All over town, people are working on their Jell-O. Well, probably not, but I know one guy in Portland who is (the Jell-O Knight) and surely someone here besides me has it all over their kitchen. Mine is also filling the living room.
That's because I am visually oriented and need to see all the differently colored pieces out on plates and trays so I know what to make and get stimulated in new directions. I have more in transparent tubs, divided by color, and sometimes size, but I like to lay out my pieces first before I glue anything up (and when I say glue, I mean fasten together with melted gelatin. It's super-gluey.)
It's kind of layered on a card table and when I get interested in another project, that just goes on top. Right now I have a large papier-mache project in its final stages taking up all lf the working room in my living room and I need to stash it somewhere. I'm making props, something I can never resist.
Mostly I use big cardboard boxes, sometimes flattened, to make set pieces and other props, and of course they also take up a lot of space in my small house. I'm doing one drawing today that is almost ready for going full-size, and another big drawing that is not for a Jell-O project but just because I wanted to see if I could do it.
It's an optical illusion that I got off the internet, a floor painting of a chasm with a wooden plank bridge over it. I sketched it out and quickly realized there is a lot more to it than I expected. For one thing, the photo is taken from the perspective of a person who is viewing it on the floor, which is just one of the several views it will get which will all have to be coherent. Someone looking at it from the other side will have to understand it, as well as someone looking at it from above, and from the other two sides. And it's big, over four by four feet, and I don't happen to have a space on the floor clear enough to put it down. Every so often I take it out on the porch to look at it from several angles.
What is saving me is that I keep reminding myself this is only a pencil drawing. I can keep working on it endlessly until it looks right, and maybe the drawing is all that I will be able to make. I may need to enlist a painter with more skills than I have at rendering textures and perspective. I could also collage some of it if I want...like use wood-grain contact paper for the wood, for instance, or colored papers for other parts of it. A co-project with that is a very, very tiny miniature diorama that I just want to make to see if I can do it.
Problem-solving is a lot of fun. I guess that is why I am still a self-employed artist with a lot of projects like maintaining and repairing two houses and a yard full of fruit trees. I like ongoing projects I can think about and plan, sometimes just letting my brain ponder them on its own while I do other things. Gradually I get a visual plan for the steps I will need to take and work myself up to launching into the project, or at least getting the materials together. I'm working on at least a half dozen things like that, some stretching over years, some just staying on the list while I don't really get started. I'm not going to run out of things to do, though I may run out of the ability and will to get to them.
But Jell-O has a hard deadline of the end of March (the show is the 25th of March) and props have to be ready or not get used. I rarely have to compete for the task of making them...other people in the troupe seem to have less time and energy for producing the visuals of the performance outside of their costumes. Sometimes we will get people who like to coordinate the costumes with similar accessories for all of us but mostly we just do our own and hope they coordinate somehow. I have not worked on my costume yet, though I got a purple apron at the HM which I plan to build it around. Being the Queen of Jell-O Art is a delightful role, costume-wise, and I can have as many aspects to it as I want or have time to fit in. Usually there isn't a lot of time and I don't really plan any costume changes at the moment...though it just occurred to me that I could use some accessories to enhance each scene change and that could be a lot of fun. Sometimes we like to add details to our costumes just to amuse the other actors in the troupe...and those rarely even come out at the Dress Rehearsal because it's more fun to wait until the show. Some of us do that with our lines, too.
I finished the third rewrite of our script this morning, and anything from here on is just tweaking, with the main narrative pretty pinned down. We'll continue to change our own lines to fit our characters, make more jokes, and say things more cleverly as we rehearse. Hopefully we won't bring in any more major themes...it is always a big challenge to integrate the themes we all want in it. Each one has to be articulated somehow to the audience and we use parody songs to do a lot of that, but it all goes by fast and it's doubtful that anyone really gets all of our jokes or that all of them are even gettable. If we don't have a good sound system and the right placing of the mics, they might not even be hearable. One of our best shows, Jell-O Wave, included a few Beach boys songs with complicated harmonies and all kinds of subtleties but our sound was so bad, you can't even really watch the recording. It was a bit of a heartbreak as we worked really hard on that show.
And of course the last three years have not really been live shows at all. We had to jettison 2020, which was promising to be amusing, and then did zoom and recorded shows in 2021 and last year, which were a lot of work still, but felt incomplete and somewhat less than satisfying. Like so many things that were compromised, I'm glad 2019 worked out. I did learn to try not to take it all quite as seriously though. Like everyone keeps repeating as we brainstorm the narrative, It Doesn't Have to Make Sense!
But of course as a writer I want it all to mostly make sense, and to be clever and original, and maybe to say something beyond Jell-O Saves the World which is generally what we end up saying. Either that, or it's someone's hero's journey and that's what so many stories are about, just with different costumes. This one is kind of neither, but it isn't finished yet either. Things have a way of settling into the familiar grooves as we leave the phase of putting everything in and enter the phase of trimming out what isn't going to work. I've learned just to ride the wave and see how it ends up. None of it is worth fighting anyone about. And for a bunch of actors who are supposed to be ego-driven, we are mostly not. Ego gets in the way of the final product, which is supposed to be pure fun. Easy to forget that goal.
So, except for the realization that papier-mache is heavier than expected, everything is moving right along. It's messy, but I like it. I hope we get to rehearse in person this year. That damn Covid seems to be circulating just as much as ever, just not officially. I know more people who are getting it now than I did in any past year of it. Still not me, so far. I don't have time to be sick, so I hope I'm lucky. Just being careful is probably not going to be enough.
