Tonight was the second annual inter-theatre-company theatre sports night. I participated last year, but to our advantage we had a really great team of people who all knew each other. I was the only stay-on from last year, but another person had competed for another team.

It’s an incredibly nerve-wracking experience and backstage everyone is concerned about remembering the games and trying not to completely go up (ie. die, freeze) on stage. There is also the fear of the unknown because the lights and the audience stare can feel like the weight of a truck on your shoulders when you’re thinking of what to say.

In the first round of one minute games we were chosen for “Word at a Time Story”, where the team tells a story but we can only say one word each. Soliciting audience responses to the phrase “your favourite animal at the zoo”, some odd audience member said “donkey”, and so we told (or at least tried to) the story of going to see a donkey at the zoo. It’s harder than it sounds because you’re ideas are almost always rendered useless immediately before you are supposed to say it. It’s particularly entertaining if its fast and active, rather than just describing something.

For the second round we played “Sing About It”, in which we improvised a scene about making breakfast and every now and then the emcee yells “Sing About It” and the person who is speaking has to break off and improvise a short song. My moment occurred just as I was telling another actor that I didn’t see her name on the pancake mix. It was terror as I turned and began to make up my lyrics. The worst is when you have to set up the first half of the rhyme without knowing what the second half will be. My song lyrics were (something like) “I went to the cupboard / only pancake mix did I see (i figured this might be an easy rhyme) / but noticed it was without / the name of thee.” It was nice to get a laugh but it was more comforting to just find that second rhyme in time.

Our third game was the ace, “Emotion, Replay, Replay, Replay”. First we act out a short scene of maybe a few lines and some clear distinct actions. The first time around it should be fairly mundane and uneventful, but then you have to do the exact same scene in different emotional states. Our team hit gold as we enact a day at the race course. Danny set the scene by playing a trainer grooming his horse. Next, I came along leading a horse to the slot next to his. Fiona and Koby then exchanged a small bit of dialogue about one asking the other how to place a bet. Our next enactment had to be the same, but underscored with the emotion of jealousy. Danny, in a moment of brilliance, bent down beside the horse he was grooming, looked under it, then down as his crotch and said “Aww, Jeez!” Little was done, but just enough for the audience to grasp that he was doing a little comparison, and the audience roared at his use of the ‘jealousy’ concept. The rest of that scene played out typically. The second emotion was ‘happiness’, and Danny again delivered comedy gold by pointing at the horses crotch, down at his, and then let out a very satisfied laugh. Again, I led the horse over, this time giving a friendly wave, and the girls spoke about how one of them won their gamble. Our final emotional state was ‘grief’. Danny followed through with a look at the horse’s undercarriage then a “Oh, God”. At this point I was off to the side of the stage a bit disappointed I hadn’t added much to the scene beyond perpetuating the emotions, when I decided that my horse should be dead. At first I was going to drag the dead horse to the same spot, but by the time Danny had finished his bit, I walked the horse across the stage and said, “You won’t need those legs where you’re going…” and riding on the back (har!) of Danny’s jokes, I got a great roar from the audience and suddenly the night was over for us.

As the final scores were read out, our team took our bows as the winning team for this year, and I look forward to competing next year to defend the trophy thats temporarily sitting on my desk.

Perhaps in some effort to stamp claim to my break from studies, I’ve been immersing myself in fiction. No, not that book, but a range of other things.

Midway through the week I went with Amy and Adam to see a New York Metropolitan youth orchestra concert, which was entertaining, if a little loose with some very ‘curious’ playing.

Friday night Brett and Adam headed out to the movies to see Transformers. I must admit that I was under the impression that we were seeing Harry Potter (that’s what happens when you leave the MSN multi-person chat prematurely), so was a little concerned to discover that someone else was playing Harry, but pleasantly surprised to see that JK Rowling had started including scenes about the Iraq war in her books. After an hour or so when the car began to talk and I realised it wasn’t under a magical spell I looked at my ticket stub and the whole thing started to make more sense. Not a lot more, mind you. It still didn’t explain why everyone thought endangering the lives of a whole city of people was a good idea. Or why the story had to go on for so very long.

It wasn’t but a few nights later I was off, again with Brett and supplemented with Min to see a production of The Government Inspector. Again, a little long, but very funny with a great local cast. Sometimes a simple farce is exactly what the doctor called for, particularly when everyone is having such fun with their allotted bits of ‘business’, rising every time they get a laugh out of the audience.

I’ve been filling the hours in between catching up with some movies. I caught Disturbia (good fun if you aren’t expecting Hitchcock), Zodiac (very still and consuming with a great score by David Shire), Newsies (finally caught up with it, loved the Christian Bale dance solo in Santa Fe), and making my way through season two of Arrested Development (I’m so glad Liza made it back).

While it may sound like I’m slacking off in my own filth (why does that cut so deeply?), I am still busy and at the theatre most evenings or days. Now, where did I put that DVD…

The small three bar heater that has been glowing in the corner of this frigidaire of a room throughout these cold winter weeks spat the dummy the other day. In what felt like a metaphorical fable told by some greek god on a cloud, at first the top globe blew, and soon after the second globe. I’m now down to the lowest globe which fails to even defrost my toes when I stand almost on top of it.

This morning I journeyed into university and slammed some papers down on someone’s desk and screamed “Let me out, you damned dirty ape!” In reality, I attended a prebooked appointment with the subdean and got her signature on a form to state that I am indeed dropping the commerce part of my degree. I’ll now be a lowly Creative Arts graduate, come December. When I explained I wanted to do a graduate diploma of education (to become a secondary teacher), the subdean looked up from her papers and said “Oh, well. I guess that’s something to fall back on.”

Should I go through with it (as much as I’d love a decently paid Musical Director/Performer job to come up quickly and quietly), it terrifies me that in 18 months I might just be a high school music teacher. I guess I still have substantial time to get used to the idea. And I’d better. After studying to be a composer, I looked to other things, and found that commerce wasn’t quite the right fit. Teaching is my final light globe, but I hope at least it will defrost my toes.