Saturday was a day off after three looong days in the theatre. It’s been an exhausting week. Luckily the rehearsal schedule lightens up a little bit after this, but I’m behind on putting the cues into my score, so I’ll have to spend several hours on that when we’re not on stage or in a lighting session.
Being out and about on the day off was something of a shock. I feel as if I started prepping for this show in summer and yesterday, I went outside and had to blink twice because it is fall. Trees blazing with colour and light. Leaves barely clinging on to branches, their cohorts carpeting the ground. Yet also it’s unseasonably warm this week – in the 70s and 80s. Our choreographer, who is from England, asked me the other day if this warm temperature was normal, and I started to say, “No, it’s not normal,” but then I stopped because I can’t remember what is “normal” weather anymore. I mean I certainly don’t remember it being 80 degrees the week before Hallowe’en, but I don’t think we’ve had a truly cold Hallowe’en in ages. Not the cool nights that I remember growing up, of layers and sweatpants under Hallowe’en costumes.
Some Fun Things This Week:
-Soup Swap At Work! This was absolutely an awesome idea. Four of us brought soup – we had butternut squash soup, cream of mushroom, matzoh ball soup, and I made kale and sausage soup. Someone brought bread, and I picked up apples from the Farmer’s market that morning. Since there were so many soup options, we decided to serve ourselves soup in mugs so that we could each try all of the options without filling up on big bowls of any one soup. Then we started mixing the soups and putting the matzoh balls in different soups. We had lots of leftovers. Definitely goes on our “Let’s do it again” list for work.
-The 11 year old went on a two night overnight trip with her school. I didn’t know this beforehand, but every sixth grader has the opportunity to go on an overnight trip, called Outdoor Education. It’s not really camping because everyone stays in a cabin, but they do spend the day in the wood – suburban woods, but still, outside among trees – and roast marshmallows at night. She apparently had a great time, which surprised me a little because she has always rejected the idea of sleepaway camp. Anyhow, the first day she was gone, I got home form work at midnight and saw that she had left her lunch on the living room floor and I got so sad because day 1 lunch was the one meal that was not provided. And I proceeded to worry about her for the next two days. (Would I have been this upset about it if it hadn’t been tech week, and I had gotten a full night’s sleep? Maybe not.) When she came home, I asked her about it, and she said that she just got a PB&J from the cafeteria and it was fine. I’m so proud of her for figuring it out. Also – I completely forgot to pay the Outdoor Ed fee because the online system was down. I don’t know … the whole thing was somehow utterly mentally exhausting for me. The important thing, though… she had a good time and no one had to pick her up at midnight from the camp because she wanted to come home.
-This fun jigsaw puzzle that one of my co-workers brought in for our office. We may have stayed later than prudent to finish it one night…
Some genius things this week:
1) My favorite farm stand is my go to source for apples this time of year. The guy at the register once told me that they have about thirty varieties of apples over the course of Fall. I love trying all the different varieties of apples, but I could never keep straight what I was bringing home. Well, recently, they’ve started putting out paper bags for customers to buy apples. Brilliant! I can write the names of the apples on the bag. I feel like I’ve just been able to up my apple tasting game.
2) The use of technology so casually and easily in rehearsal continues to amaze me. I mean when I first started working at this company, we were still faxing things back and forth. In fact there are some ways we notate things on paperwork because it was the only way that it would be clear when the fax came through on the other end. I used to have to make really complicated drawings on paperwork using Word or Paint or what not to show the crew how things should be set up. (My friend could make the most amazing line drawings in Word. They were truly works of art.) But now, I can just take a picture and add it to the paperwork.
The other easy use of our phones/cameras these days is to make study videos of parts of rehearsal so that the director can review them at night and come in with new ideas the next day. It used to be if we wanted to make study videos, we would have to get a camera and a tripod. But now, everyone has a phone with a camera and lots of memory and it’s so easy just to use that. The other week we were making lots of study videos and I had to hold the camera and it got tedious – my arms got tired and shaky. I thought, “How amazing is this technology, and yet, how much are we not set up to use it like this in rehearsal the way we need?” I went looking for a way to rig something to hold the camera up so I wouldn’t have to do it. I ended up finding two book ends and just wedging the phone between them, but it still wasn’t perfect because the bookends kept sliding apart.
Then the fight choreographer started prowling around the room, as if on a mission. And he came back with two rubber bands and a pencil and set this up for me:
The combination of high tech and low tech made me giggle.
What didn’t go so well this week – as usual, home life suffers during tech week. I barely see the Husband or the kids and when I do, it’s very functional. Pack lunches, brush teeth, empty backpacks, fold laundry (just half a load)… Next tech week, I want to find ways to be more… human with my family. Not sure what that means yet… find moments of connection and not just function?
Tech week treats – For me, tech week is a combination of meticulously planned healthy meals and also unlimited snacking. Two indulgences in this latter category which I discovered this week, one sweet and one savory:
Nerds Gummy Clusters! Where have you been all my life? I like have a variety of flavor and texture combinations in my candy and these are the perfect blend of sweet and sour and crunchy and chewy. Apparently there’s Nerd rope too? That might be a little much for me – I like that I can just pop one or two of these in my mouth at a time.
And then buffalo wing pretzels. Buffalo wings are one of my favorite things – and these pretzels – crunchy, tangy, spicy – are like having wings without all the bones and stringy bits.
Grateful for (tech week edition):
– post its notes and removable stickers. This is how I mark up my book. Post Its and removable stickers in all colors so I can color code all the things. On the wall of the theatre there are stage manager prompt books from the 70s and 80s and it’s all pencil and ruler lines and impeccably neat handwriting. I think I did learn to use ruler and lines when i first started marking up a score, but now I use post its, 0.9 lead mechanical pencils, and Frixion pens.
– sunshine and warm weather. Being in a dark theatre for 12-14 hours a day, the few moments of sunshine that I was able to steal are divine. (There was one day where I worked straight through two meal breaks and did not see the sun at all and that made me sad.) I managed to carve out at least 10 minutes, sometimes 30, every day to walk outside and soak up the sun.
– my lunchbox. I have a special lunch box for tech that is the size of a small cooler. It’s huge. But it has to be so that I can pack all my food. I have a huge aversion to being hungry, so I always make sure I pack a lot of food to get me through tech. There is a cafeteria at work, and restaurants in walking distance, but I like the security of knowing what all I have planned to eat that day. The first few days are usually 12+ hours at the theatre so I pack lunch and dinner and two or three substantial snacks as well as a snack to eat on the way home. It all fits in my lunch box, along with an ice pack or two. (One of my co-workers has a tech meal planning spreadsheet – stage managers love a good spreadsheet.) Thank you lunch box for keeping me from having to think about what I’m going to eat. The fewer decisions I have to make once I’m at the theatre, the better.
-Sleep and Showers. Full disclosure – I’m not a “shower every day” person. I think I shower every two or three days. This is how bad it is – I lose count. But I have to say, after working a really rough rehearsal, getting home from work after midnight and waking up 5-6 hours later to do the breakfast/lunch/kids/school bus thing and then being at the theatre by 10am, I just feel groggy and dragging. I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. On those mornings, a shower does wonders for me. It makes me feel like it’s a new day, I’ve washed off all the baggage and criticism of the night before and am ready to face whatever is thrown at me. I am grateful for the chance to shower and start fresh.
Looking forward to:
-opening night. Actually final dress rehearsal. I know that opening night is supposed to be the big night, but for me it’s really about the final dress rehearsal. In opera, the final dress rehearsal usually has an invited audience and sometimes it’s the first time we get to run the show all the way through, including bows. (Side bar on Bows … there is never time to stage bows and usually it’s just crammed in at the end of rehearsals, in the five minutes between when the orchestra is released and when the stage crew gets to go home. And some shows… “staging bows” falls by the wayside and the stage management team is handed a sheet of paper on final dress with the bow order and we are supposed to just make it happen. Bows always seem so simple, but there is still a little bit to it – you have to tell the singers which side of stage to enter from, which side to go to after the bow, what the order is, how many bows, where to stand at the end of bow so they don’t get hit by the curtain coming in…. Final dress is the first time we really get to run bows and it is ALWAYS awkward.) Anyhow, I’m looking forward to final dress and getting all the elements lined up line up properly. It’s where I really feel like I’ve gotten the show to the finish line. Opening night is the victory lap.
-Hallowe’en. (okay, Hallowe’en was last night, but I drafted this earlier in the week and didn’t get a chance to post. It happened. More of a recap later). Last year, I was working on Hallowe’en, but this year, the schedule worked out that I’m off. Of course, Hallowe’en falls during tech week, which meant that I was up at 6am assembling one kid’s costume before going to the theatre, and hot gluing another kid’s costume ten minutes before we were out the door. Thankfully the third kid just wants something from our dress up bin. I hadn’t planned on carving pumpkins this year because of the tech schedule, but at the last minute, our neighbors invited us over for a pumpkin carving party so we had jack o’lanterns after all. usually we design our own jack o’lanterns, but the neighbors had some cool stencils and the kids really liked them, so I carved then ones they wanted. I thought they turned out really well.
-sleep. Because it’s been tech and 14 hour days at the theatre and still having to get up in time to pack lunches and get the kids to school. The Husband has been great and telling the kids to let me sleep in until 7am.
What We Ate – I have nothing for this. The Husband, as always during tech week, held down the fort, and he made dinner all week. I was gone every night so I didn’t even get to eat any of his yummy cookings. I think there was broccoli and pasta one night, there was an eggs night. Of course, pizza and a movie. He did make a pickle pizza, which I had leftovers of, and it was very tasty. I ate mostly leftovers, except for the one day when I was at the theatre on Farmer’s Market day and I got, in addition to Kimchi, an eggplant parmesan sandwich.
As for family movie night – I heard they watched Ghostbusters. I’m a little jealous they didn’t wait for me, but it is very seasonally appropriate.