It was a perfect storm. There are certain things I need before and during an audition. I got none of them. Just because of the way it was set up. Nobody’s to blame, it was just not my optimum audition situation.

On the way out, one of the monitors asked if it went well. “No,” I said, “I planned two pieces that required a lot of movement and there wasn’t the room I was expecting and I adjusted poorly.”

“Do you think you’re just being hard on yourself?” she said.

“Nope,” I replied. Because I wasn’t. I made stupid mistakes to try to fit my ground-covering pieces into a much smaller space. I had less than ten minutes to come up with a workable plan and that I couldn’t try it out first, because I was sitting in the house waiting for the performers before me to go. I think I did the best I could on the fly.

It was not as bad as the worst audition I have ever given (a 2nd callback for an Equity house in Portland, which I will someday tell you about because it was abysmal), but it was amateurish and I went over time.

Ah, well. It’s over now. Time to move on and focus on tonight’s callback. And maybe treat myself to a donut for surviving.

My friend Laura over at Rhinestone Armadillo has a post up about a project we’re doing together.

You should be reading her anyway. She’s fabulous.

(I hope.)

Divorce-free post here, I promise.

The Source of All the Trouble

This is Katala as of this morning. She’s two months away from turning nineteen. She’s also the cat who has been the focus of my attention recently. (Aside from Imogen, who developed a UTI this week. Expensive week.)

As you could probably tell from the above-linked post, I have been at my wits’ end trying to come up with a solution for the poor girl’s gastric issues. She’s terrifyingly sensitive to medications, but needs something to address the acid production problem, and every solution the vet and I had come up with so far had resulted in more problems rather than fewer. I was beginning to think I needed to say good-bye to her, just because there seemed to be no controlling the latest spate of issues.

But there was one thing I hadn’t tried. Every time I googled things like, “cat, diarrhea, vomiting” or “cat, pepcid, diarrhea” or “cat, vomiting” I kept seeing references to slippery elm bark.

I know that cats are not to be dosed with human medications or with herbal supplements. Their systems are different from ours. Spider bites don’t bother them nearly as much as they do us, yet chocolate can kill them. If their systems responded to things in the exact same way ours do, they’d be humans. So I was leery of trying an herbal remedy. Because the point is to NOT kill her or make things worse. On the other hand, she responds so badly to manufactured substances that I thought herbs might be a bit more gentle on her system and not have the nasty side effects. So I did some research on slippery elm bark and cats.

When I discovered a reference to the benefits of slippery elm bark on one of the feline CRF information sites I trust, I figured it was probably okay, but I wanted a bit more reassurance. Which is when I found this note from a DVM about how slippery elm is one of the few herbal substances that we can give to cats and dogs. Both sites had recipes for slippery elm bark syrup. Knowing how delicate Katala’s system is, I decided to go with the one that seemed to have the smallest dosage first, since I could always up the concentration if it seemed to be working but wasn’t working enough.

On Wednesday, I went to the store and bought some organic slippery elm powder. I made the syrup. Once it was cool, I gave it to Katala. It didn’t appear to affect her adversely, so I was hoping it would quell the vomiting or at the very least, clear up the diarrhea so I could keep giving her the Pepcid without the awful side effect. She still did a bunch of barfing in the middle of the night (so I gave her a Pepcid), and also had some loose stools, but they weren’t nearly as bad as they had been. Still, I was up every 30-60 minutes for a while there on Wednesday night/Thursday morning. I began to despair.

However. I figured I needed to give the Pepcid time to leave her system (if I could), and also for the slippery elm to really begin to work. And last night, I slept All. Night. Long. No vomit sounds woke me. When I got up this morning, there was no barf anywhere and no loose stool anywhere.

For the first time since early January, the cat appears to be having no gastric issues. She’s snoring behind me in the chair right now, and she had her last dose of Pepcid at 3:55am Thursday. We’ll see what happens at 45 hours or so post-dose, since that’s when she usually starts feeling punky again, but I think we may have a solution. Of course, it’s going to take a bit more work than just shoving a pill down the cat’s throat once every day or so, since she gets the syrup four times a day and the timing is kind of precise (at least 5 minutes before a meal). Plus, I have to make the syrup every eight days or so, but if it keeps her comfortable and vomit/diarrhea-free, I don’t care. It’s worth the work. I’ll keep you posted, but I think we may have found a solution, at least for now.

