First Dance Rehearsal!!!

Today was a pretty uneventful day until the mid-afternoon. I didn’t have anything to do this morning and still didn’t get any calls about my job applications so I puttered around the house, did some laundry, dishes, and all that jazz. I found out my mother would be coming to the house to meet an insurance adjuster so I wanted to make myself scarce before she got there after the last episode between us. I must have taken the world’s quickest shower and folded all my laundry in record time. It was all for naught though, because literally as I was walking to my truck she pulled up. Great, I thought, here we go again. My good day will be ruined by her manic mess. I always feel really bad for reacting that way, but when your mother is mentally unstable and uses you as her trigger in all situations, makes up horrible things about you to make other people “get on her side” because she feels she needs that, has violent outbursts directed toward you, and is verbally and physically abusive when you see her… all this doesn’t really add up to the most stable loving mother-daughter relationship in the world. And I have to say that I am more used to it now. My mother has been this way for 13 years. This year that will be exactly half of my life. She’s always had these weird paranoid tendencies and cared too much of what other people think about her, but when I was 13 she went over the edge. Now we know that she is bi-polar, has a paranoia disorder, agoraphobia, auditory misapprehension (essentially she convinces herself she hears things she doesn’t. Not hearing voices exactly, but she wants to think the worst so she twists things in her mind until they actually are the worst and then she believes what she has manufactured), and we are all pretty sure that she has started over the edge toward schizophrenia and dementia. Yeah, it’s a mess. It’s times like today when I am so thankful that I take after my father. I do struggle sometimes with caring what other people think of me, and I have a self-esteem issue but I fight both of those daily so that they will not win the battle for my personality. And the self-esteem issues really only set in when I started to gain weight after Brandon left. Those issues are diminishing more as each day passes and I anticipate that they will continue to do so as my weight goes down and my confidence in my abilities goes on the rise.

Anyway, enough back story. Now back to the day at hand. We had a pretty quiet interaction. I didn’t say much so that I wouldn’t unwittingly cause her to attack. That’s pretty much the way it goes with us: I don’t say anything because I don’t want to set her off, and I hold my tongue until I just can’t anymore. Then I speak my mind, and she has a fit. I do feel bad for my mother. She used to be so put together and intelligent. Now all of that has left her and she can barely muster the will to take a shower and get dressed. But the fact that I set my mother off means that I cannot be around her very much, for both of our sakes. It’s not good for her to get that upset and she is pretty much the only person on the earth who can make me feel bad enough about myself to contemplate self-injury.

After the encounter, I left the house and drove out to Lynchburg. I was early so I met Heather Beth at PetSmart to do some shopping. She went home to take a nap & I puttered around Barnes & Noble for awhile. I bought a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mister Hyde which I did not have up until now. There are a couple of books that I wanted to have with me while my other copy was in storage (and buying a 2nd copy was less expensive than driving the 6 hours to get stuff out of my unit) but this one was a new one! I love getting new books, and I am hoping that reading this novel will help me in developing my characters for the play.

After Barnes & Noble, I drove on over to Heritage HS to wait for rehearsal to start. I got there about 20 minutes early so I was the first one to arrive. Once someone with keys showed up I went on in & tried to see if I could help in any way. There wasn’t really anything I could help with, so I went on over to the chorus room to wait for our choreographer. I got to talk with DaShay, our pianist, for awhile. I absolutely love him. Probably one of the nicest men I have met in a long time. Just inherently nice. When Kenda, our choreographer, showed up we ran the song so she could see who sang where and so on, then we jumped straight into the movement aspect of it. The song is “Façade” and the premise is that there are two groups on stage, the poor and the rich. The interplay between them is told by the lyrics and dance interplay. To open the song, Ashley & Aaron playing two poor beggars run through the aisles of the audience and jump on stage & at the same time at the back of the stage are myself, Bev & Terry who are three laundresses. I have a heavy, heavy basket of sheets to carry and slam down. Bev & Terry have an interplay with one of the sheets from my basket and then the rich begin to walk onstage. The next part for me is really fun, but kind of scary if I do it incorrectly.

Scott is playing a rich man sauntering slowly and haughtily by the laundresses, and as he passes I flip my sheet at him making a very loud snapping noise (that’s the plan anyway. It will depend on whether or not we can find a sheet that will snap well). He sneers and walks on his way. A little further into the song, the poor begin to converge on the rich and make rude and vulgar gestures at them to make them uncomfortable. I get to shake my chest, Aaron is doing pelvic thrusts at another man, Terry accosts our only rich bitch, Bev chases a man up the stairs doing a shimmy and Ashley hikes up her dress hem. It’s a really amusing part and I can’t wait to see it play out on stage. Since the show is so dark, it is up to the ensemble to add little comedic elements whenever we can fit them in to lighten it up a bit. It’s a good thing that we have Aaron in this number, because that is kind of his default setting: comic. He’s our one male poor person and he acts as our protector through the rest of the song.

Not too much real dancing in this one. We have lots of stage movement and character acting, but not like “step one, step touch, raise arm, gesture wildly” or any of that crap. And thank goodness, no umbrella choreography like they do in the video version with David Hasselhoff. The man literally sounds like he is being overtaken by a goat when he sings. Too bad they don’t have a video version with a better Jekyll/Hyde. After rehearsal, I drove to Appomattox to Heather Beth’s house to stay the night. She & Brady have been so kind to let me stay with them some nights to help me save on gas money. They have a WiiFit so I decided I wanted to work out for a little while. I did 32 minutes worth of aerobics and I was spent. I do love that it tells you how many minutes you are doing and what kind of weight you are losing, and how your BMI is reacting to your weight loss. I have brought my BMI down just shy of one point since I started doing the WiiFit and now that I am on my diet I anticipate that dropping even more! I am so excited to be motivated to lose the weight I gained. I felt too sorry for myself to really do it after the breakup, but now my confidence is on the rise and I want my body to feel good and be in shape. And I know I will get there :P

Ok, that’s all for tonight. Have a good one!