"I'll See You in Fake Court"

As of now, we are officially in production week.  I feel pretty good about the show- we had some bumps in the runthroughs this past week but nothing I haven't seen happen before.  My personal problem is that whenever I start feeling comfortable with my lines is also the time that I start feeling terrible about my delivery.  Oh, and dancing.  That's my problem too.

In spite of all the craziness with rehearsals I had a very successful academic week as well.  Last Wednesday I got to participate in my first fake mediation of a case.  My co-counsel and I dressed up in suits and met with our two also-well-dressed adversaries and a 2L trained in mediation to try and sort out an intentional infliction of emotional distress claim between our two fake clients.  Since negotiation has almost nothing to do with law (it wasn't that difficult of a case and both sides knew the applicable law quite well) and everything to do with psychology, I spent the mediation trying to confuse the other team in order to throw them off.

I did this by (gleefully) calling my own client a dumbass multiple times (during otherwise very formal negotiations- probably not the best thing to do in the real world but very useful here) in the hopes that they would implicitly agree with me so as to undermine their own contentions for one of the elements they had to prove.  My co-counsel and I also agreed beforehand to make several red-herring demands which would sound reasonable but had nothing to do with our client's actual demands.  The plan was to use these as negotiation chips later to bring down the settlement cost, but we also ended up just getting our client extra things that he never asked for.  I think the tactics worked, as I have yet to hear of another team arguing on our case who got a lower settlement (which is what we wanted), and it was also a lot of fun.  

Friday I spent a good fourteen hours in the theater building things and then doing a full run.  Most of my time building was spent with Davia, who was very offended after she internet stalked me and found that I had mentioned Ben L on this blog multiple times without also referencing her.  Among the set crew minions, we are the most competent, so Ken the set designer used us as his Seal Team 6 and sent us to go do the things that actually required creative problem solving to figure out.  Our greatest achievement was figuring out how to move a giant six-foot-diameter globe flat that weighs a couple hundred pounds from the parking garages up to the balcony of the auditorium.  Earlier, Ken had nicknamed Davia "Wonder Woman" and after we finished one of our seemingly-impossible tasks he nicknamed me "Aqua Man."  I heard it as "Awkward Man" and unwisely repeated it back because I was confused.  People seemed to like it more, so now in certain circles I'm Awkward Man.  That should really be no surprise to... anyone.  

Friday night we had a Halloween party at Emily G's house (she is also awesome and one of my new favorite people).  I brought my detective trench-coat and someone suggested I just go ahead and be a flasher as my costume since everyone else actually put some forethought into their outfits.  To anticipate any comments: yes, I was wearing clothes underneath.

And then I hung out with Steph the Pirate Queen, Ben (as Brad Majors), and Ke$ha.

On Saturday I had grand plans for doing my homework for the week, but instead I ended up playing board games and watching movies all day (which I didn't have time for, but which helped relax me for production week).  I shared The Room with Ben and Davia, and immediately afterwards I showed them this and this.  (Thanks, Absi.)  We've since invented a game I'm calling joke-chain, in which the goal seems to be to start a joke by quoting one source and answer that joke with another logically following quotation from another.  Half of mine tend to come from lines in the show because I've reached the point where I can't stop thinking in lines. It's getting bad.  

Sunday we had a tech rehearsal that got us halfway teched with the show, meaning that we'll do another tonight and then have one dress rehearsal tomorrow before putting it in front of an audience on Wednesday.  Chance of randomized disaster on Wednesday is high.  But that's okay, it'll still be fun and the techs are worth it because the set and lights are really beautiful.

After rehearsal, instead of doing homework (which I did eventually get done) we had an hour-long debate about the following picture and all of the possible answers given certain sets of assumptions and meanings of the words.  Every time I forget I'm in law school something like this happens.

Yes, it's obviously not meant to be taken seriously or analyzed.  

We decided to ignore that and take it seriously and analyze it.