While walking to lunch earlier today, I remembered something I love to do and haven't in a while.

Stagefighting. More specifically, staged swordfighting.
If I let my mind wander, I recall my time spent at the Walnut street theater learning about general concepts and then dowel-fighting with Ian who was a real bitch to learn with because he was left handed and we had to modify all the choreographed fights to what looked good and was possible with a left-handed partner. We were taught by Darla Max - a freaking awesome fight choreographer who I still find in various playbills that I pick up around Philadelphia.
After that I took two more classes between '98 and '01 (I think those were the dates), one with Ian after Walnut while we were still used to our whole right-left combination and the other a year and some later in which Tom showed up often, I don't think he was in the class though. Anyway, Tom and I did some pretty nifty fights and broke a great many dowels outside 3rd and Catharine streets downtown. I think Rob (our fight instructor for this class - I can't think of his last name) liked how we fought together and thus didn't really care if Tom was really enrolled in the class. At any rate, he knew how to fight later on when we choreographed another show together.
My next swording fest was my last show with what was then New Mermaid Players (currently MacGuffin Theater and Film), Romeo and Juliet. I tried my hardest to be really angry as Tybalt but I don't think I played it off really well. The sword fighting was a completely different issue though. We were reheasing most of the weekday afternoons either on lines or fighting and Rob was choreographing and teaching those who didn't already know how to fight. The class I mentioned before that Rob was teaching and that Tom sat in on was happening around this time as well and thus, we worked on weekends. About 2 weeks in to rehearsals, we got a little suprise from John Rea, the producer, he went out and got decent stage fighting foils. Up until this point, we were mostly using large dowels (the small ones were too easy to break - I easily have a broken dowel count of 10+) and a few small, flattened pipes which hurt a lot. We had to get used to this new, actual length metal foil which was a little more expensive than a wooden dowel and couldn't be so easily replaced. I spent a lot of really awesome time downtown fighting with Nikki (she who always played the manly roles - she was Mercutio) and she was an excellent fighter. Her aim was almost too good, however, because I recall a rehearsal a day or two before performance where we were practicing our fight and she sliced down hitting right above and right below my eye. That was a fun wound to have.
Finially, my most recent fighting experience was Peter Pan, a show that Tom and I acted in and fight-choreographed. It was an interesting experience to have - teaching most of a cast how to stage fight safely and working on fights with Tom for most of our free time. Tom and I fought EVERYWHERE and we even convinced John to let us borrow two of the real foils for Pan and Hook. It was an excellent time and the fights turned out pretty well.

I'd like to fight more... I think fencing here at school isn't really what I'm looking for. I'll have to visit Tom more often so we can fight...