Monday/Tuesday – Day 102/103

November 14, 2012

Most unfortunately, today I woke up relatively early to make it to work-light hours at 9AM. These are hours I had to contribute to help build the Legally Blonde set, like all other cast members, and involved painting and building. To my dismay, while painting a few wooden planks black, I accidentally split a full paint can all over the floor and, over my shoes, pair of which I have not many. Now, after a run through the wash I still have one black runner (sneaker) and one white runner.

By this point in time my life was far more intense than I needed it to be, and I was receiving too little sleep, resulting in a hoarse voice and intense exhaustion. I slept right through algorithms and in fact, most of the day. I awoke just in time for the 5PM rehearsal call.

Rehearsal today involved ‘teching’ (planning out lights and sound) for Act I, with continuous starting and stopping to ensure the transition from rehearsal to stage worked effectively. For me this meant learning the 16 transitions that I was scheduled to assist with, moving props and set pieces on and off stage. I was thoroughly occupied, less by performing and more by running about left right and center trying to make sure I didn’t miss any of the cues.

On getting back to my room it was time to work for a good few hours and, till 2:30AM I was  still pounding out formulae and solving equations. At that point my focus wavered and I spent the next thirty minutes before bed taking advantage of the fact that I was awake at a reasonable hour to call Australia and spoke to a few close friends at home.

Tuesday was similar, just with even more work to be done. I had an Algorithms assigment due (write an AI to play connect-4 based on the negamax algorithm) and was struggling to find a few bugs that prevented mine from playing properly. Every free second of my day was spent on this code and I still didn’t mange to track the errors down.

Tonight’s rehearsal followed on from Monday’s, trying to tech the remainder of Act I and get stuck into teching Act II. In my opinion it was left rather late. However tonight’s rehearsal had two highlights. The first was the presence of Brutus and Rusty, the two dogs performing in the show and, more importantly, the discovery of a new friend. Anaïs Ortiz, working backstage in costumes had caught my eye the night before with her beautiful smiles and tonight we exchanged a few words. We had a decent amount in common and bonded over our love of languages and good (european) food, cheese in particular. Her constant presence backstage between my transitions made rehearsal all the more bearable and gave me someone to keep an eye out for.

After the show as per usual, there was a production meeting running for a fair amount of time and then back to my room to try and spot those pesky bugs. However, by the end of the night they were unfortunately still obfuscated my by mounds of code.

Legally Blonde 1

November 9, 2012

Tonight was the first performance of Legally Blonde, that hopefully I’ll get to writing to more about once all the madness is over. Just to give all of you some idea, the earliest I’ve gone to bed in the past two weeks is about 3AM, and on average I rehearse/perform for over six hours a night.

The show went excellently and was sold out, and I did play my little part, delivering my few lines with great gusto!

Come Sunday I shall attempt to write around ten days worth of updates but undoubtedly there will be blanks. Things have certainly stepped up a notch around here, work wise too, as we come to the tail end of the fall semester.

Friday – Day 84

October 22, 2012

Friday morning I woke up not so wonderfully, but the weather was too nice and the workload too light for the day not to be wonderful. I made it through my classes in the day and had another helpful singing lesson! Rehearsal for Legally Blonde was cancelled in the afternoon, providing me with more free time to go do some pre-Shabbat shopping and just enjoy myself a little.

Shul was at chabad with a tiny minyan, turns out the entire OCP (orthodox community at penn) had left for fall break, which started today! Thus, I had not planned for food on Friday night, expecting to eat at Hillel which, unfortunately was closed. Thankfully Alyse, a Drexel student, opened up her home to me and I ate dinner with Arianna, Alexis and Zack, some of my favorite people at Penn. After a lovely dinner and a good walk with them it was time for a good, long, sleep.

© 2012-2024 Shaanan Cohney