Sixteen Shows and Counting

I've spent the past nine years of my life in the safety net or organized performing. Being in acting classes since the fourth grade and then Bountiful High's musical program from junior year on makes you used to performing regularly.

I've done at least sixteen shows. I've averaged a show a year since age eleven. As I got older one turned to two, and now...

I've been cut off.

Granted, half my repertoire I paid to participate in, such is the nature with acting classes, but it was still a regular schedule of performing.

Sophomore year my acting class had a different teacher who was focusing on a Christmas variety show instead of an actual musical, and I didn't feel like myself walking the school halls. I felt so... elementary. And perhaps the reason was that without the safety net of a yearly performance I reverted back to me as I was before the yearly performance began. It's as if I am my best self when I'm focusing one million percent on being my best someone else.

But here I am, Charley's Aunt's set in heaps and piles, my costumes out waiting to again be boxed away, and I realize that life as I know it is about to change. Any show I participate in from this moment to the end of my life is left up to my own stamina and the director's intuition regarding my talent.

Sounds like another addition to my "Golden Now Year of Change", eh? My father told me it'll be the same as it's ever been when I said that Charley's Aunt was my last guaranteed show ever. "The others weren't guaranteed, were they?" he'd asked.

He does have point. I stopped paying to be in shows the end of my sophomore year. But I argue that I only got in musical because Angela had me in her theatre class sophomore year, and somehow whiffed my potential. And I only got a part in both musicals this year because I actually tried...

Oh.

If there's anything I've learned, reviewing over my odd theatre past, it's that trying and fighting at and for auditions is what gets me places. I put everything I had into All Shook Up performances so Angela could see I'm an expressive person on stage. I did everything I could to have Mother figured out before Crazy for You auditions, and refused to tell myself that part was in the bag, because every other time I've "pre-cast" the show for myself I end up with the exact opposite: ie nothing. And Stepmother? Well, I let her come out as flamboyant as she wanted during auditions. And I guessed it worked.

So by the time Charley's Aunt came around Angela knew I was capable, and only needed my formal audition as an excuse to give me the part. (I'm not saying this to be cocky. If you would like all of the back story to this audition just ask me. It's quite an ego-boosting allegory.) I think the thing that troubles me most is that situations like the one just ascribed will not happen again. I have to learn to convey in three minutes what I showed Angela in two years. Otherwise, my list of shows stops at sixteen.

And it's quite a stressful thought.