Back from Maine

I think I've become the kind of person who spends the whole time before a vacation stressing out about how much I need a vacation and then spends the whole vacation stressing out about how much work I should be getting done.

Sigh.

Anyway, I've got two big local performance projects on my plate right now. I'm currently cast in a multicultural awareness play for the freshman orientation at John Carroll University, which goes up this Friday and for which we have been feverishly rehearsing (with the wrinkle that my vacation threw a week-long absence in the middle of an already tight rehearsal schedule).

Shocker of shockers, I play the Asian guy.

I'd have invited everyone I know to come see it but I think it's 1) only for incoming freshmen at John Carroll who need to be educated about diversity issues on campus, and 2) of limited interest to anyone who isn't an incoming freshman at John Carroll who needs to be educated about diversity issues on campus.

In all seriousness, a lot of the situations in this play -- like white students throwing a hipster-ironic "ghetto party" where everyone dressed up as black stereotypes -- actually happened at JCU, and it's kind of depressing and frustrating that stuff as basic as "This kind of thing = BAD" still needs to be made the focus of huge educational initiatives, but that's the world we live in.

In other and more exciting news, I've been cast as a gang member who dies in a Cleveland indie film. I don't think I can give much more info than that due to the impressively scary NDA I had to sign to be part of this project, but suffice it to say I am extremely excited to finally die horribly and messily on the mean streets of Cleveland -- a dream I have had since I moved here (almost every  night, in fact).

I swear I will be posting more stuff (or, as we say in the small business world, "generating quality content to foster and maintain engagement") as soon as I get some breathing room. Look forward to: My audio work on the "Book of Voices" audiobook project, some blasts from the past with commercial narrations I did that got on YouTube, some new monologues I've been working on and my entry in Vice.com's Vine contest.