Ah the joys of tech week
Well, I have once again found myself right in the middle of tech week. It is only Tuesday and I already feel like I am going through life in a haze. For those of you who are not theatre people, tech week in community theatre is the final week before a show opens, and it is when everything really starts coming together. It’s crunch time. It is long rehearsals that start early and finish late. It means being distracted by new lighting, special effects, new and different costumes, new sets, physical props that you forgot you had, and a full orchestra all while trying to remember your lines, dance moves, and blocking.
My standard schedule ends up being work until the normal time, drive straight to the theatre, reherase for 4-5 hours, go home and go to bed. Lately, I seem to be making wierd choices for tech week. When Aida was in tech week, Amy and I were redecorating our bed/entire house (more on that is coming soon). This time, we ended up getting Amy’s car repaired from a parking lot hit and run, which means I get to play driver in the morning, which in all honesty shouldn’t be a problem, but I am a slacker about getting up in the morning. The other thing, which is kind of cool, is that I am becoming sort of the photographer of the Cocoa Village Playhouse, which means I randomly get called on to do a photoshoot for newspaper photos at short notice, which explains why I end up working on photos from the end of rehearsal until 2AM or so.
Now it occurs to me that this is sounding like some sort of grip fest. It is not. After all, it is pretty unlikely that I would volunteer most of my free time in 2-3 month blocks at a time for something I didn’t really enjoy. I have just found a good number of people don’t actually know what is going on when I say “tech week”. The most import thing, though, is that the whole time you know that Friday is a whole other ballgame. Actually it is the ballgame. Regardless of what is going on during tech week, you know that Friday it all changes. On Friday, there is an audience. Most show (some more than others), even on Thursday you aren’t quite sure how it is all going to come together, but it (almost) always does. For now, all I can say is lets get to Friday now.