Lyrical atmospheres

Hello from Oklahoma City!!

Yes I arrived here on tuesday of this week, and have been in rehearsals everyday since. Dude it is awesome here, I was greeted by a cool guy at the airport, and I was given keys to my rental car. Yes my own rental car. And guess what kind, a PT Cruiser! ha, a blue one. Yeah that's the rental car they give everyone, so in the apartment complex where they house us out of towners, there are a line of Cruisers around every corner. Man if I only had my drivers license.

Well Rehearsals have been incredibly intense. We're doing the show Swing which is a dance revue show, so there are 28 dance numbers! We have 7 couples of ensemble dancers, one featured ballroom dance couple, and 4 singers, and 2 of them have to dance as well. I have never gone at such a fast pace to learn a show in my life. On our first day of rehearsal we learned 3 dances!! And this just isn't any ole dance number, these are all fancy fast partnering, and swing footwork choreography. It has been absolutely kicking my butt!! AND I LOVE EVERY MOMENT OF IT!!! Almost every number we have is a "get it" dance number. You know those big like show stopping dances. It has been such an amazing experience so far, all the staff is wonderful, even the artistic director is cool and down to earth, and has a relaxed fun attitude about him, and they just have this demeanor that treats everyone who works here like a top notch union professional. It's truly awesome, I've never experienced this kind of atmosphere before. I wil definitely be coming back here if they will have me.

Some news for you all. I was offered a role this fall in the ensemble of ALL SHOOK UP, at the Carousel dinner Theare in Akron Ohio. And you know what else, they are going to give me my equity card!!!! That's right something I have been waiting for, and need to really set me up as a true professional in this feild. So Praise God!! I didn't have to acrew points, I was worthy enough to have it negotiated in my contract. YEAH. And I also got a call from Cree, (my future roomate)telling me that he found a place for us to live in Jersey City that he likes, so It looks like I will be living right outside of Manhattan afterall. But HEy praise God I have a place to live now as well.

BORN in the USA

Hello Everyone!

I am sory it has been a while. I am now back on American soil, and it's been great to be home. I've been home for about a week and a half now, but I did a dumb thing and left my computer cord in Germany so I have not been able to use my puter. Oh well, live and learn.

Since I have been back I have been searching madly for apts in NYC. man it has not been as easy as I thought, makes me want to go back to Germany.

Germany was awesome!! The whole experience was incredible, and felt like I was on some great vacation, but the coolest thing about it was I was actually working!! Talk about the best job in the world. All the performances went really well, even when I sliced Mollys ear with my foot, when I slightly fell off the guys backs, and when people almost slipped and fell on sweat spots. They loved us , and treated us like stars, it truly was great!

Here are some random fun pics!!

Stay tuned, I am getting ready to do new shows!!

The Germanic adventure, and the 3 Gates

I've been here in Germany for 2 weeks now, and it's like we live here. We know our way around, and can get from to and fro with ease. Our days have been filled with adventure, discovery, and exploration, and a whole heck of a lot of walking. We would just get on the tram, take it farther then we had before, get off, and start walking around. We have found some awesome places, and parks, and it has been a totally incredible way to really feel at home in this city.
Something that is very popular nowadays, especially in Europe, is this outdoor acrobatic exploration called Parkour. It was named by the french, if you've seen the latest James Bond Movie than you have seen it. It's the beginning seen where He is chasing some black guy thru the city and he is flipping , and jumping off, and twisting thru all sorts of everyday equiptment. There is also a Madonna video with all of it in it. Well anyway being who we are of course we are going to do some playing, so Mauriah found this park that had all these cool things to play off of, A very interesting and awesome playground, that just happened to be right next to a nuclear power plant.

We also try and get as much culture as we can, which I think is just right on and awesome, so we went and checked out this modern art muesum. Now it was not the Modern Art Muesum that we wanted to go to, it actually ended up being the, let's say contemporary art Muesum. Dude this place was weird, and had some pretty stupid exhibits. And it also had some pretty unsettling pieces. For instance it had this one room with these 2 video monitors on the floor, and the one had this crazy painted guy humping this mayonaise jar, and the other monitor had him pouring all these condiments over his necked body, it was pretty horrible. On the top level there was the big open space with these bean bag chairs facing this empty white wall, and the piece was how the metal scapultings shadows hit the wall. kind of cool, but still weird. Outside was beautiful however, and going downstairs I got some good pics too.

