Month: October 2010

And this year we have a sorceress, a witch, and a black cat — and of course Lunn's usual assortment of fantastically carved pumpkins.

The girls have gotten to the serious avarice stage of Halloween development — they went out with pillowcases for max capacity candy collecting, and hit the road fast to get as much as they can, as fast as they can.

We got lucky on both pumpkins and costumes this year — the pumpkins mostly came from a giveaway at the grand opening of a local bank, and the costumes are all holdovers from previous years, with a few new accessories. Ana would live in that cat costume if we let her…

So last year when we took De to Circe de Soliel, she started asking about acting, performing, and such. After her umpteenth request, I registered her with a casting agency locally, that I heard about from a friend who'd been an extra through them. All this seemed to do, tho, was get us on a mailing list for endless hype exhorting us to upgrade to the paid actors and models directory, which we of course ignored.

Last week, however, out of the blue, we got a call that the agency was auditioning kids De's age for a part in a commercial, so I took Ana and De both down there. It was pretty cool – there were lots of people there auditioning for all kinds of parts, and the girls had a wonderful time.

They had each girl in turn play out a short story, basically the staff told them what to do and they did it. "You feel sick…" "You're scared" "Now you're feeling better and you're hungry," stuff like that.

We went away thinking it had been a very cool experience but expecting nothing to come of it. Then I got a call that they wanted Ana to come back in for a call-back audition! (Apparently De had been too bouncy to be convincingly sick on command…)

So we did the call-back audition today. They had a bunch of women there auditioning for the "mom" role, and they were matching them up with little girls auditioning for the "kid" role and having them play through scripts. It was again, neat to experience. Here is Ana at the beginning of the call back audition, where they photographed her holding a name board.

Ana enjoyed herself, and they seemed pleased with her, but again, no expectations. Of course, Ana's now got the bug, and keeps asking if we can do it again soon…

Jenya's gotten very focused on drawing recently, and decided to sign up for an art class at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

She picked the "Drawing Wildlife" class, taught by Mark Klingler. It's actually an adult art class, because she wanted "real" art lessons, not pasting tissue paper onto cardboard (her words).

She handled herself very well with all the grownups, and the instructor was very supportive and encouraging. It was a great experience. They picked something from the CMNH hall of mammals, and then spent 3 weeks progressively sketching, drawing, painting, and polishing a watercolor of whatever they picked. Jenya learned quite a lot.