Opening Post-Motor-em

After a long and stressful Hell Week, Opening Night was a surprising success. An audience covered with laughter what were painful pauses during rehearsal and the show went swimmingly. On stage, we had a lot of fun with a responsive audience, and at a reception afterwards we heard a lot of praise from that audience. It's a good thing, too, because Hell Week wasn't the only thing that had left me with doubts about the opening night performance.

My worry increased a great deal after taking my parents to the airport Friday morning. I've become superstitious about that trip. Recent history has proven it does not bode well for me. Once, after dropping my father off, I found myself locked out of the apartment. A month later, after another drop-off, I crashed the company car. Rather, I was crashed into... but you see where I'm going with this: a performance on Airport Day could go horribly awry. It didn't. But I didn't escape the day unscathed.

Driving home after the reception, I was pulled over for speeding. I'd been pushing the five-over rule for the 45-mph speed zone in what, I soon found out, was actually a 35-mph speed zone at the point the officer clocked me. Worse, when the officer asked his rote two-a.m.-on-Friday-night question about drinking, I could not deny that I'd had an opening night beverage. Though I'd stayed at the theatre long after that drink, thoroughly enjoying a rather nerdy conversation about comic books, Tori Amos, and the new Batman movie, admitting to a cop that I'd had it at all was scary as hell. I have bad luck with police.

See, there are people who can routinely drive 100 on the highway without ever getting a speeding ticket, but I'm not one of them. I won't even try. Because I'm the girl who gets a moving violation at a stop sign. I'm the girl who, driving 35 in a 40, gets a ticket that's signed in triplicate and delivered to me minutes before the school zone I'm supposed to have sped through goes into effect. I'm the girl who gets a ticket on a patch of Kentucky road where my brother, at the same speed, had a day earlier been told to yield right to faster traffic. That's my fate behind the wheel. And I don't tempt it. So when I found myself in this situation, I knew I was doomed. It wouldn't matter that the drink was hours-old or that the street was marked "45" not inches away from where we were standing, because I was the girl standing there.

As I stood eyes-closed, head back, touching my nose, I thought I was a goner. Because when I'm nervous, I shake and stutter (ask anyone who's watched me attempt a monologue) and if there is a whiff of accusation in the air, I'll look guilty. Had you come to my home in Detroit in 1977 to ask who was killing a million Cambodians, I'd have looked so suspicious that you'd have jumped to conclusions despite the fact I would have been just 5 years old and passport-free.

Fortunately, when it was most important, fate threw me one of the good guys and, in the end, I was sent on my way without even a speeding ticket.

But I don't ever want to go through that again. When it's time for my parents to leave after their next visit, I'm handing them cab fare.