Asking

I'm tired, but I want to keep posting these notes as we move through rehearsals, to give myself a map of what it feels like to be in exactly the place I'd like to be.  So I want to write something but it will likely be short and poorly constructed.  Thanks for your patience.

Today I had the third occasion to engage someone I thought I wouldn't like and discover I genuinely do like them, or at least I genuinely laid the foundations to like them.  This show has a coterie of dancers, and their beautiful bodies doing flips and jetes makes me feel all of my imperfections.  The ways they can move!  It's incredible.  And sitting watching them, knowing I'll be playing a fairly lumpen older woman, it makes me sad for avenues I didn't go down.  Not that I ever would have been a dancer, no, I haven't the frame for it, but I wish I were more flexible, certainly, that I could fake my way through more dance auditions.  I pick up choreography ok, I just look awkward doing it.  But I love dancing, so having these nubile springy people around to remind me of how foolish I look is difficult.  Thus there are quite a few dancers in the show I initially assumed I would never get along with - or even less negatively, I assumed wouldn't have anything in common with these folks.

I'm wrong.  They're all lovely, of course, and seem perfectly willing to chat and be affectionate.  It's weird - I wasn't even aware of it, but I just assumed none of them have any interest in someone whose body isn't perfectly bendy and elastic.  Which is a ludicrous concept once I examine it.

Anyway, so far I genuinely like nearly everyone.  How lucky is that?!  Today there was even the faint suggestion that we are all tired of this one running joke one of the actors makes - which is great, because nothing brings people together like a common cause, and I think we all still like the actor, we could just do without the joke.

Oh, and our stage manager had on the most rocking black high heeled boots I've ever seen today.  Rowr.