Ten minutes

I've got about 3 minutes left on our ten minute break.  The only trouble with this show and this experience is that it's so fun I cannot believe it is happening to me.  I am working with such talented people that it's hard to imagine I have anything I can bring to the process that will be of value.

I'm trying to ignore that idea, because even if I'm just taking up space, I'm the one that got this job and I might as well damn well enjoy it.

Because it's awesome.  Today I'm sitting around for 6 hours of rehearsal in order to learn one crossover, which could be an irritating concept but it's so fun to watch the show get blocked and choreographed that I don't mind at all.  I don't have anywhere I'd rather be.

Wow.  It's pretty rare to be able to say that, all in all.  I don't have anywhere at all I'd rather be.  I might want to be a better version of myself in this place, but there's nowhere I'd rather be.

Back in.  Hooray.

Wow

Ok, so my self-doubt is creeping in steadily - it is difficult to face a dance mirror next to a crew of dancers and not desperately want to lose about fifty pounds immediately, BUT I'm still having a fantastic time.  Everyone else is, too.  It's magic.  It's so lucky.  When you gather a whole group of people to tell a cracking good story, and the place you are telling it has the money to make sure you have beautiful clothes and fair pay and amazing working conditions, when your director is fascinated with how to help you all be genuine and immediately throws away any idea she brought in that doesn't feel right, when your fellow actors are cheerful and cooperative because they know their own ideas will be valued and the ideas they are given will be solidly playable, it is blissful.

You know, I write all that, and it sounds untethered, a checklist of happy working conditions.  But that's not the real joy.  Happy working conditions are fantastic, obviously, but actually, I just love the tinkering that goes with working out how to tell a story.  We blocked a big group number today, and that involves tons of tedious incremental movements combined with choreography that shouldn't look like "dance", and it was slightly painstaking and repetitive and I loved it.  I couldn't stop smiling at myself in the dance mirror.  I think that's what's so hard about the losing weight thing - I'm so happy, I love every minute of it, and I think I therefore must somehow be radiating joy out of every pore, that there must be some physical manifestation of my extreme engagement, and I look up and instead I just look sort of lumpy, pale, and overly wide.

But of course if there were no dance mirror, I would go on thinking I look completely amazing, so perhaps once the show opens I won't be aware that I tower over everyone else in massive fashion!

Still, getting to do this is lucky lucky lucky, and I am trying to love it hard enough to have it soak into my skin so I'm only ever this person from now on, the one who gets to do this, even if I only get to do it sometimes.  Oh, and of course, I think while I do the show I will magically lose fifty pounds.  Ha!

Also, every rehearsal makes me laugh.  A lot.

Like Staying in a Dream (Don't Let Me Wake Up)

Not that life isn't still full of stalled traffic and bad weather and colds and occasional irritation, but doing a show like this, none of that matters for long.  Last night I went to see the show that's closing in this same theatre where I'll be performing the current awesome project in a couple of weeks.  It's enormous.  It's gorgeous.  It's magnificent.  It has been refurbished and it glitters and shines.

Also, did I mention it's enormous?  It's alternately jaw-dropping and scary as hell that I'll be on that stage in a couple of weeks.  Eek!  I spent the whole show thinking about how strange it is to see a show in a space like that, with production values like that and an audience size like that (it seats 1500), and realize that will be me.  I'm not a large part in this show, but I AM in it, and you won't be able to miss me - I have lines and everything.

Last night I was also blown away by some performances, and all I could think about that was:  I have to get better.  Not, I don't belong here or I have no talent or I'm a charlatan (though of course those ideas travel through my head at times as we rehearse), just, I have more ability that I have currently developed and I have to get more solid at it.

In the meantime, I just watched what might as well be a Broadway show, and realized the next thing on that stage...is me.

Amazing People

So, one of the great benefits of this particular awesome project is that I am working with one of the most talented directors in this city.  She is...she made a fifteen minute speech about the play on our first day and it blew my mind.  This is a play I have known the soundtrack to backwards and forwards since I was about 8, and she said things about it that are completely true, but that had never once occurred to me.  (In an effort to make myself feel like less of a doofus, I see why my 8 year old self probably didn't think about the themes or character motivations of this play, and that older selves skipped that kind of thinking because the piece is so familiar - the way you know exactly how to get from your house to the store but don't know any of the road names, you just know.)

The quality that makes this director so great is that she makes sure every piece is about something.  These lovely older musicals are so frequently regarded as chestnuts, with all their ideas intact from previous productions, but this director goes back to the script and score and figures out what it's actually about, then tries to get to that.  It's thrilling to watch, and probably a lot harder than it looks.  She makes it seem easy because she has this amazing ability to balance having her own idea with accepting and receiving ideas from the cast.  (Usually you get one or the other in a director, rarely both.)  But think about any story you know really well.  How hard would it be to go back and just read the actual words, strip away your favorite performance of it or the way your mom read it to you at night or the significance the story had to you at a certain point in your life?  How impossible would it be to try to see the story just and only as it is, and not through the layers you've loaded on top of it?

