Took the Drama Club J1s to the Woodlands Library to rehearse for their debut performance. It's only a short dramatic reading but it's a pretty big event considering who the Guest-of-honour is going to be -- my Big Boss, himself.

Dramatic reading is a very delicate balancing act. On the one hand, you're reading off a set text; but on the other, you're dramatizing the scene for an audience who is there to watch the action. In a straight drama performance, the idea is to rid ourselves of our texts as quickly as possible as reading from a script loses the audience interest very fast. Here, we have to know the text well enough to play the scene, yet keep our scripts open and manipulate a handheld mike at the same time. The scene itself is a courtroom drama where most characters are held in place by protocol: Judge in his seat, witness at the witness stand, counsels seated at their desks, audience fixed in the gallery. So not a lot of movement called for, very little we can do to keep the audience's attention.

Fortunately, we've been given only 10 minutes to play, and I think that's long enough. The other items on the programme have music, movement and dance incorporated into the readings of texts in our other national languages; Malay, Chinese and Tamil. Since there's so much movement in the other items anyway, maybe we can exploit the contrast in our item and put our stillness to our advantage? We'll see.

Rushed over to the CSC in the evening of the 3rd installment of our Ministry's bowling challenge. They gave away the prizes for last month's top results before our game commenced. The top high game from last month was from a lady bowler with a score of 233 (out of a possible 300). Our competiton is truly quite awesome. I did pretty ok nevertheless, averaging 153 pinfalls out of 3 games. My sparing accuracy is crap -- for the 2nd game I simply couldn't close the frames, else my score would been higher. Training objective for next training session: practice clearing spares.

Guess with this game under my belt, my overall personal standings should have improved some, though still nowhere near the top yet. Makin' progress, though.

The team's standings are hard to judge. Yee and Vince both had good games and, like me, at least 1 poorer one. Anthony has an injured elbow and couldn't bowl his usual game. It would be good if we all bowled like we practice... Oh well, overall team improvement as far as I can tell. Cheers to us, the Gutter Boys!