Stop and Start

The entire day is perfectly epitomized in the way Julia described the first tech rehearsal - "this isn't cue to cue, it's stop and start."

I went into the Bean and Bean coffee shop twice today, and was helped by the same guy. Of course I tipped both times - which I would have done even if I wasn't angling for a good word in edgewise - and on the second time, asked for an application. Apparently they don't do paper applications, so the employee ripped off some register tape and handed it to me, asking for my e-mail address and telling me they'd send me one that way. Imagine my surprise when I actually received the application within a few hours - I've been given the brush off before from potential employers, I know what it looks like, and it pretty much looked like that. Grant (the ASM) perfectly described it as being a Starbucks, but not. It's corporate, but still has enough soul to make it feel okay for me to try there. I have to say, now that I've gotten in a little bit with the theater people, they've been really great as far as trying to hook me up with people, show me the best places, and inform me of the happenings. New Yorkers are very different from Southerners, and there's no way of getting around that, but coming to grips with that fact has not made me appreciate their brand of culture any less.

It really seems like it shouldn't take six hours to run a cue-to-cue on a ninety minute play, yet inexplicably, we didn't even get two-thirds of the way through the script. Honestly, I blame it entirely on the director, who I've come to like less and less of late. He seems - to the rest of us, anyway - the one who makes things more difficult rather than less. Artistic vision be damned, I genuinely feel like there were multiple times today when a stronger director would have taken charge of the situation and moved the cast through the script whether they liked it or not. He would literally call "hold" every thirty seconds, and then spend five minutes just . . . looking at the scenery. God knows what he was doing. People would start adjusting things, just hoping to hit on what was bothering him, but most of the time, he took five minutes to fix whatever he viewed to be a problem (call me a big-picture kind of girl, but I really think the most important issue today should have just been getting through the script), then spend another five minutes looking at whatever we had just fixed before calling it a go again.

I know I wasn't the only one who was exasperated - Simon can only either do work or project on one computer, never both at the same time. The rendering process was apparently being especially frustrating on this particular day, but every time they would ask him for a block of color on some of the walls - something they did often, and really needlessly - he'd get this provoked look on his face, stop everything he was doing, and find the exact color of "magenta orange" that they needed for the projections. Really, people, if we're going to skim over all the important parts, do we really need to pause the video process to put a placeholder color on the walls while lighting and blocking out the dance number? I was only taking notes and running errands, but I was frustrated for poor Simon.

After the seven and a half hours of theater time, my lovely friend took me to a few of the places he'd been wandering in the time I'd been at work. He showed me the place that I needed to see most - an overlook onto the other side of the river, where we could watch the sun set, watch the tourists walk by, and just feel the presence of the water. I think honestly, one of the things I was most terrified of while being gone this whole summer was the idea of not having moments exactly like these - times (almost always at a body of water, for me personally) where I can relax, soak in the beauty of my surroundings, and feel the presence of someone whose company I genuinely value. There's a very small number of people whose friendship means the world to me, but I try to make a point of spending time with those people when I'm home. It's moments like these - or three hours, in our case - that make me appreciate the world the most, or maybe recharge my batteries in some sense. I may think that most of the world is comprised of absolute idiots, but I need that other one or half-percent to remind me of the quality around me.

I'm in a strange, happy-but-melancholic mood right now. The Corinne Bailey Rae I'm playing probably isn't helping, but that's another point. I want to say a lot of things about a lot of things, and most of those things I'll leave unsaid. I think I have a tendency to be most thankful for the tiny things than for big things, like being so thrilled about getting some pasta and generally overlooking the fact that I'm living the college dream in New York City this summer, but I do want to again say that I'm grateful for all the things I have, and all the things I've been given. And I'm done rambling for the night.