#also everyone is super sweet and i got contact info/snaps for some of the artists and mentors and i am THRILLED | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thedandelionthief · 29 days

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long post under the cut of me rambling about my current show

i have my last performance for RoA in a few hours, which honestly breaks my heart. it’s not as though i’m particularly attached to the musical itself, but the cast and the meaning behind our production has made this one of the best opportunities of my life.

i don’t want to say the name of this program because i’m afraid it might dox me, but the purpose behind it is to allow young people with developmental disabilities to perform, and it’s been such a delight seeing even the most reserved cast members come out of their shells on-stage. there have been some rough days this summer, trying to tie everything together (and by that, i mean really rough), but these past few days i’ve felt so at peace with my life. theater is my biggest passion, and getting to share it with such amazing people is. i’m going to start crying if i write any more lol

i’m just so lucky to have been in both this show and oliver in just one summer. both of them have no doubt been formative experiences in my life, but rock of ages in particular has transformed the way i interact with people, boosted my self confidence, and really made me fall in love with performing for the sake of it, instead of trying to prove myself all the time. i still struggle with feeling like i need to get these huge roles to be worth anything as a person, let alone an actor, but i’m beginning to realize that theater is such a powerful force, and no matter what i’m doing for the show, just being a part of it is enough.

i used to roll my eyes when directors would say “there’s no small parts, only small actors”, and i still would today, just because the phrase is so cliche at this point. but the sentiment behind it is one i agree with. i mean, there definitely are small parts, but making the most of your limited stage time, or your few lines of solo music is important. and being a good castmate, and in this case, mentor, is even more so.

not to mention the youth edition (who even decided a youth edition of rock of ages was a good idea) is comedy gold i don’t even care. there are so many funny lines, and because the audience is a lot of older people who were actually teens/adults in the ‘80s, their reactions are always on point. also, the boy who plays franz uses a wheelchair which allowed us to add in the best visual gag of him trying to defiantly storm away from his mom only to keep rolling over the traffic cones blocking off the road. it’s beautiful. the drew and sherrie romance is also the most adorable thing i have ever witnessed. drew is just this awkwardly earnest guy and paired with sherrie’s enthusiasm it’s so cute. i love the part where they meet in sister christian and it’s like “my names wolfgang von colt!” “sorry???” “…or drew :(“.

also i learned how to be a sighted guide so that’s pretty awesome

#also both shows so far have had the *best* crowds i’ve ever encountered. they laugh at every single funny line or visual gag #whenever a big moment happens they literally erupt into sound it is Wonderful. it just makes me so happy to see #in particular there’s one girl in the cast who really dreams of making it to broadway (she plays hilda if you’re familiar with roa)#and during the big confrontation after the final countdown the crowd cheers so loudly for her and she can never stop herself from smiling #it’s just little things like that that make me feel so lucky to be a part of this production. for a lot of these people (though not all)#this is their Only chance to be up on stage. and certainly their only opportunity to be there only with people who understand and respect #them. it’s just really nice #also everyone is super sweet and i got contact info/snaps for some of the artists and mentors and i am THRILLED #in particular this one artist who i really only befriended this week but we are similar in so many ways #and she talks to me about percy jackson a lot hehehe #theater ramblings

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snsmissionaries · 5 years

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4/9/19 -- Sister Nicole Ritman, Spain, Madrid Mission

The Longest "Short" Week of my Mission 😞

Subject Line: Since we had last Pday on Wednesday, I figured it would feel nice to have a short week until the next Pday only a few days later on Monday. Wrong. Somehow H Brumble and I had a week that felt even LONGER than normal even though it was technically shorter than normal.

¡Hola a Todos!

