The Unnecessarily Catalogued Fulltext Open Access Diary of an (Acting) Librarian Chapter 19

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Alice in Thunderland

Date: Days of Thunder
Weather: The clouds begin the thunder and crickets murmuring

Actors usually create characters by observing other people around them. They observe, deconstruct and recreate. That’s the art of character creation. However, when you are working in a place that is saturated with middle to post-middle aged women who thrive on pettiness in life, that won’t give you much advantage in your art.

I need to correct that statement cos I did get that gay bitch job by observing the cat fights of these women. But then if that’s all I got from them, either I will become a gay bitch myself or I’ll just be stereotyping myself further in the industry.

Alice the Thunderland has been parading her success over Eva Cologne in the project but that hasn’t made work easy for Claire and I. Despite the fact that she actually is not our supervisor, she has been showing up a lot without reasons but just to try to tell us her importance in the whole matter. Sometimes I did wonder whether she got any real work to do. Surely she has been telling people how busy she is all the time, from her own office to her ex-co-workers in the library, but then if she is so busy why would she have time to go around telling people about that? That is a paradox that Claire and I could never figure out. Another thing that puzzled us is that why does she always carry a sour puss face with her? Surely after her triumph on Eva, she would have something to smile on as they were life enemies. But then even when she smiles, it just looks like an upward crack on her sour puss face and every time she laughs her squeaky voice just makes things worse.

So you may wonder if she has such a squeaky voice why is she known as Alice the Thunderland? That is because of her temper. She is well known for her temper whenever things didn’t go her way. And at this point you have to know that her way is not always the best. But probably because this job is basically her life, she just wants everything her way to live an easy life. As far as I heard, she is never married, never had a man in her life and also no family. Her only family member is a sister who is doing much better than she is with a happy family and two gorgeous teenage kids. We’d met her once at a function she and Alice are like heaven and hell. Claire and I could never figure out how come they could be so different. Anyway I digress. Claire and I had witnessed her temper in several occasions such as meeting times didn’t suit her personal schedule. With her, she can cancel your meeting anytime she wants but you still have to organise things around her schedules. Failure to do so, you warrant an angry email from her condemning you to eternity of your incompetence. I feel lucky that I am not the person organising them but did feel for Sonia’s PA.

You may further wonder how she got where she is now if she is that bad with people. Well she might not be good with men or other staff, but she does have a superior skill at her disposal – brown nosing. In the last few years, she has been sucking up to people superior to her and presented herself as a capable person by organising trips for bosses including Sonia and the library director. She will go to the distance of beating information out of their PA’s to find when they are going on trips and “accidentally” book a trip that will run into them overseas or interstate and conveniently join them because of the coincidence. I don’t know how much the bosses like her but the fact is that she has been getting what she wants inside and outside of the library because of this superior skill. Maybe as an actor, I really do need to learn this skill to go further, but then do I want to go that low? The other day after another catastrophic meeting, Claire told me she finally knew why Alice always carries a sour puss face – because she brown nosed so much that every time she inhales she can only smell shit and thus the sour pussing.

On the home front, my sister has finally come out of her hiding. She finally faced the fact that she can’t sing. She has been pretty quiet these days probably still trying get over the mockery she got at the audition. But the good thing is that everyone in the house finally got the peace required. She also stopped pestering me with stupid ideas about her singing and dancing and let me get on with life. Hopefully she will find something she is good at and work on it. Mum is definitely happy that she gave up singing and back to her uni studies as she always prefers a “normal” career for her kids than anything arty farty.

As for me, Hugo has been working hard to sell me and I did get one or two odd jobs here and there but nothing substantial to keep my payroll coming. So it seems that I will still be doing this shithole library job for a while to keep my mum happy. Well at least I got my meals and laundry done when she is happy, so all is not lost.

The Unnecessarily Catalogued Fulltext Open Access Diary of an (Acting) Librarian Chapter 18

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Greed…um…Greek…um…Greed Tragedy

Date: Labouring Day

Weather: Frosty and cold

Many things had happened since I last wrote two months ago. We got a new Prime Minister and Australia’s first female Prime Minister who is being commented more on her style than her work. Mum got really upset about the change as she loves the previous Prime Minister because he has a Chinese son-in-law. She basically voted for him because of that.

