Windmills Unveiled

​After receiving the Ustinov Award yesterday and the whirlwind of meeting so many awesome people, I was exhausted. But this weekend, this amazing, crazy, brilliant weekend, has not let up. Last night my good friend Dan took me out on the town and I got to get a real feel for New York, but today I was back at the conference for arguably the most exciting part of the whole Ustinov experience; the script reading.
     Basically, Windmills was performed in front of an audience by Broadway actors. Now this may seem weird considering the background of the story, but this version of Windmills has never been read out loud before, so for its first unveiling to be at this event by actors of this calibre was more than a little daunting. Plus it didn’t help that jetlag hit me hard and I slept most of the morning, meaning I practically had to run to the hotel and only just made it for the reading.
     Personally? I think it went really well. I cannot speak highly enough of the actors; these guys knew what they were doing and were brilliantly cast across the board. Obviously there were one or two lines that I wish I’d polished up and also any especially Australian snippets of dialogue sounded very jarring in the mouths of Americans, but these were minor quibbles.
     After the read, I was pulled up for a Q&A, and apart from probably talking way too much I feel like it went really well. There were some great questions from the actors who seemed legitimately interested in the script and where the story would go and with very little prompting I ended up spoiling the whole bloody thing for the audience, so any potential ratings if this ever gets made have already gone down by a few.
     This was roughly the moment when I realised that I may be actually having the best time of my life here. Everyone is so warm and welcoming and lovely, and mingling with these people has left me on cloud nine. Ducking out for McDonalds at Times Square after the reading I was grinning like an idiot the whole way, and that didn’t really change for the cocktail party (hosted by HBO) that followed. I spent most of the time talking to the actors and probably boring them stupid with my ramblings and ideas, but I met plenty more brilliant people and left feeling great about just about everything. Follow this with dinner and drinks with some of the new friends I’ve made here, and it was a great cap to a just about perfect day.
     So tomorrow is the International Emmy Awards Ceremony and the end of this weekend. I still have several more days in New York and the LA and hopefully more adventures and opportunities to come. But if the rest of my trip doesn’t meet the level of this weekend, I can’t complain. It’s hard to imagine anything could match up to this. 

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