Look at me; There's got to be something more than what they see

one of my best friends

I attended rehearsals for Grease on Friday night and tonight (yeaterday technically). We open Tuesday. This particular director doesn't like to hold rehearsals the night before opening nioght. It's a combination of a superstition on his part and a belief that the cast will perform better on opening night if they're rested. 

I won't necessarily be rested, as I have medical school with which to deal, but I probably won't be as bone-tired as I would have been if we rehearsed tomorrow night, as studying will always come first for me even if an important dean is telling me not to sweat it and that I'll get as many chances at scoring acceptably on tests as I'll need. I'd still be studying into the wee hours after rehearsal until I felt confident in terms of my mastery of the material. I may study a bit late, but at least the studying won't have to come after a rehearsal.

Rehearsals have gone well. The cast knows their lines, their dances, their songs,  and their blocking. I suspect the only thing holding them back was the character portraying Sandy, and I'm not hlding them back. There have been a few changes in choregography, which is throwing the Danny Zucco character for a bit of a loop, but I'm confident he'll get it, and even he thinks it's for the best. The previous Sandy was a bigger girl than I. The choreographer addded a few more lifts because I'm a lightweight. "Danny" will get it and it will work out well.

I'm very fortunate that this is a flat role in terms of acting. i could recite the lines for something reasonably heavy, but I wouldn't do so with any depth. This is Grease, not Man of La Mancha. I can do this.

It's funny that everyone sees the Sandy character as a blonde, primarily because Olivia Newton-John played the role in the movie. I assume that's one of the reasons the dean thought of me when his wife was looking for someone to step in as Sandy. Marie Osmond was originally slated for the role but turned it down because the message in the end wasn't really in line with her Mormon values. With or without her Mormon values, though,  I can't really see Marie Osmond as a perfect fit in the role quite to the degree that Olivia Newton John was, I tend to wonder; would Marie Osmond have totally changed everyone's image of Sandy (or would the movie have been a flop)? I think the contrast of a darker Danny and a fairer Sandy works well, anyway.

By the way, I readily admit that my fittingness for the role in terms of my hair coloring is totally courtesy of Lady Clairol. Without chemical assistance, I'd be a dishwaer blonde at the very lightest. Some people who color their hair are reticent about admitting it. I'm not in the least. Besides, my brother knows. If i tried to keep it some sort of a secret, he would have something to hold over me. It's in my best interext to be open and above board about the natural shade of my hair.

When I was a baby I was a towhead. As a young child, my hair bleached out totally every summer but darkened each winter. The baby picture of me is taken in December just after I rurned two. It's December. I'm wearing warm-weather clothing because we're in San Diego.

Close friends of our family just gave birth to identical twin girls. Both babies were closer to six pounds than five and seem to be very healthy, for which we're all very grateful. For identical twin babies (they shared a sac and a placenta, so there's no question about their monozygosity versus disygosity) they don't seem to look all that much alike. It will be intereting to see how their looks change and how much they end up looking alike. I suspect their looks will grow more similar after they age.

I'm including, if I can find it, a video of the reprise of the Sandra Dee song. i'm fortunate in that i can sing the entire role in my chest voice. I sound mature in my chest cvoice. When I have to resort to my head voice, I sound like a little girl -- very dolce, but very young. It wouldn't work well for this role, so I'm really glad Sandy's singing parts are relatively low. in the ovie versio, part of the vocal is skipped, but you get the idea.

An Unholy Alliance

My brother and I are friends now. We started out that way. For a time in between our early years and the present, though, we were not friends. The way in which our relationship has evolved  is interesting, but i suspect not all that unique.

Because Matthew and I are twins, except for the five weeks or so when I was still in the hospital and he was basking in my mother's undivided attention at home, always been together. I am the older twin. The doctors knew from ultrasounds that one baby was average-sized but one was tiny. The decision was made to take the tiny baby first in the Caesarean delivery to get a jump-start on the resuscitation efforts if necessary. To this day, I don't believe Matthew has forgiven the doctors for the decision that led to his being the second'born twin. It gave him  bit of an attitude -- a complex, really, not unlike a Napoleonic complex. Since then, he's had a need to prove that he was large and in charge, or something like that.

Early on, Matthew was my protector. if my mom was upset with me, he would distract her. he knew she wasn't going to hit me or do anything like that, but it really bothered him when my mom was mad at me. my mom wasn't always very patient with me. For some reason she thought I was a complete drama queen by the time I was about fifteen months old. Whenever I had  minor childhood boo boo, she had a tendency to roll her eyes. Matthew learned to put band-aids on my wounds, He was my protector at preschool and at CCD. My dad still tells the story of the time he arrived a few minutes early to pick us up from preschool to find Matthew pinning another little boy to the ground. He was on top of the kid and right in his face, saying, "NOBODY hits  Baby Lexus." That's what he called me -- Baby Lexus -- until in kindergarten, when the teacher made him stop because all the other kids in the class were calling me that as well and treating me like an infant because I was so much smaller than everyone else in the class.

By the time we were about six, his statement could have been amended to "Nobody hit Alexis, except me!"
truthfully, we fought constantly, though our fights almost never escalated to the physical level because our parents would have killed us. It was actually a pretty level playing field. I was smarter. He was stronger. Even though we weren't allowed to knock each other senseless, I knew I had to be careful because his size advantage was enough that if I pushed anything too far, I might regret it.

We made car trips sheer torture for our parents. We dared and taunted each other into truly dangerous stunts, including the infamous occasion when I performed a back walkover and cartwheel on the second-story roof beam of our home. If push came to shove, we probably knew that we loved each other, but we certainly didn't like each other very much.

The very beginning of Matthew's adolescence was as rough a time as our relationship ever reached. A hormonal fourteen-year-old boy isn't  easy to like, even for the fourteen-year-old boy himself. It probably didn't help that other kids teased Matthew about having a baby for a twin sister. It probably made it even more difficult on the rare occasions when we had to be in the same section of a class in high school. I was normally willing to do the bare minimum of work  to secure an A in a given course, but if Matthew or his friends were in the class, I did what was necessary to achieve a perfect score, all for Matthew's benefit. It was showboating to the maximum degree, and it wasn't very nice on my part.

Matthew made it through that early period of adolescence and emerged as a human being  at just about the time a boy very cruelly broke off a prom date with me after I had been seriously  injured at a track meet. By the time I was assaulted in a school restroom, he was almost back to the "NOBODY hurts Baby Lexus" phase.

Most of the time I really don't need anyone to fight battles for me. I'm reasonably good at staying away from controversy for the most part. i do like the idea that we're allies rather than adversaries now. My brother is the person with whom I've shared more experiences than anyone in the world. Boyfriends and girlfriends will likely continue to come and go for the next few years. I only have one surviving brother, however, and only one twin in the world.  It's  tie that I hope never will be severed.