud of.

• It was incredibly cool to see how happy some of the winners were. Everyone we nominated was so ridiculously talented, and it's such a cliche but I hope everyone who was nominated felt like a winner. At the very least I didn't see anyone throwing chairs or pulling out hair afterwards, so that's a good thing. Although I'm sure if actors do fight each other, it's incredibly entertaining and dramatic. 

• Handsome actors are ten times more handsome in tuxes. How does George Clooney not get attacked by women every time he goes to an award show? 

• I chatted with a director who I played piano with in elementary school, waved at the mom of my elementary school classmate across the lobby, and saw several women who used to work with my mom at the Virginia Library. Which, I've said it before, but it can't be emphasized enough, Richmond=tiny, tiny world.

• I'm a complete newbie in this Richmond theater world and often feel like I'm just trying to catch up, but last night only reinforced for me how lucky I am to have had this theater reviewer job basically fall in my lap. I've lived here my whole life and I had no idea how much talent and creativity and dedication there was here when it comes to theater. I'm still learning, still making mistakes (oh there have been mistakes a plenty-let's just say I probably lost all theater credibility when I mistakenly referred to the uber-famous Wicked song "Defying Gravity" as Fighting Gravity, blerg), but I'm really happy to be even a very peripheral part of this all. I know actors/directors/crew members might sometimes think of theater critics as well, critics, snobs, ass faces, what have you. But the dirty little secret, at least speaking personally, is that I'm also a fan, a fan that occasionally writes critical things, but a fan nonetheless. Richmond has a pretty kick ass local theater scene, one that was represented wonderfully last night, and I'm really thrilled to be along for the ride.  

Why thinking of Haiti makes me hate the Wall Street protestors.

I went to Haiti on a volunteer trip more than a year ago, and I've only written about it once. I don't talk about it a lot, and I don't think about it as much as I should. The truth is it's easier not to. It's easier not to think or talk about starving children so grateful for even one sip of clean water, of a city center in ruins, of all the brutal stories I heard there about what it was like for those people, when in a matter of seconds, quite literally and figuratively, the whole earth fell apart. Yesterday I was flipping channels, and I came across the Haiti No Reservations, filmed after the earthquake in and around Port-au-Prince.

And there it all was-all of the confusion and sadness and shock that I took home with me. I watched those familiar images of tent cities and impossibly thin toddlers and people with such loss in their eyes, and I was reminded quite forcefully that I don't get to move past Haiti. The reason I went on this trip, the reason I know I will go on more trips like it, is to make it impossible to move on, to forget, to change the channel safe in the knowledge that it doesn't matter in the context of my life. I won't ever get over Haiti, and I don't think anyone who goes to a place like that does. There's too much visceral pain in the air in a place like that, too many ghosts.

The only negative that could ever come out of Haiti for me is if I was able to "move on", to forget. And the scary part is that there are stretches where I do, where all of the faces and the stories blur. But it's not my right to forget all that. I have the easy job. I got to leave, and now the only small part I can play, compared to the massive part others have played in that nation, and compared to the massive burden of its people, is to carry everything I saw with me.

And you know what, I haven't given those Wall Street protesters a lot of thought. I've been apathetic. But thinking of Haiti again, of everything I saw there, makes me want to walk up to those people and punch them in the face. Yeah, the United States isn't perfect. Not everything here is fair. It sucks that so many of us don't have jobs.

But dudes. GET OVER IT. If you're unhappy you have, compared to about 97% of the world, every resource imaginable to change your life. All of us in this nation are so tremendously blessed with the sheer dumb luck of being born here. And I've gone from not caring at all about these protesters to being really ticked off that they waste hours and days of their lives complaining about the unfairness of life in the United States.

We don't know from unfairness. None of us. Not a single one understand what unfair is. Unfair is a country where children die of malnutrition. We've long ago accepted that children die from starvation in this world and I can't for the life of me figure out how that happened-how this impossible fact turned into something intelligent life allows to occur. Unfair is a couple of hundred thousand people dead in a matter of seconds. Unfair is living with a government so corrupt and ineffective that you cheer when that government's main building collapses in an earthquake.