And because she was stretched out in the sunshine and I felt like the relief and sunbeams were warming my heart in the same way, here’s a little gratuitous Quickly to warm your morning.

Gratuitous Quickly

The outpourings of love and support from so many people have left me breathless. I cannot even begin to voice how much your comments and letters and phone calls are helping me cope.

It would be very easy to feel alone and isolated as I struggle with this, so thank you so very, very, very much for your thoughtful reminders that I’m not. I am overwhelmed with the number of people who have taken the time to tell me they care. I had no idea there werre so many of you.

Thank you. Thank you for the comments and emails and phone calls. Thank you for thinking of and praying for me. Thank you for texting me just to say I’m on your mind. Thank you for finding things to do with me. For offering to help me find work, for offering me a weekend away, for offering me a shoulder to cry on.

Thank you doesn’t even begin to express the depths of my gratitude or how much you have moved and buoyed me with your support, but it’s the only set of words I have, so thank you.

My husband informed me on Saturday morning, after a long, unhappy telephone discussion, that he is not interested in continuing with our marriage. Fortunately, by the time I spoke with him again on Monday, I had more or less decided that was the right choice as well. I’d heard one thing that made me think maybe he was reconsidering, but when that turned out to not be true, well, one person’s best efforts can’t make a relationship work when the other is unwilling.

I’ve been lucky in that I’ve received so much love and support from my friends and family. I had no idea I could expect that kind of response from people. I knew they cared about me, but, Wow, so much love. But now I have to figure out what I’m going to do, how I’m going to support myself, how I’m going to move on from this in the healthiest way possible and to create from the situation the life I want to be living. I’m going to try to come out of this without bitterness, without unresolved anger, to continue to be as open and available to the world as I can be. And to that end, and also because he’s not some evil bastard, just your standard, flawed human, I will not be using this space to vent about the situation. There’s no point in that.

On the other hand, I will probably want to explore my own discoveries and decisions here, and since there are so many of them to make, I might end up writing more than I have been. Who knows?

Last night’s audition was just that, an audition for the director of After the Fall, who wasn’t able to attend general auditions earlier.

But I’m being called back. I know this because when we finished a fun (in that weird actor way) read of the scene, the director—who was the only person in the room I didn’t know—said, “That was lovely, Sally. I’m going to want to see you for this again. We’ll be calling you back.”

It took everything I had to not run squealing from the room like a joyous six year-old.

I want to write about how much I miss Dave.

I want to write about Eddie Izzard and how fabulous his show was. What with the velociraptor, the jazz chicken, giraffe warning “sounds” and Shirley Temple’s left eye–the one that has seen too much–not to mention the ten to fifteen minute bit told mostly in Latin–with a little French and German thrown in–that had me laughing so hard I could barely breathe.

I want to write about how I’ve been called back for a role in After the Fall at Eclipse Theatre and how excited I am to have landed a callback from my first Chicago audition.

I want to write about how lovely it’s been to continue to reconnect with people who live here and nearby.

I want to write about a project I’ve just finished the first phase of and how thrilling it is to be standing on the brink of Step Two.

I want to write about how I still don’t have a job and how I’m beginning to feel like a failure.

I want to write about how I will be seeing Brian Dennehy (one of my favorite actors) in Hughie and Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett is one of my favorite playwrights) this coming Sunday at the Goodman, along with getting to see him at a talkback about the production on Saturday. One of my theatre friends here has already seen the show and described it as “a Master Class in acting.” Soooooo. Stoked.

I want to write about how, thanks to Heather, I’ve discovered Mad Men, about which I am now obsessing.

I want to write about how I will be participating in the statewide theatre auditions at the end of this month, and how scared and excited and worried and invigorated I am about it.

I want to write about how hard it is to live with a cat with chronic renal failure. About how I realized just yesterday that even though my main goal at this point is to make the rest of her life as comfortable as possible rather than as long as possible, I still keep expecting every new treatment to get her back to “normal” again. But she’s not normal. She’s dying. And that’s very hard to take.

But as you can see from the list above, there’s way too much going on in my life now for me to write much more about anything than I’ve written here already.

I promise, PROMISE, that when I can, when I have the time, when I have the energy, when I have the focus again, I will write some more. Until then, please bear with me.