Currently sitting in Starbucks with Meg and Hannah at the start of the final week of BADA…..It’s so hard to not feel like its over, even though we still have 1/4th of the program to go….it felt over last week when we were only halfway through it.

We’re people watching from the second floor of Starbucks checking out the European flare passing up and down Cornmarket St below.  I can’t really name what it is, but there is such a definitive style to European clothing…..It has a lot to do with skinny sweaters, small horizontal stripes, and cut off jeans….and the hair just has to be as crazy as possible.

I stayed in Oxford yesterday, when a lot of people went into London….that would have been impossible without my Debit Card…no way I could borrow another 70 pounds in one day from people.  Hopefully, my card arrives tomorrow…please, please, please….If it doesn’t, I’m convinced Bank of America fucked up and I’m never getting it.

Anyway, a bunch of us went to the Ashmolean Museum yesterday in Oxford, then Meg and I took a nice walk along Christ Church Meadow and saw a lot of the other colleges….There was a wedding at Magdalen and the bells in the chapel were ringing for a straight half hour….we doubled back to go inside Christ Church and see the Great Hall (a decent way to spend July 31st - Harry Potter’s birthday) but by the time we got back it was closed…..I’ll have to head down there on Wednesday when I don’t have class…..I also want to get a haircut on Wednesday….I don’t know why but for some reason I really want to get a haircut in England.  But again, that will be hard if I don’t have any money by then!

We had a big picnic on the Balliol lawn for dinner and then a bunch of people went to see this random show in town, but I skipped out on it and hung out with Seamus.  We crossed over the Magdalen St. Bridge to a part of Oxford that I hadn’t been to yet.  Went inside the Cape of Good Hope pub….it was all right, but a very weird place.  There’s a lot of pubs over on that side of Oxford that I won’t have time to go visit - my coloring poster of pubs will be very incomplete when I leave….I’ll just have to come back to finish it…..Then we walked around a bit and ended up at the Jolly Farmer & Castle - a couple of gay pubs (that sounds weird), we had a good time just hanging out with a couple of guys we met.

We have our final Q&A with Deborah Warner today - a director for the RSC.  I also had my final masterclass with John Barton this past Thursday - it was definitely the most beneficial of all of them….at the end, he had the 9 of us in the workshop sit down on the floor and deliver our sonnets to each other like we were sharing stories late at night at a party….It really helped us make the words our own and feel way more comfortable with the language.  Rehearsals for Cherry Orchard/Three Sisters are finally having an effect now that we are all off book and using props.  Its been hard to get through both of the shows thought because half of Kane has fallen sick for some reason or another…actually, a lot of BADA is sick….luckily I have avoided the plague…*knock on wood*……I always get out of Shakespeare class early because Lynn uses the classroom time to coach individual scenes, and Deanna and I are way ahead of the game with our Taming of the Shrew scene.

I had Madeline Potter for Audition Techniques yesterday and she is simply wonderful.  A lot of my friends in the Chekhov group have her for Modern and they’re working on this play called “Absolute Hell”….anyway, she is simply phenomenal and sooo much better than Linda Gates was.

Time to go spend my final 1 pound and 10 pence and borrow more money from people for lunch…..urgh