As you might expect, everyone was pretty excited this last weekend, as it was closing weekend for the show.

Friday: Rain.

The wife and I mourned the terrible turn of events by going to the IMAX theater to see the most recent Harry Potter movie, which featured Gary Oldman eating his own face, as he does so well. The movie also contains some hilarious scenes where the young fellow playing Harry attempts to conceal his prominent, embarrassing erections, which is somewhat difficult when they are apparently six feet tall. I can't wait for the next movie, which I assume will have a scene showing Hermione shaving her upper lip. On the IMAX screen, it will almost certainly look like wheat being harvested.

We did indeed have shows on Saturday and Sunday, however, bringing up our final tally of performances to 7 out of 12 scheduled. This is no way to win a pennant. On Saturday, having gone nearly a full week without doing the show, the actors were not quite on their game. One actress, having gone up on her lines, completed a dramatic paragraph by stuttering, "When gold and silver rust . . . we will . . . we . . . after all that happens . . . ah . . . then it will be funny." Well, good. At least "funny" is somewhere in the future. At another point, a different actor lost his shit completely, and simply didn't say his line. We hissed at him to give him a kind of half-assed prompt, to which he hissed back, "Keep going!" This is right at the bottom of things you want to hear onstage, coming a close second behind, well, complete silence.

These things happen, especially when events conspire to deny a cast regular shows. On Sunday, we were confident that we'd be more on our game; perhaps to help facilitate this, one cast member suggested we get together for a "unity circle" backstage before we went on. My tens of regular readers might easily predict my reaction to this suggestion.

"I'd rather die," I said. But these things take on a life of their own--Christ, actors are weird--and after some cajoling from people who really felt strongly about it, I reluctantly trudged over to join the circle. Unfortunately, since the cast was so huge, the circle began to spread out into the actors' seating area, where many deck chairs had been laid out for us, and we found our circle blocked by these various items. Everyone stood around, not knowing what to do (like, I don't know, move the circle), and we stared at each other dumbly for a little bit, an uncompleted circuit needing unforthcoming help from . . . anyone. I found myself clutching a chair back in lieu of someone's unifying hand. Finally, I turned and said to portable furniture, "Chair, I think I'll miss you most of all."

The final show progressed well after that unlovely benediction. People were picking up their cues, and overall, it was a pretty good show. There were, however, developments of a sort. At one point in the show, one character flings dry oatmeal at another; this did not go unnoticed by the pigeons who live in the park and they immediately flocked over to devour the discarded grain, unasked-for guest stars. They were actually hilarious, and lent a certain "Where's Tippi Hendren?" aspect to the proceedings, particularly when they had finished up with the oatmeal and began stalking other scenes with a definitely gluttonous sparkle in their creepy side-faced eyes. There is a "Last Supper" scene which coincided with their tentative assault, and they seemed to be eyeing our plates of plastic fruit with an unnerving potential of voracity.

I actually fucked up a line because the sky-rats were so brash; I kept imagining their hive-mind communiques:

"NO-WINGS HAVE SUSTENANCE! SEE HOW THEY EAT GRAPES!"

"SKY-RATS ATTACK! FIRST, OATMEAL! NOW GRAPES!"

"BE OF CAUTION! THEY ARE NOT FUNNY."

I'm hard on the show I just did, and I've been hard on the shows I've done lately, and I think it speaks to something: I'm going to lay off acting for a while. Possibly a good while. I'm probably tempting fate by even writing this, but I just haven't been enjoying myself doing acting for a long time, and that's no good at all. I have a job already, and it pays a helluva lot more than acting--which, you know, pays nothing--so when acting turns into another job, well . . . you can do the math. It makes me sad and kind of guilty to admit it, but hey: in the final analysis, if I'm not enjoying it, what the fuck am I doing?

I've already turned down one role, and I don't expect I'll be accepting another soon. And with my crummy attitude, who would want me in their cast?

I know. Unity Circles everywhere are wondering who in the hell is going to notice those poor chairs.