I’m sitting here in my room in the Springer Opera House—yes, that’s a thing—waiting for the first rehearsal of Born Yesterday, the Garson Kanin comedy that closes out the Springer’s season, and I’m being very good, waking at 6:00 a.m. and actually working on Christmas Carol.

I questioned whether to bring my own coffee pot since there’s one in the communal kitchen here, but then I realized that if I open that door before 9:30, I’ll start being sociable with my fellow cast members and never get any work done.  So I’m glad I have my coffee set up in my bathroom; I’ve actually been productive this morning.

I’ve picked up where I left off some weeks ago, starting to get “The Cratchits’ Prayer” re-orchestrated.  As I’ve said before, none of this process is very hard since most of it is just deciding where to copy and paste the music that’s already there.  But there are issues—and always have been—with this piece, in that the harmonies twist and turn and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten them right.  I reworked them last year and I don’t think I solved the problem, so this is the time and the place where it all comes to an end.  Eventually.

This blog post is, of course, in the spirit of TASK AVOIDANCE, one of the nine precepts of Lichtenbergianism: I got to a certain point in the music and decided to stop working on it for a bit.

Today is Tuesday.  The first runthrough of this show is Sunday.  And then in another week and a half, we open.  Let that sink in: we have fourteen days of rehearsal (Mondays off) and then we open.

Let me be the first to say that, never having done this before, I have some anxiety about my ability to learn these lines in the allotted timeframe.  It helps that one of my fellow cast members, an actual professional actor, said the same thing at dinner last night.  It’s a matter of age, mostly.  Those lines just won’t stick like they used to.  In Into the Woods, I flubbed scenes in ways I never had before.  Of course, in my defense, most of my scenes began with the line “And so the Baker…,” so it’s no wonder that I couldn’t keep them straight.

Feh.  I will not only survive, I will prevail.  But I do see a lot of evenings spent chiseling those words into my brain.

Ah well, back to Dickens.