So on another day when the crew went exploring they hit a huge jackpot, so the next day they gathered almost all of us to go back to this magical fantasy land, they called Narleyia( a mixture of narley, and Narnia). So we took the train to a stop further than most of us had taken, got off walked past some more residential housing blocks, a school, (of course thru all this we are warming up our parkour skills) and we past thru our first gate.






The first gate was this big nice wall, that looked like the entrance to some nice government park. We were greeted by beautiful gardens on each side of the paved path, How lovely we thought. As we kept walking I was just thanking God for the beautiful sunny day, and all the great nature I was seeing that seemed to be so far away from the city. We were all enthralled at how so much life and growth was in this place, and then we come across the fork in the road, and in so discover that this luscious garden of beauty, is actually the land of the dead. We were actually in a big cemetary. Talk about being thrown for a loop. This realization put a whole new dimension on how we were feeling, and added this extra level of awe.

Well after being lead thru there we came upon the path to a hedge wall, and as I saw the leaders dissapear , I knew we had reached gate number 2, the doorway to The fields of the children tamed Beasts. We had passed thru this small opening fence door in the hedge to an actual petting zoo!! Hahaha, it was awesome, so we walked around petting and feeding the sheep, and goats, and just watched the pigs playing. They also had baby ducks, and chickens. I have to admit half the fun was watching these cute kids around this place, absolutely adorable. There was also a small swing set which I got to be on and get that fantastic feeling that runs thru your body when you hang upside down going backwards. Man that is awesome!!!





We again are heeded by the crew of leaders to continue on, and they take us on this dirt path by the side of the zoo, and end up in some kind of maze. Literally some kind of garden labrynth, with the wall hedges being as high as over my head, but mostly at shoulder level, and what we saw over these walls were beautiful and funny. It was The Garden Village of the Dwarves! We saw all these luscious garden plats and they seemed to be hiding these small one roomed cabins. But it was a whole village of these extravagant gardens and bush walls with these little wooden shacks in the middle of the garden plot. It was incredible and the likes I had never seen before I had gotten here. I had seen something like this the first day we got here, for I went and got lost and ended up in another one of these garden village plots, it's truly amazing. It's like they move to these plots in the summer to soley plant and garden.
We go thru a series of leafed archways and stand in awe of our final destination.

THE SPIDER CASTLE!!


WOW! It is this extravagant public playground right behind these big soccer fields that is made up entirely out of intertwined rope. Not just some kind of jungle gym, this thing was huge, and shot clear up a story or 2 in the sky, with this rope connecting everything. There were 3 main spires, The 3 towers if you will, connected by bridges, and one other bridge to get on in easier way. There were also 2 other smaller circular ones on the sides not connected so that you could just jump up and down in like a trampoline. It was Freakin Awesome!!! Oh and we found out the hard way if you shake one area the whole thing shakes,(poor little girl). Man we spent the rest of the morning and afternoon there acting like monkeys and subjects of the Spider Kingdom.













One of the most awesome trips we took was our day trip to one of the top 4 cities to see in Germany, Cologne. Now in German it's spelled koln with a special double dotted o, think about how confusing that was trying to by a ticket. It was only about a 20 min ride, and the train station lets you out right in front of the Cathedral. he only place that did not get bombed during the war since it was the highest and most recognizable building. And It' amazing! This place took 600 years to build. And it is astounding, full of atherial awe, artistic magistry, and spiritual enlightenment. It also has a spiraling tower of somehwere between 500 and 1000 steps,(Cree counted), we went up and saw the whole city. It was just surreal, but absolutely worth it. Just amazing that I can have this experience being a dancer. God has totally blessed me, and this was the perfect place to give him reverence for it. Coming down of course was very dissying, and when we got out some of our legs were shaking for like 10 minutes after that. The courtyard behind was full of life size statues for entertainment, they were all pretty lame, except for one , he was the only one worth getting a picture of and giving money too, but when we're around in open space, there is nothing next to us, and we started playing around and doing some of our dances, and we ended up stealing the crowd from them, which gave them a smoke break, it was soo funny. I spent the rest of the day shopping, absolutely fabulous, I love Germany.