I want all of those protestors to go to Haiti. I want them to see unfair. I want them to talk to the people who lost everything, who have nothing, who have been living in tents for nearly two years, and who have no support to fall back on, no Welfare, no guarantee of treatment in an Emergency Room. And then I want them to stand there, in their hipster knit caps, with their full stomachs that have never known hunger or thirst, and complain about their lot.

I think it's good that I'm angry. I made a mistake in letting myself forget that out of everything Haiti showed me, it's the importance of anger. We can't change all the unfairness in our world. But we can sure as hell get mad enough to try to at least change some of it. Or at the very least yell at obnoxious protesters.

My Best Friend's Wedding (among other things)

On the way to the church

Oh what a whirl of wind. That's the best way I can think to describe the last few weeks-weeks that contained in them all of the following-viewings and reviews for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Merchant of Venice, and Wicked, a furious race to finish my copy for the November Belle (which is by far my favorite work I've done so far for the magazine because it includes not only a page devoted to running but a how-to-guide for oyster roasts, since I don't live in Charleston anymore there was some wonderful vicarious pleasure in  writing about salty oysters cracked open on chilly nights, the quintessential fall Charleston experience). I've ran 9 miles in preparation for the November half-marathon, the farthest I've ever run in my life. If you would have told two years ago that I would one day be able to run 9 miles I would have assumed the only way that could happen is if a rabid bobcat got loose on the streets of Richmond. And yet here I am, hopelessly and completely addicted to running, a sport I used to look at with nothing but wide-eyed astonishment over the fact that so many otherwise sane people would do that to themselves. 

I've given more baths and changed more beds (with people in them!). I've taken vitals on real people, not just mannequins or my classmates. I've done blood glucoses and charted in a real hospital computer system. 

I've streaked and poured and spread plates in Microbiology and wrote out a nursing care plan for the late Captain Phil from Deadliest Catch (and yes we got to watch snippets from Deadliest Catch in class and it was wonderful). I went apple picking (for the first time, how have I never done that before? I literally plucked an apple off of a tree and ate it, thanks nature for being so delicious and crisp). I went to a vineyard outside of Charlottesville (Now this, really, how have I never done? Wine is one of my favorite things in life and there are vineyards an hour away and I had never before gone to one-this is insanity my friends). I sat in the warm sun with a cheese plate, a bottle of local sparkling wine, and some lovely company and watched the absurdly beautiful Charlottesville scenery (darn me and my coastal inclinations, I really missed out on mountain life growing up). I climbed Crab Tree Falls (well half way up at least) and managed to make it down in the dark without dying. 

I signed a lease on an apartment! After two years of squatting in my parent's house and reaping the benefits of free rent and utilities, I'm journeying back into the world of apartment living-tiny kitchen and all. Luckily I'm only moving about 12 blocks from where I live now, so I will be able to continue to enjoy the benefits of free, home cooked meals, and a convenient washer/dryer that are not coin operated. 

And a little more than a week ago I watched my best friend since I was six get married. I can not think of a more surreal experience than watching her come down the aisle in her gorgeous dress, instantly flashing back to a million memories growing up together. The wedding was perfect. I made the wise (if not financially sound) decision to get hair and makeup done professionally, and while it may have cost extra it was a lovely experience to have professionals do all that for me while I sipped pomegranate mimosas and ate from platters of Chik-fil-A.

Getting ready

We danced, we ate, we drank. We took over half of Lemaire after the reception and opened our own, smuggled in bottles of sparkling wine until they very nicely informed us that shockingly, one of the nicest restaurants in Richmond is not BYOB. We took pictures in front of the Lee Monument and amused passers by as all 18 of us (bride and groom + wedding party) jumped up in down in formal wear. 

I gave a toast at the rehearsal dinner in front of 100+ people and managed not to a) pass out from nerves or b) get embarrassingly drunk from nerves. I only got a little bit weepy.

Rehearsal dinner with fellow bridesmaids, and two of my other best friends in the world

It's strange how firmly change becomes a part of life when you're in your 20s. Most of us spend 18 years in one place. And even our college years are only a slight shift. We still come home for breaks and feel like kids (or at least I did). But then your mid 20's hit and every few months there's something new, someone getting married, someone having a baby, someone moving away. There's new jobs, new careers. I think back on all that's happened in the last 4 years and it's incredible to me. I went from barista clinging on to my college life to English teacher in Thailand to unemployed writer to nanny to unemployed writer to nursing student/employed writer (and runner, still can't really get over that). 