It's only been a few days since I wrote you all last and H Brumble and I have worked super hard and have nothing to show for it. You're probably reading this imagine I'm saying that in a bitter voice, but I'm not even angry. I'm not even annoyed. One thing the mission teaches you is that you can be disappointed without getting frustrated. It gives you a broader perspective that we may not see the obvious results of our labor, but there are still blessings that come that we might not see the relation to. For example, we all know that if missionaries talk to more people, they find more people. But sometimes none of those people talk back. But that doesn't mean we weren't blessed for that effort. Maybe we were sent blessings like seeing new gorgeous parts of our area, getting sick before you had to travel but then feeling well enough to go at the last minute, getting to comfort a crying woman on the phone even though you couldn't go and see her, or actually having an eating cita not cancel like all the others and being able to get to know the family. (None of the above examples are hypothetical and all have happened recently). We may not be able to see those blessings as a direct result of the work we put in before, and the truth is there are probably way more variables that go into it, but the truth is the Lord can bless us in different ways than are obvious to find the cause and effect. This probably made no sense, but these are just some of the things I've been learning lately.

Also I am learning that first you have to tell the Lord you are WILL-ing to do anything for Him before He reveals you what his actual WILL is. Why would he tell you His will if He knows you'll only do what He wants if it's what you wanted to do in the first place? In a word: Sacrifice

As for the actual week, I can't think of any events of grand importance, but we did happen upon a gorgeous park and tried to snap a few photos to add quotes to something and maybe put on our shared area Facebook account. I'll attach some of the photos because I haven't really sent many photos of the pretty part of Villalba yet. Villalba is part of Spain's "Sierra" (yes it is a word but it is also the name of the area) and we have gorgeous mountains and pine trees but the mountains are never as gorgeous in. my pictures than in person. You will just have to Google it or take my word for it 😉

Today we hit Madrid hard and zipped around and saw everything in the super classical art museum Prado and almost everything in the wacky modern art museum Reina Sofía. It was cool seeing my inspirations like Remembrant, Goya, Salvador Dahli, Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Juan Miró, Diego Rivera etc. My pick of the Prado this time (I went before in the CCM) would have to be a really realistic marble satue of Mars and Venus in the Prado that was just very sweet even thought they're usually portrayed pretty dramatically. The artist really got the gaze even thought they didn't even have pupils, which was interesting. It was in one of the main parts with a bunch of other famous works, but it totally stole the show. (Unfortunately it was just a re-creation and the original is in Buckingham Palace). My pick of the Reina Sofía would have to be the Alexander Calder's (one of my personal favorite artists ever since I read "The Calder Game" and saw his work in the Phoenix Museum) ever-turning mobile of simple yet uniquely Calder shapes and colors. It was near Picasso's "Guernica", which was also a marvel to behold. Somehow Picasso knows how to show light with using only a few grey and white shades. The Reina Sofía also had a lot of videos and picture series of performance art from the 40s-60s which was pretty cool because it was like giving their art a second life. I also really connected with this one random artist I don't remember the name of because all his abstract paintings look like the shapes I doodle on the edge of my paper when I'm either bored or stressed sometimes. I just felt like the same patterns were in our souls. Art is literally a spiritual experience for me because I get it tune with the creative vibe and feel like I can just connect to the Human Experience so much better. I just feel like I have lived more than just my own life when I go to an art collection and see so many different places and people and experiences from different periods of time.

Anyways sorry I didn't have actual experiences to write this week-I just kinda gave the thoughts that churn around in my head to an audience.

Os quiero,

Hermana Ritman

Villalba Week 3: https://photos.app.goo.gl/SVjdkFrcjM2yV7bN7

Contact Information

email: [email protected]

Sister Nicole Ritman

Madrid Spain Mission

Avenida de Tenerife, 11

28703 San Sebastian de los Reyes

Madrid, Espana

#WeWorkin'Grindin' #💯% #Neva Stop #💪💥🛴 #Romans3:16 #Gettin'gains #GiveitAllto God🙏

Subject Line: A while before I left my mission I remember laughing at all those memes that made fun of how student athletes tweet. This week's subject line is inspired by those memes because we really did hit the grind.

¡Hola a Todos!

I will start out this weeks email with a random anecdote.

