I've been writing my tail off + couldn't be prouder that I can announce that I have officially finished the homework my mangers gave me. Tomorrow I am meeting with the amazing people who made 2 1/2 men (again) because they want me to meet the guy who wrote "Wonder Years". There are some things I wish were different sure, but instead of complaining I am reveling in the blessings my hard work have given me. Slowly, I am going to share bits and pieces + promise to keep you updated on what is happening. Thanks for hanging in with me. I love your guts.
New Work!
Every single night before I went to bed I would do three things in this order:
I would ice every single fiber of my body that was sore. First my feet and ankles, then my shoulders and lastly my hips. Twenty minutes each part.
Next, I would go to the bathroom and start tearing away the hockey tape I had used to cover my blisters all day. Once my feet were tape free I would sit on the toilet holding a tissue between my legs hoping to catch some of my magical foot salvation. I would then take the tissue I had just peed on and prop my feet up on the sink and carefully cover each of my blisters with my own urine. This I found was the magical cure for open sores. There was nothing that could heal a blister faster than this. Once the pee had semi-dried, I would hobble into bed. I slept with the urine on my feet all night long so that hopefully in the morning my feet would be slightly less raw and sore. There were so many things to worry about during rehearsals and there was absolutely no compassion given to blistered feet. It wasn’t
that we were going to be able to NOT get blisters, it was how many, which toe and were they infected yet? We had an entire team of physical therapists who treated our feet. I once had a blister that was so bad it would hang like a lip over the back on my tap shoe, when they finally took me to the doctor they lanced it off to reveal a nasty infection coming from the blister underneath that blister. Even my blisters were blistered.
The last thing I would do before I went to sleep at night would be to plan my escape. I would make a mental list of all of the reasons that I could pack up my bags and go away from all of this insane pressure. In my head I would make plans to take what was left of my savings and buy a one way ticket to Paris, Prince Rupert or Greenland and become a Starbucks barista. Sure they had to deal with people asking for triple venti skinny one shot mochas but at least they didn’t have to sleep with their own pee on their blistered feet.
I would plan to skip work, skip brushing my teeth and skip being polite. I played out what it would feel like to show up at rehearsals late the next day and start yelling at people, just showing up without my tap shoes on and just start screaming all the ways that everything about this process ruined my soul. That there was no reason to be hard on us, couldn’t they see we were all trying so hard inside each moment! Did they know that at the end of the day we all had tears running down our cheeks? This was my childhood dream! I had missed out on proms, parties, and Friday nights my entire life for this! This was supposed to feel magical, like watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade on repeat! This was Christmas for heaven sake. We were ambassadors for the most wonderful time of the year! All the girls and even Santa himself would look at me in shock and awe and then band together and we would all run off to Greenland together, free from the pressures of getting exactly what we wanted and not wanting it at all.
But that never happened. Somewhere inside my fantastic escape plan I would find sleep. The next morning my alarm would ring. I would get up, put on my tights and tap shoes and become the lines fearless leader for another 8 hours.
-RRR 2.0
