Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Doing a Little Something Fun for Myself



With everything that has been going on in my life; expanding health issues, marital issues, work craziness, I have been in a bit of a funk.  I am still upright and dealing with everything.  Not always in the best way, but I am making it through and for that I can be grateful, but it's been a long, slow slide down the slope and I didn't even see that it was happening until I found myself apologizing a few times about being bitchy.  I heard myself and realized that it was time to find a way to snap out of it. I read this quote a month or so ago and I decided that it was time to step out of my comfort zone and do something fun just for me.

"The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers."

M. Scott Peck

  If you know me at all, you know that I LOVE Halloween.  It's my favorite holiday and I truly have more fun with Halloween than I do with Christmas.  I love the costumes, I love the crisp Fall air, I love the ghost stories and the pumpkins and cider.  I also love Haunted Houses; not because I get scared but because I love watching other people go through them and watching THEM get scared and enjoying every minute of being scared.  Last season when my best friend flew in for her annual visit, she, my husband and I decided to do a tour of haunted houses.  The intention was to hit the trifecta of haunted houses that are located in reportedly truly haunted locations in my area~ The Culbertson Mansion, the Baxter Avenue Morgue and Waverly Hills Sanatorium.     We have done Waverly several times including the annual fundraising haunted house, the two hour guided tour and the half-night ghost hunting tour.  We had never been to Culbertson or Baxter Ave so we were really looking forward to them.  My friend is one of those people that I love to watch in a haunted house because though she will clutch you the whole way through, she has a ball being scared.  So off we went and we had a good time but the best of the best was the Baxter Avenue Morgue.  We went on a quiet Thursday night so we were visiting with the security outside and mentioned where my friend was from and what our mission was for this tour.  He then mentioned it to someone inside and they truly went out of their way to "target" her and give her some thrills.  After the tour, a couple of cast members spent time with us outside telling us of their experiences both with the haunted house and with the paranormal side of the building.

We appreciated their time and the way that they went out of their way so much that when I began to think about what I wanted to do to "break out", and when I would be able to commit to something, one of the things I decided to do was to audition for this season's Morgue cast.  I went down to the open casting a couple of weekends ago and talked to the casting directors and I was lucky enough to be cast! Last weekend I went to the call-backs where we met the other volunteers and learned our way around and through the location as well as how things will work. This season (beginning the weekend of September 6th and running through the first weekend in November) I will be down there on weekends, hopefully offering thrills and chills to the masses.  I am pretty darned excited.  The seasoned veterans of the were very welcoming and made it a point to drive home that it's very much a family atmosphere among the cast and crew and you could see it in the way they interacted.  That's a good thing because I have found that I have become very introverted in the last few years and this will drive me out of the house and "force" me to make new friends.  This is an important step because I have been very content spending my free time at home just hanging out with my puppies and not really putting myself out there~ and we all know that too much of that can lead to a self-imposed isolation.  It's also getting my creative juices flowing as I develop a background sketch for my character. This will help me on my next writing venture.  

So this year, if you are in the Louisville area, stop down at The Baxter Avenue Morgue.  Great deals for tickets can be found at Circle K gas stations as well as some Penn Station sub locations. You just might run into this chick during your visit!





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