Saturday, May 1, 2010

Friday, April 30, 2010 9:56 PM

It’s been a while since I’ve written and I feel sore about it. Our schedule is so crazy that I’m exhausted all the time. I find myself, for the first time EVER, struggling to sleep for extended periods and I think it has a lot to do with the time of day problem. So I’m striving for 6 or 7 sleep hours a day at the most, which are spread over multiple nap times, making them shallow and ineffective. Slowly but surely, my body is healing, although, while my muscles feel better, I continue to bruise everywhere. Bruise and scrape inventory GO! Back of both knees, above the hips, scrapes on the right inner thigh (not sure why), a big ol’ bruise on my right bicep and a purple, right big toe. I also have championed my first rip on my right hand (trend??) from the trapeze bar, and while it hurts like crazy, I don’t mind it because I feel like a *real* acrobat. Oh, and there’s a rug burn scrape on one of my toes from climbing a rope every night for our initial conditioning. So basically I look rough. Ruthless. I’m a poor, unfortunate soul. We went swimming today for the first time and Tiago was joking that it looks like I’m in an abusive relationship. And what’s funny about that is that I am in an abusive relationship…with my job. Things are, all in all, going a lot better, and we actually choreographed a lot of the tumble track portion of the show last night, which was nice, and much needed affirmation of why I’m here. I’m really just hoping that I land this Maxwell character. We saw the show last night, and it’s very cool. I wouldn’t call it “moving” or extremely “artistic” per say, but for a cruise ship show, it’s pretty damn well done. There’s very little through line, but I think, as Maxwell, I can really help that. I feel that as a whole, our cast is stronger than the first but that may be because it looked like they were all just over it or lazy. Still, it looks like, when it’s all put together, it’ll be a great show. We also saw the aqua show, Oasis of Dreams, early this week. It was…scary. First, the show is at night at the very back of the ship, while the ship is going full throttle forward at sea. So you can feel the ship swaying and visibly see the pool water just sloshing from side to side. Scary. People are jumping into this pool from 17 meters up. WTF? And it’s not like it’s a huge pool either. It’s shaped like a peanut. And the floor of the pool moves up and down with hydraulics to be either 20 feet deep or various depths or to make a platform level with the deck. It’s a cool idea until you start thinking about the worst case scenario, which I do…a lot. So that freaked me out pretty instantly. AND THEN, we got some information as to WHY the previous Acro cast is smaller than ours. We have six, 4 boys and 2 girls, and they have five, 3 and 2, with one of the boys injured. Ok, are you ready? Apparently, one of the acrobat girls, who is no longer in the cast, was told it was clear to dive into the water and it wasn’t. The floor was partially raised and SHE BROKE HER NECK. What. The. Fuck. Are you joking? Why am I not getting paid a million dollars for this job? So all that being said, my feelings for the aqua show are: It’s a mediocre show with good tidbits here and there but very little substance, it’s basically a glorified talent show in a pool, and there is WAY too much risk involved for a show this bad. And too many costume changes. And cheesy stage fighting. And maniacal synchronized swimmers.

So… it looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me. The upside to all this craziness as that we will have a lot of time off, generally speaking. If all goes well, and we don’t have to reschedule shows due to cancelation, we’ll have two days completely off a week. And when you put actual performance time on paper, it’s only about 9 hours or less. And when you break it down further than that, we’re only onstage for like 30 minutes tops for each of the shows. So basically, I’m working hard for about 4.5 hours a week, kind of working hard for another 4.5 hours, getting ready to work for 4.5, and I’m off the rest of the time. So I’m working less than 15 hours a week. And that, my friends, is the good part.

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