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Ashes to Ashes
Day: Brand Old Day
Weather: Cats and Dogs
Shortly after the holiday the drama school was back in full swing. And Succubus hadn’t waited a second to perform her New Year slaughter. The first victim was my beloved Acting Head Timothy Hayes. Tim has been at the drama school for over 10 years and under him, lots of outstanding actors were trained. He had put in a lot of efforts to keep the acting course up-to-date without compromising the main element – acting training. However since Succubus came, she was trying to up root the acting course into a way that she thought useful for students. Instead of real theatre training, she decided to put in street performance and motion capturing etc., which means new students won’t be able to get on to the stage for real production training until halfway through semester two in Year 2. The Acting Department of course is not happy, as the basic purpose of the acting course was acting and theatre training. Meeting this resistance, Succubus was trying to reduce the influence of the teaching staff as much as possible.
First of all, she invited her friends to come to direct productions and kicked the acting staff out of rehearsal rooms. Then she unraveled a series of white terror in the meeting room belittling the knowledge of acting staff and sometimes even publicly humiliated them. When such news reached the students, a few year-3 students organized a student walk out to protest against the change. News reached Succubus through the minions, so she immediately sent warning letters to these students telling them that if they walk out they will be pulled from all final year productions and they will not be able to showcase their work for agents. When Tim heard he that was furious so he went to reason with her. Succubus was waiting for this opportunity to put him under the guillotine for a long time. After the meeting, she suddenly announced that she reverted Tim’s employment terms with the school because of “inappropriate and distressful behaviours” against her. To give her sufficient time to get someone in to kick Tim out, she put Tim on a temporary 6 months contract after 15 years of service with the school. Completely angered by this move, Tim complained to the Board directly which forced Succubus to extend the employment to one year pending to revision.
When Michelle Conroy, another much loved voice teacher of the school heard that. She was so upset that she decided to take 6 months’ long service leave before deciding whether she will continue to stay at the school. Meanwhile, Succubus is gearing up herself to kick board members who are against her out of the Board. Her partner in crime Molotov Lamia was busily ringing in votes from idle members presenting their own “facts” so that they could secure their non-sitting votes. The last Director Jarrod Campell and a few other concerned members were racing against time and Molotov to secure vote before the AGM in May. At this point it looks like the school is going to fall apart under Succubus, as she did with the so call art management company in UK before she returned to Australia.
While the drama school in the heat of another political storm, I was trying to figure out my way in my own career storm. Jobs were slow since the New Year. Apart from some isolated auditions that are scarcer than isolated showers at the Red Centre, there was virtually nothing. The current situation with the media is that people are inbreeding to secure their own jobs as the economy is still recovering. As a result that means a lot of actors were not called in for anything as most main and supporting roles were decided even before pre-productions started. There was once a call from a casting director asking Hugo to send me to a free gig for a limited budget feature. Hugo didn’t like the idea of free gigs but then would look at whether it would help my careers. It turned out it was another gig asking me to be a funny Chinese restaurant owner for a comedic scene. Hugo, who really hated the idea of me being stereotyped, turned the casting agent down point blank. In fact, lately Hugo had been discussing with me about going over to LA to try my luck. The main purpose is to secure an agent or a manager there to start up myself. He said Australian media is quite hopeless for non-Anglo actors, no matter they can act or not. He said for me who was well trained and can do the job well should break away from the chains of stereotype casting in this country. His words kept resonating in my head making me to seriously re-consider my acting future in Australia.
On the Library front, things were back to normal. Normal means dealing with all the extra-terrestrial behaviours of various personnel there. Recently Eva had been publicly disputing my commitment to the job and was telling people that it was a waste of money for the Library to keep me around. When she talked about that in one of the meetings with my boss again, I confronted her on her statement. She said she was commenting in a good will manner so I shouldn’t be upset about that. I told her to piss off and told her that if she was able to finish the job in time both Claire and I will not be here in the first place. Also I told her maybe the workplace thinks that it is better to keep someone with has other commitments but can do the job instead of relying on someone who claimed to have full commitments but could never get a single project finish on time. Also I told her to wake up from the illusion that she was a good worker and did everything fantastically because she sucked at everything she did and every time people needed to pick up her shit. Claire and my boss’ jaws dropped as I said that and the meeting room sank to a dead silence. Eventually my boss wrapped the meeting beautifully and professionally and everyone left. She had a word with me afterward but at that point although I understood her good intentions, I was very through and done with Eva’s stupidity. The good thing that came out of this was Eva left Claire and I alone and completely disappeared from our office. The only communications with her now were through email (which I preferred so I could have records) and she also stopped bitching about me to anyone anymore.
I thought the New Year would be a good one, but it looks like another rough journey is about to start.
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