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You Shouldn't Go Home Again I keep trying to remember why I wanted to work at the Center's summer program again. Every day when I get up at 6:30 so I can be back in South Jersey by 8:30, I try to remember. When I walk into my rehearsal space - a trailer in the middle of a college parking lot - and am confronted with 82 faces, fully fifty more than were in my last summer cast in 1993, I try to remember. When I have to trudge across the parking lot in 96 degree heat to take kids to the bathroom, I try to remember. When I have lunch duty and have to keep track of 220 kids as they go back and forth to the lunch lines and the bathroom and other tables and God knows where else, I try to remember. When I'm trying to stage scenes while my leads are A. flirting B. talking C. mocking each other and D. all of the above, plus half my mind is worrying if the poor chorus is bored out of their minds (they are), I try to remember. When I'm trying to come up with musical staging for terrible songs no one's ever heard of and teach it with a straight face, I try to remember. When I'm laying in the bathtub soaking my shin splints and soothing my sunburn while making cuts to the script with one hand, I try to remember. It's the second week of the program. The first week I wanted to shoot myself. Now I want to shoot them. They never. shut. up. Never. Oh, we (my staff of three assistants and I) can get them quiet. We just can't keep them quiet. Of course we can't. There are EIGHTY-TWO of them. There are four of us. It's summer. This isn't school. They're doing it for fun, supposedly (some parents make their kids come because it's cheap all-day babysitting - it sucks, but it's true). And when you're 12, it's hard to keep quiet. I know this. There are too many of them and too few of us. Too many in one cast and nothing we can do about it. I don't mean to keep comparing it to the way it was in 1993 but I can't help it. I have to teach acting now and I hate to teach acting (luckily that ends this week). My Beast is costumed in the most ridiculously cuddly looking costume in the history of the world. Two of the songs in my show have the same tune, and it's not a good one. There are good friends around, but I am on my feet all day fighting the noise and I just want it to be over. And this, my friends, is what is sapping my energy so much I can barely even finish this entry. Greg and I are staying home for the Fourth. I intend to post a big wedding chunk this weekend, but I know you'll understand if it's all slow going. If you're not on the notify list yet, you may want to join for these exhausted, frustrating weeks.
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