Trey: Funny. You sounded just English a few seconds ago.
Me: Tired ... Headache ... Hungover ...
Trey: Uh? What?
Natalie: Everytime we went to the Pro, François would get piss ass drunk and his accent would shift from French to English.

Alex Ross and I went to see Ten by Ten, a series of ten plays of ten minutes organized by Houston Community College with Scriptwriters/Houston. Joe Barnes had probably the best play of the evening, Second Chances, where Rachel (Morgan McCarthy) comes back home after a job interview in Chicago, only to see her ambitions impeded by her husband, Morris (Steve Carpentier). Joe's play was funny, cynical and quirky. The contrast between McCarthy and Carpentier was rather fascinating to watch, with the former's quirkiness and the latter's sloppiness.

It was also interesting to watch how the different actors of Meghan Hakes's Cutters kept switching roles on stage for the main characters' narration. Julie Weiman was probably the actress with the biggest range, from sexual abuse victim (Cealy) to sexual predator (as the girl who introduced Raygan Kelly's Quin to cutting). Of course, there were times where the play was quite melodramatic, and the ending itself was too clean, too telescoped, in a way you wonder where tension is created in the play.

The other eight plays are not really worth mentioning. Sure, some of them were funny, but mostly, there were too talky (as in, they told rather than show), too cliché (as in the one where an aspiring playwright is about to commit suicide, only to be visited by Death and rediscovers LIFE!), or simply, you kept wondering why this was even on stage (such as the riff on Edward Albee's play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" complete with the goat).

All of which goes to say that summer is over and the interesting stuff is happening again in Houston (kind of).