One show open...two to go.

We had our first opening weekend this weekend. We opened White Christmas on Friday night, had another performance Saturday night, and then a third performance Sunday afternoon. Opening night was okay, but our best performance was Sunday afternoon. I’m enjoying being backstage for the performances. I feel so much more involved with a running crew position. At CNU, all I’ve done is design work so I haven’t actually been on a running crew yet. I’m getting to work a lot closer to the actors than I have at CNU. We really have an awesome cast and crew to work with. Everyone has a great attitude about everything which makes it a pleasant working environment which is really helpful considering we are all lacking on sleep and might just kill each other if we had unpleasant people to work with. Nothing too major went wrong with any of our performances this weekend. Just a few late/early cues due to us having to use walkie talkies instead of a comm. system because our comm. system blew up the other night when mine wasn’t working. I was lucky that my comm. went out at the beginning of the performance the other night because I didn’t have my ear drums blown up when the comm. system went. Running a show with two way radios creates a challenge because we can’t really respond to our stage manager because if we are talking and she is needing to call a cue, she can’t talk until we are done talking. But I love overcoming challenges! Challenges are sent so that we can learn! Also, having my comm. go out on Thursday night did raise my confidence on knowing my cues. The thing is that we had done White Christmas a couple times with comm. before we lost it, so doing Mulan and Secret Garden without comm. is going to be even more of a challenge. I say bring it on!

We had an awesome audience Sunday so I think that helped with everyone’s energy. We are all being worn down. The actors all got Friday afternoon off to rest for the show, but none of the techies did which doesn’t really make sense, but whatever. We are all running shows on very little sleep. It’s working okay, but it would probably be better if we got some rest somewhere in our day. We did get Sunday evening and Monday morning off though! It was a very nice rest period. I didn’t realize how little free time I had last week until I realized how grateful I was for 5 extra hours on Sunday and 5 extra hours on Monday. It made Monday a pretty great day! I slept in, got to build stuff in the shop, we danced to Backstreet Boys, Brittany Spears, and N’Sync while working, we all went out for pizza, and I got my first paycheck! My paycheck got sent here so I have to send it to VA to actually get deposited and taxes took about 50 dollars out of it, but it’s all good. I also went to the store and got some ice cream because the next couple of weeks are going to be crazy so I will be needing ice cream. :)

I have been working extra hard to stay awake today. It just seemed longer than our typical day. Probably because I was laying out and painting bricks all day. As in painting wood to look like bricks. That becomes a boring thing to do for 10 hours. At one point today there was only about 4 of us working in the shop because everyone else went to the warehouse so I got to plug my iPod in and play my 60’s playlist which was a lot of fun and helped wake me up for a little while. When the end of the day finally came along, I was very excited to be headed back to my apartment to rest. My roommate and I just finished making egg rolls for dinner so I am very happy right now and ready to go to sleep. :)

Oh, and I don’t know if I already mentioned this before, but I found Klove on the radio here so that is nice to listen to on the way to and from work.

Sleep time. Oh, and I know I’ve said it before, but I can’t wait to open Secret Garden because it’s going to be amazing!!!!! :)