Laurie Cider! You have been summoned on Crotalus Commons

Lila St. Martin

February 12, 2009 6:22 PM

Laurie Cider! You have been summoned by Lila St. Martin

The Concert was starting to feel like a major party she had yet to pick her robes for. As it got closer and closer, the amount of stress it caused Lila grew greater and greater. A few weeks before, she had just felt vaguely anxious when it crossed her mind. Now, it had started infiltrating her very dreams. They were never very pleasant dreams, and more than she would have liked featured the entire school laughing at her.

So she worked harder, taking ideas even from her sister and biting her tongue around the other prefects. The list was a far cry from being as helpful as Lila would have liked, but extensive study had opened up some new avenues. She was not quite sure whose idea it had originally been except that it had not been Jordanna's, but the idea of using Laurie Cider for what she said she was good at had finally come up.

It was Saturday before Lila's common room scans finally had the desired effect of locating the third year. Going to her dorm only long enough to retrieve her notebook and have her mirror assure her that she was presentable, she headed back into and across the commons to ask the question.

"Hi," she said, with the fake smile she reserved for things related to the Concert. "I'm Lila St. Martin. Are you still interested in writing a script for the Concert act?"

16 Lila St. Martin Laurie Cider! You have been summoned 80 Lila St. Martin 1 5

Laurie Cider

February 12, 2009 8:40 PM

Responding as directed! by Laurie Cider

The usual evening-time din of the common room had dulled to a slight blur of white noise as Laurie pushed her nose a little closer to the well-thumbed pages of her book. At fourteen years old, one might think that she was becoming too old to waste her time on the same books she had been reading in the fourth grade. But really, they were such a predictable comfort that it didn't matter how many times she read the same pages, or how much time passed between the re-discovery of its faded jacket in a forgotten portion of her bedroom and its eventual loss.

She brought her brown eyes up from one particularly gripping passage, as George and Nancy were trapped in the gorge as the forest fire made its way down the mountain side, blinking fuzzily. She caught onto the last few words:

"--interested in writing a script for the Concert act?"

"Um," Laurie replied intelligently, creasing her place in the paperback. Being confronted with the full attention of one of her house's prefects was a tad disconcerting. "Yeah, definitely. What were you looking for- I mean, I wasn't thinking of doing anything terribly original. It might just be easier to take something really well known and just, you know, re-make it."

0 Laurie Cider Responding as directed! 0 Laurie Cider 0 5

Lila St. Martin

February 14, 2009 9:05 PM

Excellent! by Lila St. Martin

Because she had a mental picture of how things ought to go and had not factored in variants, it took Lila a moment to realize she'd directed most of her speech to a book's back cover. She resisted the urge to look around frantically to find anyone who had noticed; if she acted like nothing had gone awry, there was a better chance that no one would see fit to comment. Not noticing the preoccupation of the girl she was speaking to wasn't exactly up to her standards for prefectly dignity.

She sat down as Laurie, who had at least had the decency to not make her repeat herself, returned to the real world and got to business. Sort of. At least she had been thinking of something to do, even if Lila - with, she felt, cause - was a tiny bit concerned about what that might be. What, after all, was well-known to a Laurie Cider might be one of the things a Lila St. Martin's parents would never dream of giving their approval. She knew literally nothing about the other girl's background.

"We're prepared to give you a - reasonably - free hand with it," she said. "So long as the material isn't intentionally aimed at offending a certain portion of the audience." That hadn't actually come up in discussion, but she was, for all practical purposes, the senior prefect, and no one could be crazy enough to want the act to send a blatant message when the situation outside the school was already tense.

"I've made you a copy of the sign-up list," she said, then passed it over. "When do you think you can present a final manuscript to the prefect council?"

OOC: Sign-up list is basically the same as the notice from before midterm. Lila and Helena Layne can both be used if-and-as needed as well, and I've been informed the same goes for Josh Santoro and Adelita Garcia (dancer).

16 Lila St. Martin Excellent! 80 Lila St. Martin 0 5

Laurie Cider

February 23, 2009 5:26 PM

Seriously though I posted this earlier. by Laurie Cider

Laurie paused, her brows furrowed thoughtfully. "Well, I've been thinking it over, and I imagine it might be best to storyboard it- you know: explain what happens in each scene and what the characters are supposed to achieve, and let the actors- or whoever- decide how to word it. In fact-" Her voice gained a rush of excitement. "I had one particular idea, and maybe it's a bit too much, but anyway."

She leaned in, mindful that her voice tended to carry far too easily. One of her best childhood memories had been when she witnessed her brother Bryce's sophomore year play. It was supposed to be Hamlet, but the students had re-done the entire story as if it was acted out by iconic people from history. The end result had been hilarious, even to her much younger self who had absolutely no idea what Hamlet was supposed to be about. Even at fourteen, Laurie was still a little sketchy as to the whole plot: something about incestuous uncles, girls drowning in creeks, and a skull figured in somewhere.

"I was thinking what if we did Romeo and Juliet- but as if the characters were actually members of the staff. I mean, everyone knows Romeo and Juliet right? So we make Romeo- I don't know, O'Leary maybe?- and Juliet could be Coach Fox-- it would all be along that gist." Laurie couldn't help the giggle that interrupted. She had a sudden thought of Flatt professing his undying love for Coach Fox, and the image was too much. "And if we keep the script really generalized, we can have the musician types make up some songs and the worse the lines, the better the humor, right?"

