Showtime and shopping!

We did it! We performed our play this weekend and it went really well! The first performance was on Saturday night. It was a good, solid performance, but we were a little discouraged because the audience was DEAD! This was a comedy, yet they hardly laughed at all the entire time. We decided this was mainly because it was a primarily Japanese audience, and the Japanese don't tend to laugh very much during performances (I believe I discussed this a long time ago in reference to movies, but apparently it carries over to live theater). The next day we had a much better audience, since that's when a lot of the cast's friends came, including mine. My coworker and student came, as well as Jenn and my friend Eimilly (I sort of lost touch with Eimilly for a while, but she's a really wonderful person so I'm very glad that I've been seeing more of her lately). Before the Sunday performance I called Jenn and told her that if something was funny she should laugh, because I think part of the problem is that people are nervous to laugh if no one else is laughing with them. I believe some other cast members also asked their friends to laugh at the funny parts, so Sunday's show was a much more enjoyable experience for both the cast and the audience! Jenn filmed a few scenes from the play, so once she sends those to me I'll post them up here. I am so glad that I had so many people come to see me, they seemed to really enjoy the show (even though they're obliged to say that to me, I think they really did) and I was overjoyed because they brought me flowers! Afterwards, I went out for dinner with Jenn and Eimilly and then we went to this sort of bar/lounge where Eimilly's trainer from work was DJing. There were a lot of teachers and staff from our company there and Jenn and I ran into our trainer (our boss) and talked to him for a little bit. I was pretty glad that the lounge closed early because I was quite exhausted after all the acting and commuting back and forth from my home to Yokohama over the last two days. I had also missed my last train the night before and had to take a taxi back from Ikebukuro, which was a huge pain in the ass because taxi's after midnight are exorbitantly expensive. For a 20 minute taxi ride home I had to pay about $45, and that actually was cheap compared to some of the taxi horror stories I've heard from my students. I DID NOT want to pay another $45, so going home at a decent hour last night was definitely a plus.

Today I slept in and lounged around, but in the evening I met up with Jenn in Ikebukuro. We decided to go clothes shopping because we have been invited by Jenn's super rich friend to a pool party at the Grand Hyatt in Roppongi Hills (a very upscale area) next Saturday, and we didn't really have anything good to wear (we don't plan on swimming, but we needed some classier clothes). I am also going to a friend's birthday party the night after that and I just found out that we are supposed to wear formal/semi-formal attire, so I needed something for that as well. Jenn didn't have much luck, but I actually found something to wear for both nights. For Saturday I got this long red shirt/dress that I'm going to wear with black leggings and for Sunday I got a black and white patterned dress. I still am in love with the amazing customer service in Japan! Everyone is SO helpful and the way they package up your clothes is just amazing in itself, they even have plastic things to go over the regular bag to protect it from the rain! Once I'd paid and they were finished wrapping everything up and putting it in a bag, they didn't just hand it to me, they actually escorted me out and carried it to the door for me. The second girl actually escorted us out of the department store and then directed us to the correct train line (even though we actually knew where it was). I think that going to stores without being waited on hand and foot will take some getting used to once I return to America!