i have to tell someone

There's a fella in my group here who's a little... odd. One of the actors tells me that he saw this guy talking to the brownies in the cafeteria (no, not the mini Girl Scouts, the bakery treat), and we all get a strange vibe off him. He's indicated that he's a feature writer pressed into service as a critic by his smalltown paper, and the few working sessions I've been in with him back that up. He doesn't really seem to have any idea about how to start; his reviews of the two plays we've seen so far haven't really inspired confidence, if you follow. So he's odd and writes poorly in this format, and seems to be staring at me a lot, with his mouth kind of open.

Yeah.

Anyway. He rented a laptop for the two weeks of our camp, and the first night he discovered that several of the keys didn't work, and he can't get a replacement while he's here. So he wrote out the review longhand, and turned it in like that (an option we'd been told we had, if it came to it.) We get back from the show around 11pm, and have to "file" our reviews by 7:30am. The administrative assistant person has a room on our floor, and we put our reviews in a manila envelope atatched to his door. When he wakes up, he runs them over to the Center to xerox and collate them into packages so we have something to work with for the morning session.

Yesterday I was in the same group with openmouthguy, and it was kind of hard reading the xerox of his review, and I started to feel bad for him. I'd feel like my work was hard to take seriously if people had to work from xeroxes of my, ah, highly artistic handwriting. And his handwriting is, well, bad. So last night (well, early this morning), after I'd finished my own review, I fished his out of the envelope and took it back to my room. I changed the font and formatting so nobody would track it back to me, and I typed up his review and then snuck back down the hall and dropped the clean copy in the envelope. It was painful. This guy is really struggling, and I had a Herculean urge to make a few little changes here and there, but I stuck to what he'd written.

Well.

Now there's a story going around about a good fairy, and I've been in a few groups today where people have been speculating on that person's identity. And I really don't want anyone here to know it was me, because it isn't important. I may not like the guy, but I felt bad for him and I had the capacity to fix something; that's enough. If I thought someone would get in trouble because of my secret, I'd say something, but it's not that kind of a secret.

Now I'm hoping that someone else will pick up the hint and do it tonight. I think it would be really cool if we all surreptitiously took turns.

Otherwise, this is turning out to be a pretty cool thing. I am getting my ass kicked in the working sessions, and learning a lot; I'm really excited about taking what I'm learning back to my paid work. I also got to see an actor I'd admired in a show about Leo daVinci last year sing the role of a tranny prostitute in a rehearsal, and he was just phenomenal. It's exciting to be around the process here.