I guess it hit me, maybe more powerfully than it ever has, as I watched my best friend get married, this girl I've known through dolls and braces and N'Sync and going away to college, that holy crap, we're adults. I'm an adult. And it's a very weird mix of emotions. It's been such a happy and beautiful experience and I'm so proud of and happy for my friend, but I've also had a couple of moments since the wedding where I've been hit by this wave of grief for the past and all of the silly, immature, kid moments contained within it. The thing about change is that it is absolutely necessary for us to thrive and grow and become who we're supposed to be, and we get used to its frequency, but I think even the best changes are always a little bit sad. It's that tiny bubble that wells up in you're chest, when you know the future is so bright and new and good, but you can't help but look back over your shoulder at what you're leaving behind. 

I guess the thing about change is that it wouldn't mean anything at all if it was easy. The only change worth having in life is the kind that is simultaneously beautiful and a little bit sad. 

Word Salad

First of all, did you know that "word salad" is actually a medical term to describe when someone's verbal speech sounds like, well, a word salad? I love that. I think it's my favorite medical phrase I've learned so far, well second to micturition (look it up).

But I thought word salad would also be applicable to this blog, because it's going to be a bit jumbled. First of all, I have been missing. I am very sorry for this. The last few weeks have been beyond busy, and I would lie and say that it won't happen again, but the next few weeks may be even busier so I will probably vanish from the interweb once more.

But I wanted to write, even if in jumbled fashion, because I miss it. I write professionally and get paid for it, but at the end of the day I really love blogging, even if it's for free, even if there's only three people out there reading it (hey guys!). Because it helps to corral all the neuroses that live in my skull and get them to stand in a straight line for a while at least. And if that sentence made no sense to you than clearly you are a more sane and together person than I.

So in no particular order, my thoughts of the moment:

-The absolute best part about the weather getting colder is drinking red wine. Does that make me sound like Courtney Cox's quasi-alcoholic character from Cougar Town? Okay I might be Courtney Cox's quasi-alcoholic character from Cougar Town. But at least I don't have a candle holder doubling as a wine glass that I've named "Big Jo".

Yet.

-I went to Wrightsville Beach for a weekend to celebrate my lovely best-friend's bachelorette. The house was very cool-an old 1930's beach house a stone's throw away from the water. The only problem was that when we arrived, other than the house being lovely, it also looked like a frat house. I wish I were exaggerating. There were dozens of beer boxes on top of dozens of pizza boxes stacked up all over the place. In one room not only was there a pair of man's boxers, but also a lady's bra (presumably these did not belong to the same person). There was sand everywhere. There was probably bodily fluid everywhere. We were a black-light and a David Caruso away from it being a crime scene. Now my first thought was, "Oh well guys, let's get a vacuum and an industrial strength jar of bleach and clean this place up ourselves." Luckily my much more assertive friend was there who immediately called the owner, let him know not only were his former occupants the Canadian equivalent of Jersey Shore (did I mention they were Canadian, I mean WHO KNEW?) but that the cleaning people had not come and that we would not accept it. NO SIR WE WOULD NOT. I SAID GOOD DAY. It was literally like that. And it was awesome. Not only did a cleaning lady arrive about 5 minutes later and scour that house to within an inch of its life, but the owner agreed to write us a check for our trouble. This was truly a life lesson. My way of doing things would have ended up with us scrubbing floors for two hours and probably catching Hepatitis. My awesome, assertive friend's way of doing things had us on the porch sipping champagne while our house was professionally cleaned, and getting paid for it to boot!

Also I now wonder if everything I've ever presumed of Canadians was a lie. Because these boys were dirty. And also I'm assuming smoking hot if they were getting ladies in and out of their house with such frequency that they forgot their under garments.