all things German

So so much has been going on. It is hard to keep you updated on a regular basis cause we don't get regular all the time wifi access, we only have it set up for all day or all night. So if I'm out all day, and then go out at night after the show, I'm pretty much screwed. And then On top of that we are 6 hrs ahead.
Ok, so the venue that we perform in is this big glorified tent, that from the inside does not look like a tent, just a glorious very chic restaurant. This is the Super VIP lounge for the clients and customers of Heidelberg Printing Press( who we're working for). The format goes they drink sit down have dinner, watch our show then have there dessert and continue drinking. Let me just reiterate there is mad money behind all this. Crazy stupid money!!!!
It is absolutely amazing for me to be here! I have crossed over to become an international dancer!!! Dudes that is so awesome!! I never in my life thought I would ever be in Germany, let alone considered high talent, and semi living here for a period of time. I'm just an awe of the fact that I'm here. You know it's very surreal for me. I have not had much contact with folks from the states, and so I'm not really feeling emotional, or spiritual intimacy here, so I feel like I'm not all together here, like I'm plucked out of my life for this period of time, to experience this weird dream. I think I also feel this way cause I have not been able to share this experience on a personal level with any of my close friends. All the times cool things happen I just want to do what I normally do, which is calling somebody, and I haven't been able to do that at all, which has been killing me. Some times I get lonely cause I might not see people till we meet to go over to the lounge. There's been a lot of solo exploring, which has been good but, I still would like to share it with people.

None the less a lot of cool things have been happening. Most of the time to and fro from the hotel to the tent Lounge, we've had this taxi bus, driven by this totally sweet older man with horribly bad teeth named Lucian. Great guy. Well one day he finally got to come in and watch the show. Man he loved it, which made us fantastically happy. To further our ecstaticness, and to show how much he likes us, after the show he gave us all little teddy bears that he had bought for us from Ikea. I have no idea when he bought them and when the idea had hit him, but let me just tell you it hit us all in that great spot in our hearts to get these bears. I'm still working on a name for mine though, it's got to be German.

The other thing that makes this a really weird experience for me is this, the dancers in the company call me a demi god. Which I do not encourage, and I hate, and I try as much as possible to give all the praise back to God. But what seems to have happened here is that everyone really loves me for some reason. Now in the show there are kind of 2 distinct parts where I stand out. There's this whole eygpt section where I'm like the pharoh and am the main focus in this 4 man duet. At the end of the dance there's this fun like hiphoppy dance party section, and they gave me a part where I have a little solo. I come out into the middle of the stage do like 3 or 4 turns in the silence and then do this big toe touch right when the music comes back in. It's a big little to do.but really not like a special thing. Well the President of the company has read our names out after the show one by one so we could bow, and both times for my name there has been shockingly more applause and shouting for me. It makes me feel bad. It is like this to the point that one night after the show, I was asked to go out and meet 2 young lady admirers, and have drinks with them. That was a weird night. Just didn't feel like myself at all, I'm not a smoozer. BUt I had to take one for the team and do it for the company, cause the ladys were very high profile in our clients company. we also went out one nite and in the club apparently we were told by a club patron, that everyone thought I was beautiful and was looking at me. So it's been really weird for me cause of everyone's high perception of me. It's definitely cool, but it's weird cause I don't know how to stay humble when there is this constant compliment. So I had a shirt made, it says, " Dusseldorf dunkle schocolade,". Guess what that means!?

SO Heidelberg wanted to make us feel special and thanks us so last night they took us to the rich part of Dusseldorf, over the Reign river, to this real italian restaurant. Exclusive, we end up going downstairs to this wine cellar where they have this elaborate dinner set up for us. Man it was all the expensive amazin stuff you think it would be, and let me just say I had pasta with truffles in it, you know it's high class now. It was just a total amazing experience.
I'm in Germany, WOW!