The Final Countdown

Our last full Monday in Moscow!  Already!  Finally!  Time moves so strangely here, this whole final week is so full of mixed feelings of “How can I ever leave?!” and “It’s really time to go.”  Today had those moments in spades. 

I woke up exhausted after our excitement with urgent care last night, and headed down for singing.  We had a substitute translator… and let me tell you, translating for Marina is not the easiest gig for a translator.  Poor Boris looked like a deer in headlights.  Most of the time I understand Marina and don’t need translating, so he sort of dropped out as we were working my song (I managed to go first), and once I was done, I headed out to pick up a prescription for Susie (ah… clever pseudonym) and brought it back to her at the dorm (she had decided to stay off the leg for most of today).  Then I headed back down to the MXAT where there was a lot of grouchiness about a weird situation that is definitely not blogworthy, but is absolutely frustration worthy.  I guess I’ll just say I wish people would stop trying to draw lines in the sand between theatrical disciplines.

Then it was time for acting class, which had its ups and its downs.  We did some really good work, and some really frustrating work.  We got some really good instructions, and some really opaque instructions.  Then we participated in this weird staged photo shoot for a brochure or something, and did a few Chekhov etudes before calling it a day.  At that point I turned over the tickets for tonight’s show (the ballet Giselle at the Stanislavsky/Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre) to one of my PhD cohorts, gave her directions to the theatre, and booked it back to the dorm to see if Susie was up for making the trek to the ballet.  She met me in the kitchen all dressed and ready to go, so I escorted her down to the theatre, met up with the group, and left them there.  This was a show for which I was only able to get 13 reasonably priced tickets, so one person took a bullet and bought a more expensive ticket, and one student and I opted out of the show altogether.  Now, this is a beautiful theatre, and the show is performed by one of the best ballet companies in Russia... which is to say one of the best ballet companies in the world... but I have to admit, while there are a lot of ways that I like to be told a story, it turns out that ballet is not really one of them.  So I was pretty much fine with bowing out of this one in favor of a night to myself.

I had all these grand plans about working on my paper and my script… but I ended up taking a shower, making a sandwich, having ice cream and beer (my Moscow comfort foods) and taking a nap.  I continue to feel like I’m in a very deep hole, and I’m not sure when I’m going to manage to find a way out… but it had better be soon!