She Lives

I've been home from San Diego now for seven weeks and I've spent five of those weeks working 80 to 90 hours. That schedule is, for me, coming to an end. Though for the next five weeks I will be running the nighttime performances and a few matinees of a show that's just opened, I will not be in daytime rehearsals for the show which will replace it next month. Instead, I will be across town rehearsing a show in which I've been cast.

That show is an original script based -- not loosely -- on the Grimm fairy tale Sleeping Beauty. As there is a paycheck and professional credit in a respected venue involved, I will refrain from additional comment, except to say that I will be playing the young beauty's mother.

Though I've been cast as a mother before, my fictional children have always been infants or actors older enough than myself to border on ridiculous. That this time I am of an age which could have truly borne the sixteen-year-old spindle-finding princess gives me pause.

Or, had different author invented a truly novel evil curse, paws.

Now THAT would be an original script! Instead of sleeping peacefully for 100 years, all inhabitants of the castle would be turned into bears who maul each other to death until a century later only three remain, eating porridge, when Little Red Robin Hood comes to steal the royal golden plates for the poor and... nah, it'd never sell.

She says while quietly copywriting the idea and never minding the inevitable Into the Woods comparisons.

But I digress.

In the last few weeks, I have accomplished very little personal business while attending to the business of the theatre, but when breaks did come, they wore robes of synchronicity and serendipity.

For example, in a schedule heavy with double-duty days, it was lucky that auditions for Sleeping Beauty fell early on a day I'd work only night and callbacks on a night when I'd work only day. I was meant to be there.

And when one of my few full days off left me eyeing a new Dodge (a story deserving an article of its own), it was a fortunate accident to discover still on the lot a Chrysler that hadn't been picked to play kickball in 2004. I shaved $8,000 from the sticker price and received more car than I'd budgeted for, brand spanking new.

Less sympathetic events in recent weeks have included bills for previous medical tests and appointments for future diagnosis, early morning barking alarms, late night mewing greetings, a pesky West Viriginian parking spot thief, and a surprise Californian suspension of my driver's license for failure to file Form FR1 with the DMV in the wake of April's accident -- as every out-of-state driver knows instintively to do, I'm sure.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse, yadda yadda. But really. Was there somewhere I could have picked up a Visitor's Guide to California Penal Codes? The trooper made no mention. One day I'll share a little federal interstate commerce rant I'm stewing on....

Until then... back to work.