In Which Many Many Things Happen and I Italicise a Lot

Right, so first things first. My sister totally dominated her competition at a speech/debate tournament in Virginia, so BOO-YAH! In addition to her awesomeness, our club's debate teams (1 with my sister in it) advanced to the out rounds, even though both teams are made up of people who've debated 1 year or less (with the exception of my sister.) Great job Em!

While my sister was crushing the competition, Lucifer had two more shows, and then closed. As always, I'm happy/sad to be done with it, and I'm even happier that due to some ingeniousness by Prof. Slav, the chariot (usually called the "stupid chariot" or worse) finally worked right, and didn't get stuck bringing it on stage. Hopefully it looked good, I couldn't really see around Lucifer's awesome wings. Afterwards, we struck the set, and I got to keep Raphael's branch of peace, a demon dagger made of plexiglass, and one of those cool angel torches, which I call my epilepsy stick, since it flashes with three different colors on one setting. Immediately afterward, we started to construct the set for Alysha's play: Niada, which, due to my friend Mitch having to drop his role, I get to be in after all.

Niada is basically a re-telling of the original Little Mermaid story. I play Kade, the older brother of the man whom the mermaid (named Merin in this play) falls in love with. Since my younger brother is kind of an idiot (though well intentioned) I get to roll my eyes and make sarcastic comments, which suits me just fine. However, as much as Kade may make fun of him, it's obvious that he cares about his brother, so it won't be all sarcasm.

Anyway, after Lucifer closed I had a bit of a chance to catch my breath and enjoy the weekend. Earlier this week I got an e-mail asking me to go on a "mystery date" with someone unknown from Imani hall. I said yes, since I'd heard stories about people saying no to these things and it making people feel bad, and I immediately started worrying that it would be a very awkward day spent with someone I didn't know. I needn't have worried though. Come Sunday afternoon I found out that my mystery date was good friend Liz Brink, and we had a great time on a scavenger hunt through downtown Chattanooga with the other 20-some people in our group. We had a great time, and even though we came in nearly last, we still finished the whole list of things to find.

Sunday night we had the cast party for Lucifer, where we recorded a lot of testimonies about how God worked in the production, and it was all very encouraging and amazing to hear about everyone's experiences and how they grew during the show. Later on, we also played that awesome game we always play at cast parties (the question-answer game thing. I know I've mentioned it before here). It got recorded too, which will no doubt be a hilarious recording if anyone ever finds it. Highlights included:

Q: "What would you do if the whole world thought you were a rabbit?
A: "Well, I would avoid the taxidermy department."

Q: "What would you do if Justin Johns told you he had unlimited psychic abilities, was about to conquer the world, and asked you to be his queen?
A: "I would call Janel Corbett and yell 'It's true! It's true!"

Anyway, we had a blast, and several of the seniors read Prof. Hallstrom a very moving bible passage from Isaiah, as a thank-you gift for all her hard work. The iGallop made another appearance, and we had an awesome time.

Monday was a normal day, but today we had a snow day. Again. Oh, well. I guess we'll eventually get a week without snow. On the plus side, a bunch of people built an awesome igloo between Mac and Founders. It's absolutely massive, and has little snowmen carved into it. I'm not sure whether they're supposed to live there or if this is more like what Calvin does to his snowmen.

Oh, and last week at the Niada read-through, Katleyn and Alysha joked that because I'm playing Kade, I'd have a lot of fans. This prompted Jordan to make a Facebook group called "David Pickering's Screaming Fangirls." with some very amusing descriptions of me written in the info boxes. Highly flattering, and also really funny. If any of you happen across this, don't worry, I don't really have screaming fangirls, just a bunch of awesome friends. :)

Anyway, ciao for now.