The past half-month
So it's been over two weeks since I've posted anything new to this blog. I've been busy. Last Friday (the 4th) was the end of our first quarter at school. One of my big assignments for my senior English classes is to do a paper about a novel they've read independently. I have them due about a week before the end of the quarter because it takes me about a week to go through them. (I had 83 papers, most between 4 and 10 pages in length, to read.) My schedule, which I managed to keep pretty close to, was to read 8 papers per day. I spend about 15-20 minutes on each paper.
The following week (last week) was the last week of rehearsals for our fall play, Into the Woods. It was a long week, as it typically is, but this one was even longer than normal. There was only one night during the week when I was home before 10:30. Last Monday, a week ago, the play looked to be a complete disaster. A number of kids didn't know their lines, their songs, their blocking, their entrances and exits. I think the four-hour practice we had that night must have sunk in with them, because by Wednesday, they had improved tremendously. I've been at this long enough to realize that with this age group, everything seems to happen at the last minute, but I have never seen a turnaround that big in only two days. It was amazing. By the time we had our final dress rehearsal Friday afternoon (which we do in front of a live audience of junior high kids), they had managed to pull it off. The three shows we did over the weekend went extremely well. We got more than our usual share of compliments, and when people saw the difficulty level of this show, I think many of them were blown away. It was great. My only disappoint is that our audience attendance was down quite a bit from normal. We had about 100 people in the audience for each of the three shows, but we often get maybe twice that for some nights. Ah, well, the kids did an amazing job, and I'm proud of all of them.
Now that it's all over, I'm looking forward to getting back to doing a little reading once in a while at night, and this little thing I have vague memories of called sleep.
At least for a couple of weeks before I begin work on our school's one-act play.
The following week (last week) was the last week of rehearsals for our fall play, Into the Woods. It was a long week, as it typically is, but this one was even longer than normal. There was only one night during the week when I was home before 10:30. Last Monday, a week ago, the play looked to be a complete disaster. A number of kids didn't know their lines, their songs, their blocking, their entrances and exits. I think the four-hour practice we had that night must have sunk in with them, because by Wednesday, they had improved tremendously. I've been at this long enough to realize that with this age group, everything seems to happen at the last minute, but I have never seen a turnaround that big in only two days. It was amazing. By the time we had our final dress rehearsal Friday afternoon (which we do in front of a live audience of junior high kids), they had managed to pull it off. The three shows we did over the weekend went extremely well. We got more than our usual share of compliments, and when people saw the difficulty level of this show, I think many of them were blown away. It was great. My only disappoint is that our audience attendance was down quite a bit from normal. We had about 100 people in the audience for each of the three shows, but we often get maybe twice that for some nights. Ah, well, the kids did an amazing job, and I'm proud of all of them.
Now that it's all over, I'm looking forward to getting back to doing a little reading once in a while at night, and this little thing I have vague memories of called sleep.
At least for a couple of weeks before I begin work on our school's one-act play.
posted by Kootch | 4:54 PM
2 Comments:
Glad to read that Into The Woods went well. What a difficult show -- vocally, at least.
It's pretty lousy that people won't even go to a high school show if it doesn't have name recognition. I mean, good grief!...should we just do Fiddler on the Roof and Sound of Music over and over and over?
Well said, Stix.
I'll be the first to admit that I am not a big fan of musicals ~ I can count on one hand the ones I've actually liked ~ but, as I told the director (Kootch) Saturday night, Into the Woods was the most enjoyable play that I have ever seen in Martin County.
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