Mum: “Of course I will wote for da family!”

Me: “When did he become our family?”

Mum: “A Tzainese son-in-law is as gud as a family!”

Anyway politics isn’t anything that I’m interested in unless they developed a more friendly art and cultural policy that helps actors getting more work. Another friend of mine has moved overseas and saw that there are more opportunities in L.A. However the catch is you will need a Visa before anyone is interested in you. My friend is half American so there is no problem for him, but for me, unless I can get a sponsor, things are not as easy. And apart from that I don’t really have an extensively varied showreel that I can put together to impress potential employers about my versatility in my art. I met a Blogger of the Herald Post the other day at one of the functions. He said basically there are no well-trained Asian actors in Australia to do any roles so I should stop complaining about it and settle with stereotypical roles. I told him that I am Australian and for his information there is lots of Asian and ethnic actors graduated from drama school so it was very deluded of him to make that statement. He said he went to more casting than I had eaten pasta so don’t argue with him. I told him I know more well trained ethnic actors than the hair he lost on his head so don’t argue with me either. He was obviously offended by my statement and walked away. Why is the truth so difficult for people to digest?

On the drama school front, the saga continued to unfold when Angela finally resigned with an explosive email about “she doesn’t want to work in an environment that doesn’t treasure her contribution and experience”. Obviously the all staff email was sent directly against Succubus. The interesting part was that under Succubus’ strict curfew Angela still managed to get the email to all staff AND students. Succubus’ was furious about that but then there was nothing she could do. She tried to locate the culprit but the IT department refused to give in to her own private detectives – yes she has employed a company to investigate “ethical” issues in the drama school.

A few weeks later, Leonard, the founder and a current Board Member of the drama school announced his own resignation. There were fights at the Board for quite a while now. The two camps were Leonard and the teaching staff representing the artistic direction and Succubus and her main minion Little Tommy. The tug-of-war was an even game until the point that Little Tommy went around bad mouthing Leonard and his allies to the sleeping members and hypnotising them into surrendering their votes to them. Seeing that she will have sufficient majority votes, Succubus then moved forward to marginalise Board Members who were against her and eliminated them one by one. The Herald Post has long been following the story since dad broke that news on his program. So at the latest open Annual General Meeting, they sent a journalist into the auditorium. When Succubus and Little Tommy found out there were journalists in the hall, they asked security to remove them as “the meeting intended to discuss internal issues that should not be of journalists’ interests”. When being pointed out that since the drama school is federally funded by taxpayers and it is an open meeting, everyone should be able to attend, Succubus and Little Tommy called for “proximity removal”. However that kind of action didn’t go well with the media of course. A week later, there was an explosive coverage in the Herald Magazine on the front page titling “Dramas at the Drama School”. In the story, there were interviews from Leonard, Angela, Danielle etc. there were also whistle blower stuff from current employees within the drama school. Although no names were mentioned, everyone knows who are rebelling against Succubus silently. I was told that Succubus was furious about the coverage and called the paper demanding an apology. However, Herald said that they will only do so if Succubus turned in all the information they need for an extensive coverage of the school – including the accounting details about why the school turned from black to red in just two years. As expected, they never heard from Succubus again.

Against all advice, my sister did queue up for Australian Idol two weeks ago. As expected, she was completely mocked and ridiculed for her lack of singing talent and fashion backward taste. Mum had repeatedly told her that she sounds like a chicken being slaughtered but my sister insisted that the music industry needs a unique voice like hers. She reckoned she would be the multi-platinum singer who can even crack the US market. She also thought that if she threw dad’s name at the audition, she will get through. Dad was quite on arms on that idea as he knew that it will just tarnish his reputation in the industry if my sister did that. So the family was in war the week before my sister got bombed at the audition. After her epic failure at the audition, she locked herself up in her room for two nights and threw all her “Singstar” games into the bin. As for me, I picked them all up and sold them on eBay for a good profit. As mum always said, there is always something good from bad situations. This is definitely one of them.