twenty-four is an awfully big number

a week and a half ago was my last college theatre production. number twenty-four. twenty-eight if you count all the double shows. west side story, orchesis '02, school for scandal, the wind in the willows, the magic theatre, spring one-acts '03, fall one-acts '03, proof, orchesis '03, museum, talking with, jane eyre, trial of goldilocks, the princess and the pauper, spring one-acts '04, fall one-acts '04, once upon a mattress, orchesis '04, much ado about nothing, the music box, the mummy musical, spring one-acts '05, fall one-acts '05, major barbara, orchesis '05, the pirates of penzance, honk!, spring one-acts '06. i'm so sad it's over. theatre has been my life for these four years. so many hours spend in that building. sewing, painting, hammering, hanging lights, cleaning, fitting costumes, rehearsing, cutting fabric, moving set pieces, tearing down set pieces, wiring microphones, pulling gels, making props, finding furniture. laughing. crying. theatre has been so much more than putting on a play. every inch of that place brings back memories. i walk in the girls dressing room and think of phil trying to cram his entire body in one of the lockers, and succeeding except for half of one leg. i go to the spot gallery and see brendan pretending his spotlight is a machine gun. backstage right is seven people crammed on one bed and a dance party in the caliper. the set shop is painting bricks and building 15 foot columns. the back hallway is bagel hockey and one-acts run crew. little theatre - berkey and luke hanging upside down out of the catwalks, nailgunning shingles to the roof of a house at 2am. green room - planning the orchesis techie dance and dodging mattresses being flung from the top of the prop closet. and then there is the costume shop. hannah singing roxanne at the top of her lungs, sorting rented school for scandal costumes while laura-jane makes inappropriate comments over the sound system, accidentally drawing anarchy symbols on the washing machine with sharpie markers, half a million schoolgirl dresses, massive amounts of gray fabric, knight tunics, too many princesses, making green long underwear half an hour before the show starts, trying to fit the boys into 18th century uniforms, dying purple pants, making clothing for ridiculously large people, bustles, turning grove city boys into manly pirates, orange tights. slowly going crazy with caitlin. theatre is knowing that every one act festival has to have at least one show that uses a couch, so that run crew has somewhere to sit in the back hallway. theatre is sitting in kings very late at night, laughing uncontrolably at the most ridiculous things and not really knowing why. it's watching shows from the booth, from backstage, and from the catwalks, but never from the audience. it's skipping school for three days to perform plays for little kids. it's spending three months working your butt off to produce something magical, only to see it disappear in an instant.

but above all of that, theatre is friendship. it is laughter, sadness, and love and every emotion in between. there are times where we hate each other. during shows, we live with each other. it's bound to happen. but the times we love each other drown those times out. i've made some of the best friends i'll ever had in that theatre. the people that i know i will still be in touch with in twenty or thirty years. people ask me why i've been killing myself these past four years doing all these shows. why i'm willing to get three hours of sleep a night rather than take a play off. it's because theatre keeps me sane. no matter what kind of day i've had, i've been able to go to pew, and my problems have almost always disappeared. part of my problem with theatre is that i spend way too much time there, because i start working and forget everything else that i have to do. and a big part of that is because of my friends. i've always said that i do theatre because of the people. i love the atmosphere, the attitude, and the personalities. theatre people are unlike any other types on the planet, and i love them. where else would you have grown men willing to put on knee breeches and tights?

so, beyond anything else i've done at college, i'm glad i did theatre. my experiences in that department have made me who i am, and everytime i think them in the future, they will make me smile.