The second semester always seems to speed right by. No sooner did we get rid of the snow that summer showed up and now, finals week. Stage Door opened last month and finished the season. I made my grand debut on the Marvel stage: putting a grapefruit on Shakespeare’s bust during intermission. Offstage, I ran around with a headset on making sure we had actors ready for “Places!” If anything, I am relieved. Being an ASM was a huge part of this past year for me; stressful but successful.
Since my last blog post here, I’ve been busy with classes and Stage Door, pledging for Alpha Psi Omega (the national Theatre honor society), getting ready for my summer in NYC and Auburn, New York; registering for classes. I’ve been a busy girl. So busy, that I hardly had time to acknowledge my birthday last month and it seems the end of the semester has sneaked up on me, along with the APO formal and the PAC-nic end of year celebrations. With my birthday (the big 2-0!) and the end of the semester here, I realized that somehow I’ve come to the halfway point of college. So long sophomore year! Goodbye those awkward teen years (even if I’ll still be cast as a fourteen year old for another ten years)! And here’s to the next and last two years of college I have left, to being an adult, to the future…
Sophomore year: It’s hard to believe that at the beginning of this year, I was walking into Acting A to ask if maybe, might I be allowed to join the BFA Voice and Movement class because physicality was a real weakness for me as an actor and I know I’m just a BA but select BAs have been allowed in the past…I got as far as “Can I join” before Terry Beck went, “Oh, of course!” I think I was a little flabbergasted at how easily I was accepted into V+M by everyone and sometimes I still am, just because how lucky I am to be here and part of this:
Voice and Movement is supposed to focus on teaching us actors how to free our bodies and voices but I think we also freed our minds. This was a bit of an unusual year for the Voice and Movement class, because Ted Sharon’s been on sabbatical and so instead, we’ve been learning from Terry Beck. We learned about each other, ourselves, about being human; I think I’ve learned more from this class than from the previous nineteen years of my life and it’s all culminated into one performance at the Fredonia Opera House, called Here, And After. I can honestly say this is the most raw, vulnerable, honest and most interesting performance I’ve ever done—because when most shows end, everybody is living happily or is now dead if it’s a tragedy, but our story isn’t over yet. Because this was our story right here—and it’s the story of after we left the Opera House tonight, the story about our next two years at Fredonia and what happens after we graduate, when I go on to (I hope) create more theatre like this.
I’ve learned to observe without judgment. To make every moment count. I’ve learned to sing again, when it used to be only thing that sustained me. How to embrace choices. To confess and keep truths honest. That sometimes it’s okay that I’m not quite there yet. How to introduce myself to the world on the stage. No regrets.
No regrets for me: I’m off to take a “class” seeing shows in NYC this week before I head out to work for the Merry Go Round Playhouse this summer and then back for my Junior year! I should probably finish packing, but then I get distracted by the things I find, like nice quotes in my acting journal from the beginning of the year:
“You gain strength, courage, and confidence in every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face…do the thing you think you cannot do.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt
