When I posted this blog, I was obviously feeling very proud of my son and very high on the play, feeling so very positive about the experience as a whole. Unfortunately, things didn't stay so positive. While I'm still proud of the boy, he created problems for himself that I truly hope both he and I can learn from. I extend to the cast a heartfelt "thank you" for any patience, help, or tolerance you've extended to the littlest cowboy. He will remember this experience and all of you for the rest of his life. I personally am starting to hope I'll forget. (just kidding!)
Preview night, and the boy was a champion. I was using a borrowed digital camera that would not at all accept any form of movement in its subjects, so the only pics I got of my future Broadway star are the ones where he's standing still. Just so you know, he dances and sings too. ;)
The boy has also been attending summer band camp this week at Creative Soul in Watauga. Really cool place, the kids get to form a band, choose an instrument, write a song, learn other cover songs, rehearse, and then perform a gig on Friday evening to show what cool rock and rollers they are. The boy chose to play the drums, and you know what, he sounds surprisingly good. When he plays the drums in the next room from where I'm working in my office, it actually sounds like there's someone in there playing a particular drum riff and not like someone fell down the stairs while carrying snares and cymbals. When I picked him up at band camp today, he was humming the song above and told me that's what they'd learned today. Bon Jovi, man, is that right on or what? My boy knows how to play my favorite Bon Jovi song on the drums. So we sang that song together in the car, all the way over to Lewisville where he was scheduled to be a cowboy on stage for the next three hours but without the steel horse he'd ride. (Tomorrow is the actual opening.)
I've told you how thrilling it all is (and I am very proud, yes) so here's the down side: me and the boy, we don't sleep anymore. For the past two months, it's been nightly rehearsals in Lewisville, and we never get home before midnight. This week, with band camp too, we're up at the crack to get ready, and I drive him to camp, then pick him up and hurry to rehearsal, home at midnight. Since my evening home is now the theater, I have to give up a lot of sleep to get things done so I can start over again tomorrow. We're exhausted but having a blast. I'm sure there will be more theater to come for him, but he says he wants to go back to the other side of acting for a while, commercials and TV. Good boy. A fraction of the time commitment, and he'd actually get paid!
Here are some interesting things I've learned:
1) Nearly every grown-up in the show, including myself, behaved at times more like a child than the children themselves.
2) I learned the terms blocking, marking, and striking. But I'm not going to tell you what they are.
3) Theater people are very theatrical. Lordy, the drama that goes on in the greenroom, behind the curtains, in the prop rooms--enough to upstage whatever's going on out on the set!
4) Costume changes and tiny places to perform them in the intervals between cues (maybe minutes) have given theater people a completely liberal and free attitude toward nudity. I'm not all that hung up on modesty myself, so I didn't even notice it after the first rehearsal...until one particular gentleman in Oklahoma! walked by me just the other day wearing his unders, and I did the most comical double take! I decided he must use his boxer briefs to carry his pet python around with him because there's no way all that he had going on there was HIM!! Yeah, okay, I had to look a third time, but I did determine (I'm pretty sure) that it actually IS him. I'm not kidding---scary big.
Oklahoma! will go on for the next four weeks, twelve more shows. Week night rehearsals are over, thank God, but we'll be there with cowboy hats and boots on every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday till early August. Y'all come see us, y'hear?
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