Hiragana Keyaki stage play Magia Record cast photo -- Kakizaki Memi in the centre

The Magia Record Twitter account just started up with this photo:

front l-r: Ushio, Tomita, Kakizaki, Sasaki Mirei, Watanabe Miho
rear: Nibu, Kawata, Kanemura, Takase, Saitou Kyouko

To me, Memi looks pretty happy to be where she is, in the centre. But she's smiling her gentle but rather real smile quite a bit recently.

Memi says she spent Sunday rehearsing stage fighting and was sore all over afterwards. But I felt she said it with a hint of satisfaction. She has also said that they are rehearsing hard and she is learning a lot and enjoying it.

For those who don't know, Memi plays the lead (Tamaki Iroha) in the stage-play version of a game that is a Madoka Magica side-story. It's a Hiragana play, but only ten Hiraganas are taking part -- five 1gens and five 2gens. They are rehearsing now, but the play won't be performed until September.

Now for a few more Memi reports and images. On Hiragana Oshi last Sunday, one of the games was for members to come up with funny captions for photos they were shown. The normally quiet Memi ended up as one of the more frequent contributors -- Kumi gave 15 answers, Iguchi 11, Matsuda 10 and Kyouko 9, but there were 7 each from Memi, Mirei, Takase, Nao (the same thing several times, but quite effective) and Paripi.

Memi's, as usual, were a bit too complex and surreal for people to react fully to, lol. When they showed a pic of Kasuga at about age 13, wearing a pink shirt, Memi said it was "the day he awakened to pink" (now the colour of the sweater he wears).

And when they showed a pic of Katoshi age about 2, Memi confused people with a reference to a previous show in which Katoshi had mis-guessed a line from a song as "give me money to go and play".  Memi said the young Katoshi was saying: "Please loan me Y10,000." That earlier event produced this photo below, which fans praise for showing Memi not understanding why Wakabayashi's comment that it sounded like a "string" was funny. "String" (himo) in this context meant gigolo or pimp. Fans want her to be innocent. Actually I think that, if anything, she was not comprehending why asking for money was so funny.

She called a pic of a young Kasuga a "Japanese-made Easter Island statue" (about right).

And a picture of a mid-teen Wakabayashi (the Audrey tsukkomi) made her think the nickname he used to hate was "Yasu," which I think may refer to the character in the manga/anime/movie NANA, (as well as Wakabayashi Masayasu). 

Memi's most surreal answer came the week before, when she suggested that the members would all eat earth (instead of rice or bread) as the basis of a meal.

My own opinion is that what Memi contributes is almost always weird and interesting, much more interesting to me than the straighter things that come from most members -- but which can be more directly funny.

I'm enjoying the 5channel Memi support thread these days. It is actually a festival of support, with few anti's and almost none of the raunchy posts there used to be. One poster called Sunday's video of a live performance of Dare yori mo Takaku Tobe! a "Memi MV." Here are some screencaps from 5ch and elsewhere to show why he might have said that:

Nice to see, for those of us who keep noticing how video cameramen seem to avoid her.

One striking photo that just turned up is from the special app created for the Keyaki advertising campaign with the job-hunting site Baitoru. Miho and Memi:

Reminds me of this photo. Memi's more serious about the eating, lol.

Here are two more shots for good measure:

Oide, Natsu no Kyoukaisen, from the album tour