Greetings from the Unified Professional Theater Auditions in Memphis, Tennessee! I spent the weekend eagerly following the news from NYCC in between auditions, and enjoying a flurry of excited text messages over Yen’s acquisition of Yotsuba&! So exciting! I also have a review in today’s Manga Minis for volume five of Shugo Chara! which is a series I have been enjoying very much. Be sure to check out Deanna’s latest post, too, where she talks about Wild Adapter!

On another small note, I’ve added a sidebar widget here that displays my Twitter updates for anyone who is interested. I’m not much of a, uh, tweeter, but frustration over my hotel’s painfully slow internet service drove me to find a way to make small updates with my phone, and this seemed like the easiest option. So there they are, near the bottom of my sidebar. You may choose to read or ignore as you please. :)

I am currently waiting on the little pot of watery hotel room coffee that is brewing in my bathroom, and attempting to find a way to soothe my aching back. For those of you who have never been to group auditions like this (which I’m assuming is most of you), the way it works is as follows:
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It’s a beautiful, sunny morning in Charlotte, though I’m still enjoying it through the window of my hotel room, as I lazily prepare for our first day of auditions here. I’ll just be watching our callbacks all day, so I don’t have to rush around to get to the general auditions when they start this morning. I suppose I’ve achieved something when I get to hire other people to do all the rushing around.

Charlotte is really a lovely city, though I admit I’ve only seen about three blocks worth of it so far. After arriving yesterday, our assistant production manager and I walked over to the theater where they were doing registrations, and there was an Indian cultural festival of some kind going on in the street. Multiple booths with delicious, spicy-smelling food, and lots of women walking around in colorful saris, it was really a nice welcome to the city.

For anyone who might be wondering, I ended up not taking any of the advice I was given on what manga to bring on the plane, though I did try. Our local bookstores and the comic shop were unhelpful in my search for volume 1 of Dororo (though I could get volumes 2 & 3 at one Barnes & Noble), which was what I’d most strongly considered. I’m happy with my choice, though. I ended up getting the first three volumes of Nana (which I’ve meant to read for a long time, finally cemented by Johanna Draper Carlson’s recent review of volume 9), and wow, what a charming series! Now of course I’m wishing I’d bought more of it, but the volumes I had effectively dulled the horror of my two flights yesterday, so I’m very grateful to them.

Time to start rallying myself to the day’s cause. More later, perhaps. In conclusion: Banana Fish. :D

This post is a bit of a mish-mash, which probably reflects the state of my brain after the long weekend. At the moment, I’m thinking a lot about travel. This coming weekend, I’ll be heading to Charlotte, NC to attend the Southeastern Theater Conference auditions on behalf of the children’s theater company I work for. We have quite a few actors to cast for tours starting in January, very serious business, and yet my mind is currently focused on two things:

1) What manga should I bring on the plane?
2) Where does one buy manga in Charlotte, NC?

If you know the answers to these burning questions, please do let me know. Also, I’ve finally purchased my ticket for the New York Anime Festival, so there will be quite a bit of travel for me this month. Thankfully, that is a much easier trip, which also allows me to see old friends in the city, and I certainly won’t have any trouble figuring out where to buy manga. ;)

Speaking of manga, as I’ve mentioned somewhere around here, I’ve been subsisting lately off of what can be found on my local comic shop’s used shelf. They rarely happen to have whatever volume I need next of the many series I’m collecting, so I’ve been reading the first volume in a lot of series. A couple of the series I’ve started recently because of this are Million Tears (which is only two volumes, total) and Zig Zag, both of which I’ll talk about a bit here.

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I am officially half-way through my southern casting tour. Flew in to Nashville yesterday, where I met up with our production assistant, Cecilia, and her friend Adam, who is assisting us while we’re here. Since we were arriving in town at rush hour, we decided to grab dinner before the drive to Atlanta, which was lovely, but of course meant that we didn’t get to Atlanta until after midnight. We held auditions there this morning, and drove back to Nashville this afternoon. At this point, I am extremely confused about what time zone I’m in.

I had some much-needed downtime this evening, so I can be fresh for a new batch of auditioners tomorrow morning. We’ll see more people tomorrow than we did today, and then there are plans to see a play at Chaffin’s Barn (Cecilia’s old stomping-grounds) in the evening.

Saturday, I’ll be here on my own until it is time to go to the airport, and so the question remains: Where the hell do I buy manga in Nashville? Advice welcome.

I’ll be very happy to return to husband, dog, and cat on Saturday night. ‘Til then, hope you’re all well.