Ay, Carramba!

Among the things that my crazy Spanish teacher has made us do, the most ambitious yet is our soap opera project. Yes, my Spanish teacher is making us film soap operas in groups of five, in Spanish and in Spanish-style, of course. We met today to start filming, and as expected, things did not go perfectly smoothly. First of all, not everyone in our groop arrived, and we needed an audience of environmentalists in the background. The person whose house we were filming in had a brother, whose friend was visiting, so we made them participate. But when the brother's friend had to leave, we were in a crisis again, so I called my sister, Rebecca, to come and help. She was very cooperative and helpful, and I must thank her and the other person's brother for all of their help. But anyway, funny things kept happening when we were filming. At one point, the audience members had to mutter the Spanish word for "environment" repeatedly in the background, and we couldn't stop laughing as we did take after take. Then, there was the part when I had to come in as a lecturer about nuclear energy, and the audience was supposed to yell at me at specified pauses. To do this, I was supposed to raise a compact flourescent lightbulb, and then they would say, "Boo" and "no" and such. However, sometimes there would be awkward pauses when nobody knew what to do, and sometimes the booing would come out funny. For whatever reason, we kept laughing uncontrollably, sometimes in the middle of a take! But the funniest part was when everyone was supposed to throw garbage at me (environmentalists can get pretty violent when they have a cause) and I was supposed to run off stage. Except that when I grabbed the door knob to barge out, my hands were slippery and the door knob wasn't smooth. I fiddled with the knob, twisting it and turning it in my hands, desperately trying to get out, WHILE THE CAMERA WAS STILL FILMING! When I finally got it open, we all laughed, and did another take. But I'm sure that we will have some good bloopers.

-Philip