Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Of dance recitals, weather forecasts & sleepless nights




Ugh. Dance recital week. I'm exhausted, stressed and freaked out. Stop reading now if you expect something quilt-y because this isnt going to be quilt-y.

So, our dance studio has somewhere around 500 students. They put on 4 shows because there are just too many dances to do it in any less than that. We always have three dress rehersals (one per show, the fourth show is virtually all repeats of dances in other shows, but they need to run it for seating capacity reasons).

Anyway, the first night of dress rehersal is generally a mess because of needing to block things on stage, check the costumes, set the lights, check the cuts of all the music, and arrange the other million details. Every year we all leave the first dress rehersal going "Wow, what a mess" but it always comes together and looks fantabulous during the show.

On Monday we had the first dress rehersal. It was a total fiasco. Everyone was walking around totally freaking out and noone could figure out what was going so wrong. In the end, we had to end the rehersal at 11 because that is the deadline set by the venue for using the facility (rehersal started at 4). And at that point, TWELVE numbers hadn't even gotten on stage. A lot of them were rushed thru with no blocking done, music still not right, etc. I've never seen it that bad.

Then we came home and I watched the news: SNOW predicted for Thursday. Uh oh. If school is cancelled due to snow, there won't even BE a dress rehersal that night (and therefore for the Saturday night show, which has some of my kids dances in it that aren't in any of the other shows).

As a result of this, I've spent two sleepless nights. I mentioned this to some of the other moms at rehersals tonight, and as it turns out, I'm not the only sleepless mom in town.

Did I mention that there is a lot of pressure for this show to be really good this year because it is the studio's 50th anniversary this year?? They have lots of big sets, several long production numbers and a bunch of extra stuff they don't usually have in the show. Yup, big time stress.

Well, tonights rehersal went much better. And the weather forecast has been changed to maybe a coating of snow on the grass, then changing to rain. Thank goodness.

But perhaps the worst thing about this week is that the dance recital is this week (instead of the normal first week of May)...because this year, the dance recital runs into my Lancaster Quilt Show weekend. This is the first time in 11 years that I have missed the quilt show. I've been there pregnant, with a newborn, with a toddler, with my Mom and no kids, with the whole family, etc. But I've been there every year. And this week I'm not there at all. And I am very unhappy about that.

1 comment:

Carol E. said...

Oh, I am sorry you are missing the great quilt show, and all for a bunch of stressful events! Boo hoo. But hopefully the recital will be wonderful and well worth it. I thought I left a message on your previous post - I love that neat afghan! I guess I didn't post it correctly somehow. Crossing my fingers for decent weather out there. (My coworker is there to run in the Boston marathon. Yikes.)