Since 2004 (and with an I’m-living-in-England absence in 2006), I’ve been taking part in a nifty little event called Trafalgar 24. The gig is pretty simple: you show up at 10PM at the Trafalgar Castle School, get assigned a room and some actors, and then write a 10 minute play due at 6AM the next morning. Then you get shuffled off to a hotel to crash, and a bunch of actors and directors show up and attempt to stage your delirious, rambling mush. Come 7:00PM, a bunch of nice people show up to watch them. The whole thing is a chance to pretend I’m a writer for a day, and it’s a fundraiser for the excellent Driftwood Theatre Group. They’re the kind of people that deserve to have money raised for them, so I get a big charge out of the whole 24 hour extravaganza.
This year, I thought it might be fun to “liveblog” (as the cool kids say) my experience of churning out a play overnight. So, starting here at 10PM, I will be providing real-time updates of my slow slide into madness. Here’s a photo of me taken around 2:30AM last year:
I promise to look even more crazy and less flannel-clad this year.
Plus, it’s an all-girls school, so I’ll also be posting the endlessly amusing things you find stuck to the wall. Here’s an exemplar from last year:
Clumsy renditions of bad teen romance? We got ‘em.
So, tune in here tonight for all sorts of wacky good times. It’ll be totally rad. I promise.
Hey, I grew up right around the corner from Trafalgar Castle. True story! That’s where I had all my early celebrity encounters; my friends and I would try to sneak on set when they were filming things there. One time, Edward Furlong from Terminator 2 tried to convince me to start smoking. Oh, the memories.