I’m feeling mighty rotten. Where to begin…
Tech week. We’ve been rehearsing up at the falls (a 30-40 minute drive each way) every day since Sunday. Every day the weather has been downright horrible. We’ve been cold and wet, slogging through the mud backstage and all over the area, just trying to get our lines out and staging done on a slippery set.
Just how slippery? Well, one of our actors cut our rehearsal short last night (at 11 PM) by taking a fall and gashing his forehead open. Like most surface head wounds it looked an awful lot more brutal than it actually was, but it was still bad enough that we had to call him an ambulance out there in the middle of nowhere to take him to the hospital.
That was a pretty anticlimactic moment for me… I was in our quasi-green room (a “kwansit hut” – sort of an oversized steel shed) when it happened, so wound up being about the fifth responder on the scene. For all of my years of training (and training others) that came flooding back to me there wasn’t much of anything for me to do… everyone else was doing a good enough job of immobilizing him and taking care of the bleeding… my first aid kit with my more advanced tools was in my car, which was a good 5 minute hike away, and while there were a litany of secondary things I could’ve potentially done I’m sure I would’ve just gotten in the way more than anything. So I made the 911 call and also phoned his family, and kept an eye on the proceedings just to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. But it was hard not to feel obsolete.
Anyway, the guy got fifteen stitches and is fine now. I, on the other hand, have been sick like a dog since Monday.
Monday was, fortunately, the worst of it, as that was when I had the sore throat, and was afraid it would develop into the same painful illness that kept me up every night for two weeks a few months back. My throat has since mellowed, but I’ve been congested and coughing, and – big surprise – being out late at night in the forest, cold and wet and able to see my breath, hasn’t done much to improve things.
Today we got to leave “early” at about 9:30, so I have some time in which to compose this blog (until the NyQuil kicks in, anyway). But we start previews tomorrow evening and have shows every day through Sunday (two on Saturday). I’m already burnt-out… and it’s gonna be a marathon from here on out.
Dan.