Dress.

I had not felt a similar level of stress and pressure as the 48 hours preceding opening since school—since last spring to be exact. Specifically, I recall those frantic days I lost in May as I worked towards graduation, final exam/papers, and the final draft of my history thesis. Days and nights bled together (although I did have the slightest respite to watch Manchester United win the Champions League over Chelsea Repeat champs?) And I even worked all of graduation day on my footnotes and bibliography before running all over campus to print the worthless 100-pg tome and turn it in only hours before commencement. Good times. But now I was dealing with creative, focused pressure—a project I truly cared about, one I had poured myself into, a labor of love.

At dress we immediately picked up right where we’d left off the night before: as John fiddled with levels, Mary, Ryan, and I set the handful of light cues—my fingers flitting over the sliders while scribbling haphazard notes-the show in a sense. Seven-thirty approached, so we rigged up the booth, set Ryan on his way with a performance piece pedaling pre-show, and ran the whole thing. Oh, and to capture the height of my dramatic career, Tim filmed his first viewing of the play. Actually, this was everyone’s first glimpse of the play with all the elements in place.

Simply, it was not a train wreck. We ran it without stopping, and hit the finish with a minute to spare before Ken brought in the next group. That didn’t mean we still wouldn’t have work to do in the few minutes before opening the house the next evening. But we struck our equipment, and convened on a windy corner to go over our final set of notes. John had pages of things to tweak, and Mary had a few notes as well, but nothing I really hadn’t noticed as I scrambled around the booth like a multi-armed Hindu deity . I had found a way to keep the show flowing, and that gave me a bit of confidence for doing it for real. But there was work to do the next day. And so we broke the huddle, and drifted our separate ways into a sleepless night.