April Grab-Bag

Perhaps it was a little disingenuous at the end of my last post, to write "This is how I would like to remember this project." After all, that was just one of the many facets of Dynamo, and I don't want to privilege one aspect over another, not when I have so many worthy memories. And also, tearful Shakespeare-induced gratitude is nice, but the bigger news from this project is that The Rose of Youth won Vassar's playwriting prize, the Marilyn Swartz Seven contest! So after our first show on Friday there was a wine-and-cheese reception, and free pizza for the cast, and an award for me. Here I am (with bouquet):

Again, it felt so strange to walk down that ramp and accept the award...ever since I first heard of the Seven Contest, I imagined winning it someday, just as I had always dreamed of seeing my play about Vassar performed at Vassar. So to have both those things happen, in an instant, on April 11, was quite surreal.

Now that Dynamo's over, it's nice to remember that, oh yeah, I have a life as a college student outside of the theater. Some of the things I've been enjoying:

• Lying in the grass in front of the Drama building, scooting further and further back as the afternoon wears on and the shadows come creeping across the grass, and reading The New Yorker. I just finished the article in this week's "Journeys" issue about the woman who went swimming in the Arctic Ocean. How nice to be warm and safe on the Vassar campus, not surrounded by icebergs and jellyfish and 30-degree water!
• Cooking for myself! I didn't feel like anything too elaborate tonight, so I made one of my quickest and easiest meals, Pseudo-Bruschetta (my own invention). Brush crusty bread with olive oil, maybe rub it with garlic, and toast it in oven. Meanwhile, heat some olive oil in a skillet, then dump in a can of cannelloni beans. Mash the beans with a potato masher, the back of a fork, whatever, while stirring them around. You want them to give up their liquid, then you want to reduce that liquid into a thicker paste. When beans are mostly thickened, add a can of tuna fish packed in oil. Then dice 2 plum tomatoes, add to the mixture, and cook until just heated through. Serve with toasted bread, drizzled with extra virgin olive oil and parmesan cheese.
• But I'm also grateful to generous relatives who take me out to dinner. My parents treated me and Rachel to a great meal on Saturday; and tomorrow my uncle and aunt are coming to Poughkeepsie to attend a wedding, and are going to take me out to eat, too!
• Having my windows open and hearing the Vassar chapel bells every day at 12:30 and 5 PM. I'm going to miss them when I go.
• Making fun of the Miscellany News, its typos, the silly things it says about drama kids, the obviously made-up questions submitted to our sex columnist. E.g. "Can you tell me about syphilis?" Though this did lead to the greatest headline I have seen in a while: "Tolstoy Contracted Syphilis, And So Could You."
• Catching up on my work for all my other classes... This week I have given a presentation on The Taming of the Shrew, another on nineteenth-century perceptions of female hysteria in France, worked on a new one-act play, and read about fin-de-siècle Vienna and Budapest.

And now, because I was just reminded that Mr. Lehrer turned 80...and because the Pope is visiting America...and because I want to prove to my dad (a Lehrer fan) that I'm not mad at him, though we have been bickering via e-mail for the last two days... here is Tom Lehrer singing "The Vatican Rag."