Elizabeth's Laughter

03-29-2020 Through my studies of the performing arts, I have come across all four of these comic greats in various degrees. Watching highlights of their work was very entertaining for me.  Of the four men mentioned in the title, "Fatty" Arbuckle is a favorite of mine. He is clearly comfortable in his own skin, and that comfort and confidence allows him to explore a wide range of physicality in his skits. Additionally, he makes use of his own unique skills, incorporating impressive coordination with flipping pancakes and fun parlor tricks with cigarette tricks. His reputation as one of the comic greats is well earned. His performances bring a smile to my face without fail. In modern times, Charlie Chaplin is arguably the most well-known comic actor from the early 20th century. Even those who might not know his name, would recognize him by his signature hat and mustache. His reputation is well earned. Chaplin masterfully makes use of his skills and stature to craft wonder...

03-28-2020 Here are my top five comedic films: 1. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) 2.  A Fish Called Wanda  (1988) 3. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) 4.  Booksmart (2019) 5. Look Who's Back (2015) Honorable mentions: National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989) This is Spinal Tap (1984) Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)

03-23-2020 This is my sweet boy, Gus! I adopted him from the Humane Society in October 2019, so we will have been together for six months this April. As you can see, on his own, he is very photogenic. But when it comes to selfies... ...not so much. I find that the best way to take a selfie with him is to distract him with the squirrels outside.

03-03-2020 Tonight we had our local showcase. By we, I mean all twenty three BFA Performance Majors (Acting and Musical Theatre) in the theatre department. It is the first performance in a long series to come. We will spend our Spring Break in New York City attending workshops and presenting our showcase to agents and casting directors in the hopes that we will learn something new and maybe even have someone take an interest in one of us. But for tonight, we were simply getting our toes wet and seeing how audiences responded  to what we have been working on. Our showcase has been a long time coming. We have all been hard at work since September, preparing our material and polishing our skills. It has been a long process, but one that I feel I can take a lot away from. I am accustomed to quick rehearsal periods--a month or two at most--but I found there is something to be said for working a piece to excess. Every time my partner and I do our scene together, I find something diff...

Last year, I discovered I had a passion for directing through my required directing class. I spent the semester working on my own production of a short 15-minute play. I spent countless hours breaking the script apart and analyzing it half to death. I developed my concepts for characters, costumes, set, lighting, and sound. All of that and more was before I’d even held auditions and cast the show! Once I’d found my actresses for my small cast of two and rehearsals began, I fell even more in love with the directing process. It was exciting and rewarding to collaborate with my cast to create a unified vision. I loved being able to watch the show from the outside and give my feedback, and I loved it even more when my cast took what I said and created something completely on their own. Needless to say, I was determined to pursue my interest in directing. I spoke to the head of our department about being his assistant director on an upcoming collaborative production with a profes...

02-29-2020 Last night I spent my evening at the Dallas Museum of Art as a painting come to life for their Family Mystery Night. I was the Lute Player out of Pietro Paolini's painting Bacchic Concert, and I, along with my fellow paintings and sculptures, was a suspect in the destruction of the DMA's talent show. It was up to the children running throughout the museum's galleries to find out who had ruined the talent show by gathering clues and interviewing artworks. Working as a hired actor for the DMA's event wasn't new to me--I'd actually done it over the summer for an adult murder mystery--but it was my first time interacting so closely with children as an actor. There were some things that I knew to expect going into the evening. For example, even though I'd had my script for weeks and knew what I was supposed to say, I knew it would be inevitable that I would have to deviate from my given lines. Crowds of children and parents were going to swarm me ...

02-20-2020 As an acting major, a part of my required curriculum is a class called Dialects. For the first month of the semester, we spent our time working on British dialects (RP, Cockney, and MLE), but this past week we began our work on American dialects. We jumped right in with the New York dialect. One might expect it to be easier to take on an American dialect when one is already an American. Whoever thinks that is the case is sorely mistaken. Immediately, it seemed, the class was struggling. We couldn't keep ourselves from slipping into Cockney, which we quickly is remarkably similar to the stereotypical New York dialect. The only thing to do in a situation as absurd as a roomful of acting majors trying desperately to appropriately distort their speech to no avail is to laugh. And laugh we did. The laughter reached an uncontrollable peak when, during an exercise where we practice saying sentences that highlight the linguistic features of the dialect, one girl's word...

02-14-2020 For several years now, I have been interested in voice acting and voice-over work. I have taken classes dedicated to the subject, I've taught myself basic sound editing skills so I can submit self-taped auditions, and most recently I have been taking an independent study on voice-over and voice acting. As a part of this study, my professor helped me and my fellow student in the study set goals for things to accomplish this semester to help us grow as voice-over artists. Our first goal was fairly straight-forward: create a commercial demo reel.  A demo reel consists of about a minute to a minute and a half of audio showcasing an actor in different audio clips. In this case, the demo reel would be geared towards commercials for television or the radio. We scheduled a time and date to use a recording booth at the KTCU station, and got right to work. There was plenty to do before we set foot in the recording studio, after all. We had to find bits of copy, or text for us ...

02-24-2020 I find that every time I return from rehearsals for my current show, Miss Molly , I am in a brighter mood, and I am certain that laughter is a major contributor to that. While ultimately the goal of our rehearsals is to produce a successful play, that doesn't mean we aren't allowed to have fun and enjoy ourselves. We laugh and joke with each other, and on occasion, the laughter doesn't stop. That very thing happened to me at rehearsal just the other day. Miss Molly is a comedy, so it is only natural that our characters, dialogue, and situations are laughter-inducing. The final act of the play sees one character, Aloysius, dressing up as another, Molly, in order to fool my character, Lady Houseington. In the midst of my character trying to determine which person is the real Molly and her daughter, another woman speaks up, Mrs. Manley, and asks me if I have considered that the two are actually twins. I am supposed to respond along the lines of, "I would r...