OOC: Very sorry about the lateness on this. I thought to pull it together before the grand Crotalus offline meet-up. Just an idea, by the way. Lila can crush it under her toes or whichever.

0 Laurie Cider Seriously though I posted this earlier. 0 Laurie Cider 0 5

Lila St. Martin

March 01, 2009 12:17 AM

I've dreamed I've posted stuff before. by Lila St. Martin

Her vocabulary was not exactly deficient - she'd been given a fairly good education, for a girl, and the second girl at that - but Lila found it difficult to follow what was being said to her. Storyboarding was not something she'd heard of before, and neither were people named Romeo and Juliet, who Laurie seemed to think everyone knew.

Beyond that, it didn't sound much better. Words and phrases jumped out at her - actors decide how to word it, really generalized, worse - and none of them sat well with her when she imagined the school evaluating her based on them.

"It sounds very...disorganized," she said, deciding it was safer to focus on that than on not knowing what Laurie was talking about with the Romeo and Juliet thing. Much, much, much less embarrassing for her. "What about scenery?" This was an important question, since Lila had sweet-talked her father into paying for it. "Would this - plan - need a lot of it to work?"

Comedy wasn't Lila's personal cup of tea, but she could get by with it. Having to prepare for this Concert had improved Lila's diplomatic skills; while she was in no risk of being transferred to Teppenpaw, she had gotten to the place where she could agree that the objective was to make something happen on stage at the Concert, even if that Something was a something Lila Evangeline St. Martin didn't like or - within limits - thought tasteless. Waste of money was quite another question, though she would never be tacky enough to come out and say it unless sorely pressed.

16 Lila St. Martin I've dreamed I've posted stuff before. 80 Lila St. Martin 0 5

Laurie Cider

March 03, 2009 10:37 AM

Wow, I have not done that. by Laurie Cider

"Not really," Laurie reassured. "It's a form of improvisation. The actors would be told the goal of the scene, they already know their characters' purpose, and they would need to achieve it. It's intended to ensure simplicity."

Laurie wished she had some way to demonstrate what she meant, but without a troop of handy actors, it was a moot point. She pursed her lips considering the question of props and background. "Well, Romeo and Juliet has some fairly iconic scenes- the balcony one and the chapel, but since we'd be doing an adaptation, we can make the background whatever we want really. In fact-"

She broke off briefly, running the acts- somewhat fuzzy in her memory; she was going off the movies more than anything- over her fingers. If they went with the whole Academy incarnation version of the play, then the balcony scene could actually be the Quidditch Pitch, maybe. She pictured a mock-up of a Quidditch tower and their Romeo character balanced on a broom; it could actually work out fairly well, she imagined. "In short: not really. We'd be mirroring everything off of places in the school anyway, so a lot of it can be used from things already on hand."

Laurie paused again, tilting her head to the side, a thoughtful expression crossing her features. "I'm not explaining this very well, I think." She often had issues translating the mental into the verbal. "Okay, so you know, basic plot of Romeo and Juliet- star crossed lovers torn apart by feuding families and the like, right? The story's been re-made a million times since Shakespeare gave it to us- and even he borrowed the original idea from some other story. Headmaster Bulla would be the Prince, the two feuding houses could be Crotalus and Aladren- and Romeo and Juliet could be Professors Flatt and Powell. The Friar could be Mr. Fox-Reynolds. . . um, Coach Fox could totally be Mercutio- oh gosh, I can totally see her as Mercutio!

"But it would be us Crotali playing the staff members as the character interpretations, of course," she made sure to include as an aside. "Is it making better sense now? I might be over-complicating it with too much detail right now."

0 Laurie Cider Wow, I have not done that. 0 Laurie Cider 0 5

Lila St. Martin

March 14, 2009 8:47 PM

It's an occasional downside of posting at two a.m. by Lila St. Martin

Shakespeare was another word that meant absolutely nothing to Lila, but his ideas seemed very impractical. If Romeo's family was in a feud with Juliet's, how had they even met? Laurie didn't make it sound like they'd married to end the feud...An absolutely horrible idea struck her.

"It's the other way around," Lila said. "You aren't giving me enough detail." She tried to think of a delicate way to put it. "Did these people have an affair? We cannot put on a play that endorses adultery."

They most certainly could not, and not only because of the obvious problems with what the staff would think - a minor detail that was next on her list of things to iron out. It wasn't much fun, being a girl whose crazy step-grandmother had named her 'Lila' a year after that Raines scandal, and the older Lila got, the more important it seemed to ensure that no one, ever, thought about that.

Since she would rather not have Laurie think about it - the inclusion of Catherine Raines in the school's most infamous clique meant it was possible that everyone in Crotalus knew at least the bare details of that old story - she added her next question onto the end. "And how much are you intending to mock the staff? That...stunt of Bulla's at the Fair last year means we might get away with a degree of it, but..." A shrug summed it up better than she could. "The teachers are the ones who score our exams."

16 Lila St. Martin It's an occasional downside of posting at two a.m. 80 Lila St. Martin 0 5