Photo credit: piermario via VisualHunt.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Well, I’m in tech again.  Probably even as you read this, I’m sitting in the dark, slaving over a hot follow spot, waiting for someone to tell me where I’m pointing.  It’s probably my last show as a technician, though I’ve said that before and look how that turned out.  Still, I’m moving out of the country, and away from the few people I still know well in the D.C. area theatre scene who would think to hire me, and that’s okay.

I mean, it’s kind of sad, really.  This is what I got my degree in lo these many years ago.  I spent all that time and energy (and student loan money) learning the skills I would need to propel me through an industry that I’m leaving behind.  But really, when I step back and think about it, I’m only leaving part of what I was interested in.  Because what is theatre about, really?

It’s people getting together and telling stories.  It’s characters and scenery and dialogue and action and all that amazing stuff, and I still get to do that, which is amazing.  I sort of fell into theatre by accident— thanks to my brother mostly— back in a time when real writers were the people who could get an agent to convince a publisher to spread ink across paper in the shape of their words.  Blogs became a viable thing when I was in college already, but by then I’d had my attention redirected.  It wasn’t until I was in California, raising my son as a stay at home mom that I got my first Kindle.  (My husband, bless him, had no idea what he was starting when he got it for me…)

With that Kindle came an epiphany, and I dipped a toe into the Wild West of indie publishing.  So, while I’m going to feel a hole in my heart where theatre has been for the last twenty years, I’m still going to be in the business of telling stories.  I just won’t be surrounded physically by an amazing group of like-minded people with the same goal: a great performance.

On the bright side, I’ll have my weekends back.  Monday is an odd day to have off.