The opening weekend of Spelling Bee went wonderfully, but not without incident.

Prone, as I am, to a disgruntled stomach, it seems I was to disagree with dinner between the Saturday matinee and evening performances. As I was getting ready for the 8pm performance I was feeling a little unstable in the digestion department. Just minutes before we were about to start the show, after deciding it was not just a bout of nerves, I had to race off to the bathroom and almost instantly lose my dinner. Thankfully my microphone was not live at that stage.

One of the great (and also inconvenient) things about this show is that I never leave the stage once I’m on until intermission, and then again until the end of the show. There were some dodgy moments during the performance when I broke out in sweats and felt nauseous, but I got through Act 1 without any further incident. Some of the intermission was spent back out in the toilets, and generally things picked up a bit during the second act and I didn’t have to make any emergency dashes off stage.

After the show, against my better judgement, almost everyone headed back to my place for a party, which helped to take my mind off things. Heading to bed at about 2:30am with Kenney, Izzy and Jack in their quarters (on my floor), I woke at around 11am with all but Izzy having dashed off early in the morning. To my surprise, the place was remarkably clean too, thanks to Nico and Izzy’s whip around.

Usually once a show opens having just finished a mammoth (and tiring) production week, things calm down a bit and you can start getting the rehearsal withdrawals. Unfortunately, this week is a bit hectic for me. At the moment, Monday night I’ll be at No Way To Treat A Lady, Tuesday I have my very last committee meeting for the theatre group, and Wednesday I hope to catch a production of The Last Five Years that I did some rehearsal piano work for during the last month or two. Thursday I’m flying off to Brisbane for work, and will return on Friday afternoon with time to get back to Wollongong for Spelling Bee. It’s kind of exhausting just reciting the itinerary.

In other news, Izzy and I applied for a wonderful apartment-of-our-dreams-type-place and we are extremely eagerly awaiting news of whether we have been successful. After being so depressed and anxious about the apartment-hunting process, and getting bad vibes every time I walked into an apartment, this one was like the clouds parted and a great ray of light directed us to it. It’s the first place I had seen that I didn’t think was a step down from my current apartment. Our fingers are crossed, and if this doesn’t come through I don’t think I’ll have the energy or time to continue the hunt until after my medium-term Brisbane engagement concludes.

At the moment life feels like an out-of-control treadmill just racing around on a loop. I’m running on top of it, jumping from one step to the next because it seems to be the way to keep upright. Eventually I’ll get too tired and I’ll need to find a way to slow it down, but for now this seems to be working.