Hell Week, Part 2 – Thursday, Friday, Shabbat
February 20, 2013
Thursday was the most singing I’ve ever done in a single day. At 8AM I woke up as the singing was to begin at 8:45 for Valentines Day. I was scheduled from 8:45 to 4PM on Singing Valentines, whereby quartets comprised of PGC members would deliver Valentine’s Day messages in song, during class, to those whose loved one’s had donated a given sum to habitat for humanity. In four separate quartets, I raced from building to building, from class to class, singing my heart out for all “My Honey”ies, “My Valentine”s, “My Little Margie”s and to members of faculty, staff, and students. Highlights were as follows: singing at Dunkin Donuts, Starbucks and Aunty Anne’s Pretzel’s and PGC members receiving free food from them. Singing for the elderly head of the Chemistry Department (Madeline Joillet) and of course singing for “her majesty” Amy Gutmann, President of The University of Pennsylvania. Embarassingly enough, a quote of me calling her, “her majesty” even made the Daily Pennsylvanian. I can only hope she didn’t read it.
Following all the normal shifts, I was then on a shift for Phone Valentine’s for those to whom we were unable to deliver in person. These included two good friends back home. Phone shift went all the way till 5:30 a which point I raced home, changed, ate a little something and then headed off to full rehearsal at the Zellerbach Auditiorium.
Rehearsal again ran well past midnight, and left me more than half dead. I think I’m truly beginning to understand the meaning of incorporeal.
Friday I thankfully had no classes, but to make up for the lack of things for me to do, of course, I had another walkshift at 10AM. I managed to quickly run out of Penn Glee Club flyers and so, while waiting for my shift to end, I decided to help out the Pan Asian Dance Troupe in advertising their show, “Revenge”. There I met a sweet girl by the name of Donna, who was somewhat bemused with my marketing techniques.
The afternoon was spent grading homework for CIS121 that I had thus far neglected, and I only just managed in time for our staff meeting. After the staff meeting, I had only just enough time for Kabbalat Shabbat, before I was off to the theatre for our very first performance!
It was well received, much the same with the matinee performance. However, after the two, I was thoroughly exhausted!
In the afternoon, there was the Glee Club Graduate Club reception, where we sung a few songs from our standard repetoire, however, unfortunately I was fairly out of practice with a number of the pieces.
Our final performance Motzei Shabbat, was filled with members from the OCP (Orthodox Jewish Community at Penn) and I felt very well supported. A few tears came to my eyes as I was asked to speak along with the seniors, on what it felt like to be partaking in my final show.
Following the end of the show, we had ‘strike’, taking apart the set and emptying the theatre. This took us till around 1AM at which point the cast party began. Mark Glassman and Erik Nordgren, an old alum and our conductor respectively were both present and helped add to the environment. Mark’s ‘roast’ was particularly entertaining, and though I wasn’t savaged quite enough, it was still hugely enjoyable. Finally at around 3AM, hell week came to a close and my eyes were laid to rest.
Hell Week, Part 1 – Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday – Days 194/195/196/197
February 17, 2013
Sunday ten AM it began. I pushed myself out of bed and headed to Platt Student Performing Arts House to help post bills around campus. We pasted them over in every residential building, across campus, and also began social media efforts to encourage people to buy tickets to the upcoming performance of “Office Bass: A Corporate Musical”.
From there it was off to the Annenberg Theatre, our performance venue. It has deep significance to the Glee Club as we were the opening act on one of Philly’s finest stages and are thus one of only two amateur groups allowed to use the space for performance. The other being Penn Singers, the light opera company which some of you may recall, I was involved with last semester for the performance of “Legally Blonde”. Once in the theater, I unloaded my costume into the change rooms and began helping to build the set.
While helping out I was introduced to Yueyi Zhou, a member of the PGC band, and we struck it off immediately, going on a brief walk to find and help unpack the truck. After a while of talking we came to a shocking surprise that we shared a certain mutual friend. Details are a little private so again, send me a message for more info!
After lunch, rehearsals started and didn’t really stop. Dinner break was far too short, even though I was late getting back after other clubbers dinner’s arrived late and held me up too!
Rehearsal tonight finished relatively early, despite large amounts of work being left unfinished. Midnight and I was back home, getting a little work done before my two midterms on Monday and Tuesday.
Monday was a struggle. At nine, I was up and already at the labyrinthine David Rittenhouse Labs for a physics review session, after which I spent around thirty minutes with the professor trying to work around my problems. Unfortunately as was to be seen later in the week, it didn’t have much of an impact on my grades. Next up was revision for my 1:30PM midterm, so I ended up skipping Networking to get some more time in. The professor who I ran into wasn’t too worried, but I wasn’t super pleased to be missing out on class. The Security midterm was pretty easy for the most part and the two questions I didn’t know how to answer I ended up getting thoroughly wrong, but that wasn’t such an issue on midterm of it’s length and fairness.
My lab was at four pm and it went really well today! We learnt about stacks and queues using a real world abstraction: paper plates! The students task was to write an algorithm first in pseudocode and then in Java to build a queue out of two stacks. Using plates I believed helped them to grasp exactly what was going on and pretty much everyone in the class succeeded. Following that I followed up with a little theory on how to implement the algorithm using the ‘call stack’ and touched on a few systems coding details just for their interest.
My evening wasn’t much to talk about, straight rehearsal from immediately after my recitation all the way to one thirty AM tuesday. Struggles. I was a little tired at this point, however I was keeping up!
Tuesday started off as a disaster, though I didn’t realize it then. First thing in the morning was my midterm and I walked in more exhausted than I realized and this meant my mistakes on the exam were monstrous. I felt pretty good about having understood it afterwards and thought I’d managed to scrape by on it. Thus, I went to lunch at Hillel in a decent mood, before spending two hours in the afternoon fast asleep before it was back up again. I jumped up and out to do a walkshift ‘flyering’ on locust walk (handing out flyers promoting the show). I was on shift with Rigel Swavley and this meant I had an excellent time chatting as I gave away my wares. I also noticed that overplaying my accent was highly effective as marketing technique along with creating a personal connection with people as they walked by. Right from my walkshift it was off to rehearsal again. This time till two am. At two am it was late enough to call someone special back in Melbourne. Then I passed out on my bed.
Wednesday was back to regular classes but with the added pressure of a team project submission due in the evening. Thus, all my day outside of class was spent working on the Networked Systems project. Not to hard but coordinating the group was a bit of a struggle. Additionally, by this point, I was almost a walking ghost, thanks to the combined stresses of regular Penn life combined with the upcoming show. Rehearsal were running really late and the show still wasn’t quite together. All regular life concerns were being thrown out the window, sleeping in my clothes, eating poorly, things that I should’ve watched more carefully to try and make the week a little healthier. Wednesday night was another late one, well past 2AM and the next day was going to be really big. The longest stretch of singing in my life (but quite enjoyable nonetheless).