I didn't get much sleep this week. It's been a stressful week of dealing with bills, insurance, and trying to put together a huge pain of an apartment application so I don't have to live in the health nightmare apartment that currently is my New York home and its own major stress generator. My trip home to my parents' house today for Thanksgiving has been the light at the end of the tunnel where I know that I can just be a kid for a few days with no adult responsibility -- because lately this is how I feel about adulting:
But
first I had to get through today... which began bright and early with a
5am wake-up (after five hours of sleep) to work an audition for
children to study ballet on scholarship. I learned very quickly at this
job that working with kids in the morning forces you to be bright and
perky and bouncy, but on some mornings that perkiness and bounciness can
be a little harder to come by naturally than on other days.... However,
after an audition like this morning's, it's would be difficult not to
leave feeling anything other than bouncy and uplifted by hope for the
lives we might have touched....
Almost
immediately after I approached the first group of children about to
audition, one nine-year-old girl at the front excitedly bounded up to me
with, "Hi Misty Copeland!" I laughed and said, "What?" and she asked
very earnestly, "You're the one who dances. Aren't you Misty
Copeland?" Not quite, kid.... Not quite. Though I have this image of
her thinking that there's only one ballet dancer in the whole world and
it's Misty Copeland, so therefore if Adult = Dancer then Adult = Misty
Copeland, I was also very aware that while I think it's frequently the
children from rough neighborhoods who could most benefit from ballet
training, it's also those kids to whom ballet is usually a completely
foreign concept -- and the fact that this girl and her friends knew the
name of a principal ballerina with American Ballet Theatre, and that
they were excited to audition because of her, was a delightful
surprise. When I was a year older than she is, my gym teacher made fun
of me and his own dancer-mom's ballet students because he thought it was
a joke that ballet was athletic and as demanding as any sport, so
something very right has happened with ballet in pop culture when inner
city kids think it's cool to study ballet because of this woman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
The
real high point of that morning audition, though, was after the
selections had been made when we learned that we had accepted two kids
who have rough home lives, one of whom lives in a shelter, both of whom
really needed something positive. And they both got selected without
anyone on our audition team knowing how badly they needed this. That
alone makes any 5am wake-up worth it.
So, my morning done but my day not even close to being over, I picked up sides from my fiancé at his
office for a Skype meeting with a casting director because my worthless-pile-of-junk printer picked today to stop working entirely; raced home
to make said Skype meeting with casting director (after first
downloading Skype and testing it with my brother and his very cute cats
because I'm that odd person who's never Skyped before), where I was
invited to test for the lead in a feature film (yeah, I don't know how that happened either)
produced by a two-time
Oscar winner; bolted to
the airport on the subway and bus to catch my flight home for
Thanksgiving; and got home at 11pm before snuggling into my childhood
bed for my first full night's sleep in at least a week.
As Jonathan Larson wrote in the beautiful, yep-that's-totally-me song "Why," "Hey, what a way to spend a day." (...See, this post is like those annoying choose-your-own-adventure books. No matter whether you chose to click on the link at the top of the post or not, sooner or later I'm making you listen to that song.)
As Jonathan Larson wrote in the beautiful, yep-that's-totally-me song "Why," "Hey, what a way to spend a day." (...See, this post is like those annoying choose-your-own-adventure books. No matter whether you chose to click on the link at the top of the post or not, sooner or later I'm making you listen to that song.)
Oh,
and when I told my mom that when I book the film I'm buying a new
printer and hiring a car to take me to the airport rather than bussing
and subwaying it, her response was, "Well of course you'll need a car
service then. Your fans on the subway will delay you getting to your
flight on time. You'll also need a dress for the red carpets." My
parents rock.
No comments:
Post a Comment