"Burning Man," the fire which has recently consumed my life.

It's been a while. Sorry. I think it goes without saying that a lot has happened since my last post, over two weeks ago. Oops. If it makes you feel better, my loyal five followers, I've been neglecting facebook just as much as I have this blog. Let's not even get into email.

Where do I begin? We experienced our first four-show weekend and survived, barely. This weekend included a Friday 7:30 performance of Snoopy!!!, a Saturday matinee of Grand Prize, a 7:30 Home is Where Your Clothes Are on the same day, and a Sunday matinee of Snoopy!!!. Gah. This weekend also included a visit from my parents AND my roommates, which was awesome. Getting to unwind with Sonic and some serious girl-talk was an uncommon luxury. We, the company, also experienced and enjoyed the world's most receptive audience - Home ran somewhere around forty minutes longer than usual because we were holding for so many laughs. Yay!

Well before that intense weekend, we began rehearsals for Burning Man, the show for which I am the Script Supervisor. My responsibilities include running rehearsals (woodshedding, combo-ing, the lot), calling light and sound cues, collecting actors, overseeing line bashes, and more. Basically, I'm a glorified stage manager. I've never done any stage managing before. so this new task has proved a little daunting. The work itself seemed simple enough, but after a couple of days of rehearsals I began having nightmares, waking up around 5:00 am thinking I had missed a call for line. This continued for a quite a few nights, but I'm happy to say that I've now been nightmare-free for over 48 hours. Today was our first (and last) full dress rehearsal for Burning Man. I'm still relishing the fact that I get a headset backstage to call light cues. Having a headset, I feel, is about the only thing that really makes a stage manager legit. So, I'm legit. And it feels good. Somehow this headset has the power to make me feel that the hours sitting in a hard, wooden chair while listening to the same scene six consecutive times, only to continue to the next scene six more, the running up and down stairs to collect actors from the shop, the hours of lost sleep due to rehearsal nightmares, and the meals I've tried to eat between feeding lines to actors at a break-time line bash, were all worth it. And you know what? Maybe they actually were...