Another Opening, Another Show

Allow me to begin this like I do most things in my life:

Please turn off your cell phones, the performance is about to start. (Cue house lights).

There is nothing quite like the opening of a show. Your pulse is racing a mile a minute. You can feel the audience's excitement as the curtain rises. You can sense the nerves of the leading lady as she takes her first steps on the set. And the best part is? Hopefully, you get to do this every night for the rest of your life.

Welcome to the theater. Everything that is good, holy, bad, unholy, emotional, insane, stressful takes place in or around these walls. An exaggerated, dramatic form of life takes place upon the stage for millions to scrutinize, be baffled by and maybe even enjoy.

But the theater is also a place of hurt and self-loathing. A place where you may be perfect at what you do but not the type of perfect that a director is looking for. A place where you need to fit into the same costume every night regardless of how many brownies you ate. A place where creating an alternate reality means selling yourself to that alternate reality.

I have sold myself to that alternate reality. An undergrad stage manager at one of the top conservatories in the nation, I will spend my college nights making a prop keg out of styrofoam rather than drinking out of one. I look forward to perfecting my craft and eventually taking it to the MET. As a stage manager, I am always Switzerland; the conscious observer taking note of the moves the other player's make without making myself a part of the game.

This blog is part diary, part expose and part therapy. I will tell you what I see from the unbiased shadows of the lighting booth. I will probably rant about one actress or another and about how she is ruining my life even though her quest for stardom is hopeless. I will most definitely attempt to explain my alternate reality and why I love living in it.

So just as Hamlet tossed about a skull, debating whether it was nobler to live or die, I now leave you with another of life's eternally unanswered and completely overdramatized questions: To read or not to read. I suppose that that is the question.

-ABos.