Oh man, oh man, oh man. I kinda wanna cry, just out of love and overwhelmedness.
Tonight, I did my year 2 final. And I will tell you all about it tomorrow. For now, I’m gonna tell you about preparing.
I don’t know if you remember my like nearly bajillion part series about going to my original audition for BMI. But the main gist that’s relevant to right now is that my high school theatre teacher/super best friend whom I love and adore dearly flew to New York just so she could be there with me.
She printed music with me, and watched me perform my songs like a billion times. “Try this.” “Try that.”
She is so creative, and brilliant, and passionate, and talented. And my life is 40 million times richer for knowing her. I can nearly guarantee you I would’ve never even been in this program had I not gone through hers.
And yet again, she flew out.
Yet again, we sat around and printed, and changed things, and printed, and highlighted, and all of that.
[We weren’t changing anything in the songs at this point, especially since I have a partner for year 2. But we were working on the best wording to set-up songs, and the whole performance and everything.]
We were triple checking – “Do we have everyone’s binder? Let’s make an extra one just in case. Do we have all the set-ups written out? Are my songs and dialogue highlighted?” and just all that kind of stuff.
She also watched yet again and gave all sorts of notes and suggestions as I performed the songs 400 million times. “Make sure you’re doing them in the shoes you plan to wear… Oh yes, what shoes should you wear? You probably want to look short in relation to Chidi.” And on and on. We get to iron out all the teeny tiny details and be super duper prepared.
And she’s just – she’s the absolute best person on Earth to get ready for anything important with. She will give it ever single ounce of her attention. She’ll care about every thing. She’ll be very calm and go with the flow in the midst of it all.
And having her there again, and going to BMI with her – the place we’d traveled to for my audition 3 1/2 years earlier… it was just the sweetest deja vu. And it was kind of nice that things came fairly full circle. I was SO full of hope at that audition. Then, I’d had the worst couple of years of my life. And now, I’m finally feeling some hope again.
So, anyway, yeah. I don’t know exactly what words to say precisely to get across my feelings, or how special this was to me. [I know it’s a little ironic, since I’m talking about how I just prepared for a final for a fancy-schmancy writing program, but still can’t use my words.]
But anyway, I feel exceptionally lucky, honored, amazed, and everything that after all of this, here she was, still by my side.
I can’t wait to take her to the Tonys someday!
[For more on my experience with the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop, you can go here.]