Wednesday/Thursday – Day 104/Day 105
November 16, 2012
The slog continues. Today I made up the remainder of my workshop hours and unfortunately spilled a can of paint over my runners (sneakers), destroying them in the process. I managed to make it to algorithms this morning, but by this point the combination of coding, solving and singing was really taking its toll. Though my voice was slowly coming back, every day my eyes drooped a little more and I was a little less attentive in class.
Tonight’s rehearsal was much the same as the previous nights, though this time we entered into act two and I was even given a little more of a role with a cameo as the prison guard in a few scenes.
Thursday was the day of the show and, thankfully my voice was back. As I’m writing this a week later I admit that I can hardly remember the day, only to say nothing of note really occurred, the usual classes with a just in time submission of some physics work and more struggles with my code.
Finally tonight the show opened and, as per usual, I was running about like a mad man, performing transition and, occasionally delivering a few lines. However, the show also gave me the opportunity to bond a little more with the other cast and crew members, culminating in a pleasant dinner after the show in which I got to talk in depth to Lauren and Anais amongst others.
I needed my sleep tonight more than ever and thankfully, I received it!
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.
Wednesday/Thursday – Day 97/98
November 12, 2012
Today was back to the usual grind and it was harder than usual after such a long break! The work suddenly piled up again, with assignments coming in from all fronts. To top it off, by this point I was low on sleep, and had been trying to spend as much time with Dad as possible. I barely scraped through my classes today, thoroughly distracted and on my phone for much of them. I only barely made it through the goodbye, and this further stole away my focus.
The evening brought another onslaught of rehearsal and the announcement that the show had been postponed till Friday to allow us time to prepare and tech the show, which despite the hurricane, was coming together quite well. In addition, we were to add a matinee show to our offerings, and hope that the theater would fill up despite the late announcement.
Another part of my day was walk-shifting on Locust Walk, handing out flyers with such slogans as “You think my accent is awesome? Not as awesome as the Penn Glee Club Fall Show” and “Kiss me kangaroo and pickle me ginger – this is something mate, that you don’t want to miss”. Exploiting my accent turned out to be highly profitable and I managed to turn over one hundred flyers in thirty minutes. A record.
Rehearsal tonight ran again very late, with more chances to get close to everyone and enjoy the music and dance. Vanessa Lam, our stage manager and a wonderful, short, Canadian girl was having a hard time keep it all together as madness converged on the theatre, setting us all on edge.
Again, another late night of work followed and very little sleep.
Thursday was much the same, but by this point hell week was really starting to hit me. Physics and Operating Systems, my two harder classes, we both today, and I almost slept right through them. I pushed through some of my remaining work due Friday and slept an hour during the day before again, hitting the rehearsal block at 6. With Dad gone, rehearsals were even harder as I had no good excuse to take me away from the action (not that I so much regretted it). Our performance was improving radically and some of our songs were really getting to the point of excellence. Even our few dance numbers combined with Penn Dance had reached an acceptable level of performance.
Finally, at 1:03, I returned to my room, talked deliriously to Mum and Esther, a close friend back home, and got to sleep around 3:30.