Rehearsals for Once Upon A Mattress are taking on that frantic quality, you know the “Holy s@#$ the show is THIS WEEKEND” attitude.  I wish we could have gotten the commitment we are seeing right now, say, a month ago.  But, in a small school, with a limited pool of kids, there are a lot of demands on their time, and they are doing the best they can.  Some of us have also reached that giddy stage where every little thing strikes us as supremely funny and we have a hard time continuing on with our jobs.  This is a problem when it is the director and her pianist that are gigging uncontrollably with tears down their cheeks.  Kind of hard to play or direct if you can’t see straight.  Or breathe.

This morning I spent a lot of time working with Sir Harry and Lady Larken.  They are the sappy mushy romantic characters that have the sappy mushy romantic songs.  She’s a senior and he’s a freshman.  And his voice is still changing. They’ve made progress, but they are still at least partly embarrassed by their characters.  (And no, I don’t really blame them, their characters are pretty silly, but come on!  It’s a musical!!  It’s supposed to be sappy and silly!)

The band director was working with them on what they should be doing while they are singing their sappy song.  This involves lots of hand-holding and gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes. She was demonstrating to Sir Harry what she wanted him to do:  namely, she held his hand and stared lovingly into his eyes.

Freaked him out.  Poor kid.  I think he was being funny, but he did actually wipe his hand off after she let go of it, and then he wandered over to use the hand sanitizer.

There’s something about being involved with a musical.  It’s so much work and I’m completely exhausted (and I was trying to go cold turkey on Pepsi this week.  Duh), but it’s a little like childbirth.  I’m probably going to forget how awful the last 2 weeks are, and volunteer to do this all over again in 2 years.  You’ll just have to be polite and not remind me how obnoxious I got right before the show.