Oxford Tea and Rubbish Landlords

The fact that my landlord is a pain in the bum has nothing much to do with this post - except I wanted to rant about it so slipped it into the title, and I'm sure that over a cup of tea tonight Stevie and I will rant about that... A LOT! hehe

Anyway back to the show which is rapidly approaching... I have been baking with tea, researching tea, joining the tea appreciation society! I now have a director for my show which is proving to be a HUGE help. I have met with Doug and sorted out how to do the sound cues, and sharing the lighting with Sally (floor plan to be produced tomorrow if all goes well). I have been surfing the net for tea blogs (of which there are a lot) and ordering tea props for the show... man it has been a bit crazy! 

I'll blog more on the practical side of things later as I get the show up on its feet this week with Maike Hale-Jones my marvellous director who I met with last week. Maike is proving to be a great person to work with - she has loads of ideas and comes from a live art / theatre background that is the same as my own, so we have very similar taste and opinions on performance - only Maike has the advantage of having an outside eye with training as a director! I showed Maike the video of the scratch performance and the first thing that she picked up on was the pace, delivery, and static nature of the material which was brilliant as they are the areas that I know need working on. 

I have already changed the delivery of the show, which works well with how Maike saw it becoming a bit more energetic - anyway we shall see... I kind of need to finish the script! HA!

I realised this week that I haven't actually had tea with people that I know! So I set off to Oxford and shamelessly begged everyone I know to turn up and have tea with me. I had tea with lots of old friends which was great to catch up. It was also interesting to see how different the conversations were. My friends know me and my relationship to my Grandma so were able to relate to me on a different level. When I have had tea with strangers the focus was much more on them and what they wanted to tell me, whereas with my friends it was more about me and how I feel about the project. Analysing what I've learnt, and my relationship to my Gran. It was great because I didn't need to spend time going into any background stuff - it was all already there.

turns out that Brad (above) doesn't like tea if any of you are wondering about the Grolsh can in the tea mug! 

After having tea with friends individually everyone kindly agreed to drink EVEN more tea and have a group tea. It was great to have more than one person there as it meant that I didn't need to do as much work in the conversation but could observe a lot more. We kept it all girls as I felt I wanted to get the 'gossip' angle... and gossip we did. 



After girlie tea - I went and had tea with some of my friends parents... yes by this time I did have a tea baby in my belly! They are all people that I have known for a few years now - it was great to get the perspective of people from my parents generation on the project whilst already having knowledge of me and my family.  

It was a lot of tea this weekend! Fun though :o)