The Westing Game - A Journey Through My Eyes

A couple of months ago I saw that a theatre group I've acted with in the past was having auditions for a play called The Westing Game.  The name sounded very familiar so I looked it up and found that the play was based off a book of the same name, a book that I had read when I was in 5th grade.  I'll take just about any opportunity to act, so I figured that I'd go ahead and audition.  I also figured that it would probably be a good idea for me to actually re-read the book since I didn't remember much of it other than bits and pieces.  My first thought, before I started reading it, was that it was going to be a bit juvenile.  I mean, I'd read this book when I was a kid, sure there are those books that are timeless and that you love all through your life from childhood to adulthood, but I couldn't really imagine this being one of them.  I was completely wrong.  It turned out to be one of the most brilliant books I had read in a good while and I loved it.  With my first reading I immediately knew what character I wanted to play, a woman who just didn't fit in with the other characters.  They laughed at her behind her back, ignored, and treated her, quite honestly, like crap, until of course they needed her and then they were all willing to kiss up to her.  In that book, she was the person who I could identify with the most, with the way she felt and to an extent to the way she was treated.  I think I read the book through at least five times before my audition, just so I could get a good feel of the character and nail the cold reading of the script.

What's Going Without Saying Should Be Said

So this post might seem slightly random to some people, but to me its really not.  Today my family's having a kind of birthday party for my grandmother on my mom's side.  It's definitely not going to be your typical kind of party though.  First of all, its at an assisted living facility where my grandmother lives.  And second, there's no telling how many of us she'll even recognize.  My grandmother was diagnosed with dementia last year.  That was something new for all of us to deal with, but I don't think any of us were expecting her to deteriorate so fast.  In a matter of months, basically between August till Christmas Day, she went from the sassy, almost bratty, tiny grandma I knew to this feeble, emotional person who called me Esther.  She had no clue who I was or who my cousin was.  Not exactly the best Christmas one would hope for.