She does, and when she does, she makes really really great productions of plays people want to see but have forgotten why they wanted to see them.  She reminds you of what they mean.

First Day

This is the first day of rehearsal for an awesome project, and I feel so lucky and happy and manic I hardly know how to behave like a grownup.  I want to dance around, I'm so thrilled.  I just had a wig fitting and the woman doing the wigs was gorgeously interesting - Canadian, warm, dog-loving, complimentary, clearly amazing at her job.  How cool is it to be able to walk into a first rehearsal and immediately know I'm working among some of the most expert people in my profession??  It feels like yes, it feels like being awake, it feels like going to a school you already like and can't wait to get to, but when you get there it turns out you are also going on a field trip somewhere awesome.

It feels better than having lots of money.  But it does feel like being rich.

These are the days I do it for - and this isn't even an award or an opening night or the sort of praise and adulation we actors often assume we are doing it for - this is the first day of WORK.  And I love this work. I'm going to walk into a room and figure out how to tell a story in the next two weeks, and then a bunch of people are going to come watch that story and be highly entertained.  They might learn something about themselves, they might just be cheered up in a cold snowy night to see a charming musical, I don't even care.  Most people will walk out happier than when they went in - it's that kind of play, and we're going to be really really good at it.

What else is there to do?  Yes, yes, there's tons of other things out there to do, all worthwhile and useful and often more momentarily necessary than telling a story.  But none of those things make me feel like this, this combination of excitement and happiness and deep interest.

So, you can probably tell I drank some coffee.  But even if I hadn't, this is an amazing, fantastic, Christmas miracle of a day.  Thanks, universe.  It feels really great to win this one.

Now let me finish reading the script....

Home

I love the South.  God, I love it.  My mother has put camellias and narcissus in my room and it's warm in December and I can walk to my best friend's house in a minute and I'll see the ocean tomorrow.  And everyone sounds friendly, even when they aren't (don't let people tell you that what they sound is "ignorant" - those people don't know jack shit about the south), in fact, they sound especially friendly when they AREN'T friendly.  And my aunt's house is a proper house, wood and high ceilings and a big front porch and creaky and old and rickety, and my mother's house is a blessed nightmare in exactly the right way and she still has her nightgown and robe on at 5 pm because she was too busy to get dressed because she is beautiful and crazy and completely lacking in the feeling that any part of herself should change because it sounds crazy to you. 

Also, she just plain didn't get that far.

I know tomorrow the temperature will drop and it will just be cold and rainy, but right now it's in the 60s and it feels like...I don't know, like my hair will curl properly in this humidity and the ground buoys my feet and I'm almost myself again, though in a few days it will feel like this is the farthest from myself I will ever get, when the expectations keep coming and I continue to fail at being the perfect daughter/sister/niece/aunt and no one seems to know who I really am down at the center of myself. Or care.

Right now none of that matters.  I'm just home.  It smells right.

I just want to sit down and write out the story of my grandmother I heard for the first time today.  Turns out she threw over her Citadel boyfriend after he painted her two pictures and wrote her a poem saying she could keep the pink picture and he'd keep the blue picture and it would mean they'd always remember each other.  She broke it off and ended up married to my grandfather, but somehow kept both paintings and had them hanging in her living room for the rest of her life.  Until she was 89.

It's just nice to be back where my history lives, and remind myself of where I fit in it.  All three of my names can be read on the gravestones of my ancestors.

Oh, Christ.  I just realized I have to post this, because in a few years this house will get sold and it won't ever be the same, there won't be a "home" to come home to, and this note will be like a homeopathic remedy, the almost reminder of what return actually feels like.  It feels like...like Christmas.

Not blowing it for a change

All right, so I've rethought this audition all day, and I must admit that I might have been a tad nervous and talked too much and said stupidly inappropriate things, and been generally like an excited puppy.  That's one way to over-think it.

BUT ALSO.

I just had a really great time with some of the best artists in this city at one of the most beautiful theatres in this city and while I was there, I acted like I belonged there.  Instead of asking for a job or asking them to like me or being any kind of supplicant, I asked artistic questions and ended up having an artistic interaction with people I admire and respect.  One of the questions I asked ended up giving the auditioner a new idea.  That's right, I brought a new idea into the room for an audition for a play that's been done a trillion times, for an audition to understudy a tiny little role.

You know why that's so amazing?  Because if they don't hire me for this job, it doesn't matter.  I showed up today as an artist who can bring something to the conversation, and not everyone who walked into that room did that.  Heck, that theatre will hire some people who didn't do that.  I could be wrong, but I think I just proved myself to be an entirely different kind of actor.

The kind who will work.  Maybe not this project, maybe not for a while, but without a doubt, eventually.

It feels...it feels...it feels fantastic.  It feels like being who I'm supposed to be.

Oh, and it was 70 degrees today, which felt like a dream for December.

Great day, coming after a great week.  I feel lucky.  Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket.