Passing Storms
2004-05-24,

Crazy Week has concluded, and by god, it was a long one.

When last we met, I was headed home for our Home Study on Wednesday. I'm pleased to say that it seemed to go very well. Almost.... too well. That is, it felt shorter and easier that I guess we expected it to be. All that work for an hour and fifteen minutes of hangin' out at home with the social worker. She'd already got the nickel tour before I'd returned home, so I didn't even have to experience that trauma. The rest just involved going over her synopsis of our lives, chatting with the kids a little, and clearing up a few tiny loose ends. Then she was gone.

Not that I had much time to relish the culmination of a month and a half of crazy-busy, because I had to then rush off to rehearsal. It was our first dress rehearsal, only two days before opening. Needless to say, we were on a tight schedule. Turns out we'd only had a total of 16 rehearsals from start to finish, which is not much at all. I kinda think that it showed in some spots of the performance, only in that it wasn't as super-tight as it should have been. There were a few interesting occurrences, like when one of the guys got locked out of the building right before he was supposed to go onstage. He went out to shoo away some noisy kids from behind the stage, and the guy who was supposed to hold the door for him, didn't. Luckily he managed to get onstage before it really mattered.

Opening night wasn't easy for me, as I'd only gotten about two good hours of sleep the night before. A serious lightning storm came through at about 2am and kept the dog barking at the scary booms in the sky and Hil waking up to stumble in and tell us that the storm was too loud, as if we'd neglected to turn the volume down before going to bed. Ack. So I went through most of Friday half asleep. I managed to have enough adrenaline kick in to do the show, luckily, so all was not lost.

All in all, however, the show went really well. I think I've made a small place for myself in the theatre community now. And the place should get a little bigger, once the next show comes around, as the whole fam damily is going to be in Music Man. Of course, we almost didn't find out about it. Saturday night a hailstorm knocked out our phone line, and the musical director was calling and calling trying to get through to us. Finally she left a message on my cell, and Sunday morning I heard that, while Simon didn't get Winthrop, I did get a part in the barbershop quartet, and the rest of the family is on the chorus. This will be most cool, I think, assuming that Hil keeps up with her schoolwork and is allowed to participate. I'm fairly confident that she will, especially now that she has some solid incentive.

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