So we were coming back from the church one night to go home and we were on a busy (well busy for a small town like Villalba) Street and right outside of a super market when this very old Spanish man stops us. He stopped us and started talking about how he's been to America and how he knows about the church and everything. We're just listening politely and then he grabs by tag and reads "Hermana Britman". I tell him with an R but he keeps insisting he sees a B and keeps pulling it closer to read it. I'm just standing awkwardly as my comp watches. The he huddles by me where my comp can't really see and says "Ritman I have something for you". I watch him reach in his pocket and take out something long a pointy and glinty. It was a knife! A surge of panic shocked my body. Every Safety Zone video we'd watched flashed through my mind. I wondered if I'd broken some sort of rule to end up in this situation. Then he started going for my hair! He wouldn't kill me, but still-my precious hair! But then I realized it was one of those excessively large hair clips and he stuck it in my hair with his shaky hand. It was actually really cute because like five times he showed H Brumble "Mira! Que bonita!" The situation went from potentialky fatal to absolutely adorable.

So this Saturday our zone decided to do a finding marathon. We didn't set any citas and we decided to find in a bunch of different ways. We started out the day Facebook contacting like madwomen and then we went to have mediodía. Usually we eat lunch but we ended up doing our special zone fast later than planned so we were just going to take a break. But then we had a last-minute cita. It was one of those lessons where they talk too much and you have a headache at the end but it's OK because we were on a roll. We immediately went out knocking doors (in Spanglish toquing puertas). It's not the most effective but we did it for variety's sake. Then we did something I never have in my entire mission before: pan carta. Basically it's a big poster and you just stand in one spot and try to contact EVERYONE THAT WALKS BY. Any speck of fear I had about contacting was gone. I mean I didn't think I was afraid of it, but I was fearless on a different level. Usually you do pan carta with other missionaries but it was just H Brumble and I and we went into a finding frenzy. We were determined to hand out every Spanish Libro de Mormón we had (an entire package orders worth). And one in Arabic. I talked to do many people my speech started coming out as stutters. I am not exaggerating. We did this for hours. We gave out so many tarjetas with our info our fingers turned blue from the ink and we tallied the amounts of Libros we gave out and phone numbers we got of our wrists and at the end of the day we took a picture. After we handed out all our books, we packed up and did some traditional en camino Street contacting. Some days in the work are about quality, but some days are about quantity just to stretch yourself and Saturday was definitely one of those days. Since we worked through lunch and started early because we didn't want to exercise while fasting, it was officially the longest hardest workday of my mission. I highly doubt I'll ever do that again. Needless to say, our zone absolutely destroyed all our goals because of it which made the mission destroy our goals too.

At the end of the day we were too tired to cook and didn't have anything good in the fridge plus we were STARVING so we ordered Papa John's and then sushi and downed an entire family size Aquarius (kinda like Gatorade) ourselves.

Last night we stayed the night in Madrid because we had to get H Brumble's residency card this morning. We thought it'd take three hours but it took 30 minutes lol. We got permission to go to the center of Madrid to pass the time. Like a good greenie breaker, I filled in the holes of H Brumble's cultural experience that didn't quite happen in training. I look her to the classic Chocolatier San Gines for chocolate with churros and porras and then one of the main Plazas who's name I am forgetting rn but it's right next to Puerta del Sol. Then we went and tried fancy cheese, salchichón and dried fruit from this open air market and wandered our way back to Sol where we rode the metro to the end of the line.

There, the office Elders picked us and other Hermanas up the van and we all went to the mission home for zone Pday. I hadn't been back since my first day in the mission and it was kinda surreal being here halfway through. We played around the world ping pong, darts, volleyball, badminton, Frisbee etc. And then we ate Papa John's, salad and had two types of cake for Presidente and Hermana Kennett (senior couple) birthdays. Now we're all chilling in the home writing and calling our families.

It's been a good week and we had a few mini adventures I didn't write about but I will send photos of.