Area Premiere: A Mini Serial. Post 1: Dress Rehearsal

In which Dan prepares himself and his daughter for the dress rehearsal and valiantly fights off an infirmity.

Tonight is Dress Rehearsal. For the layperson, that's the final rehearsal - often with close friends, family, & production crew in attendance so the performers can get a sense of timing with laughs & other audience reaction - before opening night.

Sharon & Lucy will be there. It's a pretty innuendo-laden, suggestive show, but all that stuff is going to fly right over Lucy's head. She's going to love the constant mugging, the flying in & out of doors, and the general sense of zaniness, as well as joining in with the rest of the audience when they have a good belly laugh. And she'll get a huge kick out of seeing her dad. I've been talking her through the production process; she's gotten to meet the other actors and see behind the stage doors (to backstage!), and all sort of other this-is-how-it's-done stuff and this will be a great opportunity to see how all the pieces of a production come together; how a group of committed individuals can work together to produce something that adds something to the fabric of her community. Whether or not she sees in quite those terms at age four, something will stick in that little head, somewhere. And it also is pretty cool to be a dad who can grant special privleges (Lucy wearing her own costume in the "costume parade," seeing portions of rehearsals, etc.) as a result of me being a fancy-schmancy company member.

I woke up yesterday sick. Nearly full-blown cold. Poor, poor timing. In the past 36 hours, however, an unGodly amount of forced down time, Vitamin-C, Zicam, water, (and even the mysterious, homeopathic aconite) has managed to force the thing more or less out of my body and I think I'm ready to go.

The last few nights of tech week (the final week, when all the "technical" pieces are in place), I've been either attempting to meditate, running through my scenes in my head, or reading The Geography of Nowhere (see GoodReads sidebar). Tonight I'm going to sit back and listen to the audience (hopefully) enjoy the show in the way I'm expecting them to.

The board is set. The pieces are in motion.