Well, today was the first Sunday morning since I think Christmas (and one of only a few in the past two years) that I didn’t have to get up uncomfortably early and drive into WNRN to produce the Sunday Morning Wake-Up Call. Don’t get me wrong - I love Rick Moore’s show, and producing it likely led me down the path of audio/visual engineering volunteering that likely wound me up accepted to NYU Film. Volunteering there was probably the single-most [pin-pointable] life changing event of high school.

But let me tell you - being able to wake up at 11AM this morning and spontaneously go swimming at Chris Green Lake… Wonderful! Mind you, I hadn’t been swimming in years and I now have the worst sunburn of my life; but these things happen.

What I find a little ironic though, was that I ended up celebrating my first Saturday night where I didn’t have to worry about getting to bed early for a talk show by watching a movie (Joe Dirt - terrible movie; I resisted heavily, but Jordan insisted) which is essentially a story being narrated on a talk show. Love it.

I have this ritual I go through the opening night of every show I’m in. It started with my school’s 9th grade production of West Side Story, and I’ve been repeated the process (more or less) with ever production I’ve acted in or directed.

It starts out with me getting to the theatre way before anyone else. In high school, our call for opening night was usually 5 or 5:30; I’d be at the theatre by 4 (after a quick run to Charlottesville’s favorite bagel bakery). Then, for the next hour or so (until we had to start getting makeup and costumes on) I’d wander aimlessly around the theatre, munching on my two plain bagels while being excessively perky towards the few techies or band members who were already setting up. This gets me in a good mood. I should note that the timing in eating these bagels is strategically planned - too early, and you’ll be hungry during the performance; too late, and you’ll feel full and distracted on stage.

Next step: laying down in the middle of the stage and closing my eyes. I’d call this “Becoming one with the stage,” but that sounds way too melodramatic and downright creepy. But I do feel like the single-most effective preparation I can carry out before a performance involves becoming comfortable with your acting environment. And no matter much time I’ve spent on the set before that (or how closely I’ve come to know it if I helped build it), it’s always just a set to me before that opening night. When your four hours away from the first real audience, with the worklights shining down at you from the grid and the final coats of paint still sticky from the last minute touchups, the set finally becomes alive. For some reason, laying down on the uncomfortably hard set floor in total silence without anyone else there gives me the peace and focus to go on stage and leave the outside world behind.

Finally, I visit tech land once again. Most actors ignore the techies either out of spite or lack of understanding, but I personally love the techies and find them to be the perfect way to keep from getting sucked into the overdramatic mess that is the actor collective pre-show. In may cases, I actually like the techies better than the actors (just don’t tell the actors that…).

Interspersed with the aforementioned steps, I generally lay down in the house seats, walk up in the lighting grid, and basically run amok through the whatever glorious theatre I’ve gotten to know over the past few months of rehearsal.

And somehow during this process, I manage to lose any nerves I might have had for the past few weeks as the clock ticked down to opening night. By the time I step on stage and the lights are shining down, I’m the happiest person alive.

It has been such a long three-months…

But rehearsals for Live Arts’ production of High School Musical are finally over, with our free preview starting tonight. Overall, I’m really pleased with how the show’s come along. It was certainly a different experience being on both the acting and production/design ends of the process (not to mention being the oldest student actor, and youngest member of the design team). And I don’t think I can communicate the mental and physical exhaustion of building the set from 10AM-6PM, then launching straight into rehearsal from 6PM-10PM every night this week. But I’ve kept going forward, knowing that all the work will eventually pay off (you should see the show just for the set, if nothing else).

I’m saving most of my Opening Night blogable material for the upcoming Live Arts blog (hype hype hype…), so I’ll just tell you guys that if you want to see high schoolers who are just a little too excited about being in a musical, a rocking band, and a set worthy of a 1970s Eurovision Song Contest, Live Arts is the place to be. Opening weekend is close to selling out, but click here to find out the show dates and times. Hope some of you can make it!

P.S. - I’m playing the school’s sound kid that does the morning PA announcements. Considering I’m also the sound designer for the show, that’s a bit ironic, don’t you think?

A) You spend between five and seven hours a day at Live Arts
B) You forget to eat for an entire day
C) You end up in the hospital due to stress-induced convulsions

For those of us lucky enough to be able to answer “All of the above”? It’s not a good sign.

Yesterday in the middle of dance rehearsal for High School Musical, I started to have chest convulsions, which eventually got to the point where my dad came in and took me to the emergency room. Despite what admittedly started out as a rather scary event (it’s not fun to not have control over your body), I must say I’d always wanted to be wheeled around in a stretcher… If it weren’t for my spasms, flying through the hallways with that cliche, “straight from the movies” view of the ceiling would have been kind of fun…

If this is any indication, it’s probably a very good thing that I have only one week left as producer for the Sunday Morning Wake-Up Call on WNRN. I love the job - but I need the rest time… That, when added on top of rehearsal for High School Musical six days a week, plus production meetings for the sound design, doesn’t leave a lot of time for relaxation…

Also, thanks to everyone that called or texted me, asking if I was okay. That was very nice :).

And just a bit of advice if you ever end up in a hospital bed: avoid letting them pump 2 liters of saline solution into your veins. I won’t tell you why.

I’m down to the last five days of my high school education.

Wow.

To be honest, I hadn’t really noticed until today. Up until now, I’d just continued to go through the motions of school: going to class, not going to class, doing the minimal amounts of homework associated with senior year… But now that the yearbooks have come out, and people have started asking me to sign them, I’m realizing how big this is: these next two weeks are the last during which I’m regularly going to see all these people. Some of them, people I’ve known since 3rd grade, when I was just a scared little 9-year-old, fresh from Minnesota. After this, everything’s going to change…

Tonight, Dessert Theatre 2008 opens. Tomorrow, it will close. My last production at Theatre CHS will be over - no more tech weeks, no more “dressing to the nines” on opening night. The lights will go down, the costumes put away, and the goodbyes said - and it will be over. Every Dessert Theatre closing night for the past three years, I’ve watched the seniors stand around, saying goodbye to the Black Box. Most crying. And I always think, “I don’t want to be that senior. I don’t want to say goodbye - I couldn’t handle that. I still have three years left here.

two years.

one.”

And now, there aren’t any more years left. I can’t just say, “There’s still next year. I don’t have to deal with it yet,” because this is it - I have to deal with it now. Now’s the time to say goodbye to all of these people - some old friends, others new - but all people I’ve realized I feel connected to on a level I didn’t image was possible. People that got me through the drama and trauma of high school life - who confided in me, and helped me through all those seemingly insurmountable roadblocks. People I’ve loved, people I’ve hated. People that mean the world to me. People.

I know I’m moving on to bigger and better things - goodness knows I’ll meet new friends, create new bonds. Grow even more into the person that I am. But these people around me now - they have guided me and shaped me more than I’ll ever truly realize. I don’t know how to thank them for that. There’s no way to thank them enough. I can’t even promise I’ll remember their names and faces ten years from now. But I know I’ll never forget what they meant.

So thank you, everyone. You won’t be forgotten.