Still Life: "San Francisco Springtime and Antiwar Slogans"

Still Life: "Muscular Torso (not mine) and San Francisco"

Last weekend, an accidental photo while I was trying to line up the camera to take a photo of PB (potential boyfriend) and I

I finally began my new acting class this week. One more event to add to my already crowded schedule. At least we are currently meeting in my apartment, which makes it easy for me to attend. Although, with only half an hour separating the class and the end of my therapy session, it's a bit of a mad dash to get home in time.

I'd been expecting a class full of twentysomething actresses. Instead, for the first class at least, there were only two other students, neither of whom were twentysomething actresses. There was a straight taxi-driver (chewing gum) in his early thirties, and an older lady wearing elaborate, gold spectacles and a pink velour jumpsuit (you think I'm making this up, don't you).

The teacher, a blonde woman in her late forties, surprised me by being a lot more engaging and loose than she'd sounded on the phone. And it was immediately apparent that she knew her stuff. I'd been very worried, in advance of the class, that my lack of experience would be an embarrassing handicap. But it was a small class, and the lady in the velour was behaving with comfortable chumminess, I felt quite at ease. Besides, we started off just doing exercises that required no acting experience at all. It's a technique called Meisner. I don't know much about it as yet, but the exercises we did just involved one person making an observation about another, and that person repeating the observation back at the first. Then repeat over and over again until, suddenly and surprisingly, the simple observation begins to take on new and different meanings. It's meant to show you that acting is really about being in the moment, and letting the words of the other characters take on real meaning to you.

So, no difficult challenges in the first lesson. But things will be tougher next time, since I have to drag out and try the Glass Menagerie monologue I'd been working on with my friend Scott, and I'm also going to try to rehearse a scene from my screenplay with the taxi-driver. For the latter, I've already warned him that both roles are gay. So it's a question of which of us can realistically play the protagonist, Jackson, who's a rather delicate, introverted creature from the deep South.

As everybody packed up to go, I happened to walk past my PC, which was gaily flashing photos from my screen-saver - various delectable, undressed young men I've downloaded over the years. Either nobody else saw it, or they were all too polite to say anything.

Meanwhile, I'm still taking my improvisation class at A.C.T. on tuesdays. This week I did a scene with two other people. You're not given much instruction, which, I guess, is what makes it improvisation. All we were told is that it was a morgue. Feeling lazy, I immediately lay down on a bench so that I could play the corpse, before anybody else would get that idea. Then I decided, of course, that I wouldn't really be dead. In my mind, I decided to give it an extra twist, and be some kind of android, only to pre-empted by one of the other players, as soon as I started twitching robotically, who decided I was a vampire werewolf from Mars instead. That's called "endowing," in improv lingo - making a statement about another player that immediately establishes something about them. It can have hilarious and unexpected effects, as one player starts off doing something, thinking that they're, for example, in church, preparing to pray, while the other play guesses that it's an S&M scene, and starts whipping you before you can drag your space-object bible out.