Like this:

久しぶり… Sorry everyone.  I got lazy. And busy.

The main source of busy-ness was the prefectural musical that took up almost all of my weekends from January to end of April.  Same as last year, foreigners who live in my prefecture produce and perform the musical in the local Japanese dialect.  This year the story line combined Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with the story of a samurai who united the prefecture and beyond… even attempted to take over Japan as well.

The story involved the Ghosts of — Past, Present and Future… and guess who was Ghost of –Past?  That’s right… me!  It was a huge switch from being just an extra last year to having so many lines, intense costume and makeup, and being in two full scenes.  Thankfully my character was not required to sing  *phwef!
The directors wanted Ghost of — Past to be a senile Kabuki actor who eventually gets beaten up by some bullies in the ‘Past’ scene, a la Ebizo Ichikawa.

My entry as the Ghost of -- Past

This is the photo that my makeup was based on… the ‘Lion’ kabuki character type.

Actually a doll, but this is the typical look for a 'Lion' kabuki character.

Anyways, the make-up was such a nightmare.  At our dance retreat about 6 weeks before performances, I did an allergy test with the white face paint, and got nada… but then the first weekend of technical rehearsals I wake up with a swollen eyelid and cheekbone!  Lovely.  And then later on, we discovered that the red paint was so strong that it traveled through a layer of moisturizer, baby powder and two layers of white paint to stain my skin an icky orange for two days.  Not my idea of attractive, but it certainly was dramatic and gave me a reason to talk to my teachers and students about the Musical- encouraging them to come!

The musical was well attended, and we raised quite a bit of money for a bursury to a local student who wishes to go abroad to study [any] foreign language.  Applications have yet to go out, but last year we sent a guy to France to study French and French cuisine!  YUM!

I’ll leave it there.  I hate it when the first blog post in a long time is an overwhelmingly long one.  Just because I haven’t posted in a long time doesn’t mean that I need to tell you every little thing that has happened since my last post.  Hope your lives are going well!

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