-I'm learning skills in school this semester. Skills! I know that sounds a little obvious, but let me remind you that my first degree was in English. Oh and I loved it. Book nerd that I was, I was in heaven. I didn't even care that the knowledge filling my head was useless, that if the apocalypse came and we were forced to rely on street smarts that I'd be that idiot who died while trying to lug around a stash of Jane Austen novels. I spent semester after semester learning things that were beautiful and lovely but that had literally no practical purpose in life. I mean for God's sake, I took a class dedicated to the novels of Tim O'Brien, Kurt Vonnegut, and Hemingway. And it was awesome. And I loved it. But really? What am I going to do with that people? If you know you're clearly more inventive than I, because I quickly realized about a week after graduation that unless I wanted to teach (which I don't, thank you 500 Thai children for consolidating that) my college experiences would never serve me in real life terms. They would help me to be awesome at trivia and pretentious at dinner parties-but no one was going to pay me for that.

But this, this is new. After just a few short weeks, I now know how to manually take a blood pressure (so much harder than it looks), take various pulses and respiratory rate and other vitals. I can miter corners on a bed (kind of) and put gloves on using aseptic technique. And my hardest learned skill of all-I can give someone a full bed bath and CHANGE SHEETS WITH A PERSON IN THE BED. That may sound easy, but I assure you it is not. I learned this at my first hospital clinical. Because I'm terrified of HIPAA, I won't go into any details, other than to say it was the scariest thing I've maybe ever done in my life, and there were points I was sure I was going to be that girl, the one you hear about in rumor and myth who was sued for malpractice on her first clinical, for giving someone a BATH. But I was not sued. That bed was changed and it looked fabulous. I've never been more proud of changed linens in my life.

But seriously these are honest-to-God skills. This is a trade. If there were a zombie apocalypse now I would probably not be the first one to die. Not really sure how taking vitals and changing beds would keep me alive, but I know it would have a better chance than being able to write a lengthy term paper on English Romantic poets.

-I've been catching up on all the drama over at my fellow theater critic, Dave's, theater blog (http://richmondvatheater.blogspot.com/), and long story short, some of Richmond's theater critics have apparently come under some pretty strong criticism by various and sundry people, some official, some internet commentators who probably wrote their posts in their underwear (not that there's anything wrong with that, I do some of my best writing when I'm not wearing real pants). There are a lot of layers to this things, and I can't speak for anyone, but personally I love reading my fellow critics' reviews. I think we're all different and all write differently, but at the end of the day we all have only good intentions, to write reviews that are readable and insightful.

My Richmond.com reviews, while not as prominent as Dave's or the RTD writers, have been criticized in the past for various reasons, and while I don't think it's a good rule to respond to message board"haters," I do want to explain something. One criticism that stung was a ways back and someone online said my review didn't go into the technical details of the play enough. And I unfortunately took that criticism too much to heart and let it influence my writing, which was a mistake. Because here's the thing:

I am not an expert in theater at all. I didn't seek out a job as a theater critic. It happened by chance. I filled a slot, and I know for a fact I was not hired because my editor thought I was a theater expert. I am continuously learning about this world that until recently I knew very little about. So for me to devote space in my reviews to sound design and lighting design is disingenuous at best and completely false at worst. If I'm writing about sound design it means that sound design was so obvious that it distracted from the story, and luckily that hasn't happened yet. I just can't speak to that stuff. Other reviews in town can, and if you want that in your review go read them, because they're pretty great. Me, I know story. Remember earlier in this blog when I said that what I learned in college had no practical purpose. Well I lied. Because spending four years learning about plot and character and dialogue and rhythm and voice and tone did prepare me to be able to write about that aspect of a play. And so that's what I focus on in my reviews. I, of course, talk about acting and directing and costumes and set, all of the things that I feel like someone without expertise can talk about without sounding like it's coming straight out of their you know what.

But I'm not going to get technical. That's not my jazz. When I write a review the number one thing I think about was if the story of the play moved me. The number two thing I think about is how to make my review readable, enjoyable for the reader who hasn't seen the play, who isn't an expert on theater either. And that probably would make some theater purists mad and sniff their noses at me and call me names. And that's fine. In the short time I've worked professionally as a writer I've gotten a little thicker skin. It doesn't bother me as much. I want to be honest in everything I write, and the way I write reviews allows me to do that.

So anyways, that's my little defense. It may seem out of the blue, but reading all the back and forth over at Dave's blog really had me thinking about the role of a reviewer and the role of reviews. There's no clear answer. And I will always be looking to improve and get better. But for now I play to my strengths and try to create something that people will enjoy reading. If you still want to call me names, feel free to use the comments. But at least make them witty.