Re-Sketch: Welcome to Semester 2

My good friends. I'm sorry for the hiatus, please forgive me.

"No, no," you say, "it has been too long. Broken promises like this one are the reason we have trust issues." I understand, but I really have been trying to write you. Really! My silence has not been for lack of effort. It's just that every time I started writing a post I would either fall asleep mid sentence or have to go to some rehearsal or other or remember that I had some crazy homework assignment to finish.

"Wait," you say. "You have time for sleep?!" Not really. Therein lies the issue.

"All right," you press on. "But what is this 'homework' idea you keep speaking of. You're a drama major. You have... Homework?"

Just to give you a taste, we had to...
-analyze, memorize, stage, rehearse, and perform a modern realism scene
-analyze, memorize, and create a situation in which we would respond to someone with one of Shakespeare's sonnets
-analyze, memorize, stage, rehearse, and perform a Shakespeare scene
-come up with a nun costume
-memorize a bible verse and come up with a time where we, as a nun/priest would say that verse
-lose a ring? (it's much more complicated and in depth than that but if we're being honest I have no idea how to even explain that one to you...)
-See the Adler company show, which was Arabian Nights

-among many, many other wild and fantastical things

...all while rehearsing a musical and doing all of my homework for my two academic classes (which include tons of reading and writing, an essay, and a midterm).

"Ohhh, so that's what's been keeping her busy this quarter term!"

No no, my friends. That is what's been keeping me busy this week.

"Our Kaila. She's handling this all so well."

Don't be fooled into thinking I'm great at all of this. The weather got warm and my body freaked out, so my throat is angry and my lungs have been itchy for the past two days. Shakespeare is hard. Improv is stressful for a control freak who isn't naturally funny. Ninety percent of the words that come out of my writing teacher's mouth confuse me. It's tough, but it's all in good fun. I've made friends, I've made mistakes, I've made great strides forward. I hope. But man, I've smiled a lot.

Sure I haven't written much, but not for lack of things to write about.

So here goes, in no particular order.

I've started running into friends I know from outside of school, which really makes me feel like I actually live in New York City.

I got to see Kinky Boots with a friend whose smiles are as big as her heart. (Cheesy, yes. But true, so forgive me.)

I've learned that you make your own luck and that you might as well fail big. (Like my grammar in that sentence.)

On a whim I auditioned for Disney World. Sure, nothing came of it, but hey it was fun and I wore heels and didn't fall.

Let me say, here and now, that it is a little bit surreal to be playing one of my dream roles in my first ever school show and my first show in the city. Honestly it's so bizarre that every time I get up there I sort of space out a little and don't exactly get across the idea that I meant to. Hopefully I'm gonna get over that soon. (We've got about four weeks before we open, though, so I'll definitely be in check by then.)

In the last couple of days the city has been unbelievably pretty. It's so warm that people are leaving their coats at home and strangers on the street are smiling. Yup, smiling. It's pretty incredible.

The other day I was getting into an elevator and I dropped my phone. Then I bent down to pick up my phone, and I dropped the Reese's candy that I was bringing to a rehearsal for my scene partner. So in unsurprising news, I'm still sort of a mess.

I have seen so many cute dogs. You might think that this is a small thing. It is not.

Last week we had a rehearsal for Dogfight in which an ex marine (is anyone ever really an ex marine?), Wes, led the whole cast through a mock training day, complete with making our beds and lining up for the chow line. Just a little bit of background info--Dogfight is about a group of young Marines and the party that they throw the night before they go off to fight in the Vietnam War. Because of the subject matter, it was super incredible to watch the boys go through mock-training as Wes (a man seemingly made completely of steel) turned our group of lovable talented theater teddy bears into... well, marines. Wes's wife was also a wonderful addition to the rehearsal room. As an accomplished choreographer, she had such a good eye for details and such an honest idea of what the show meant to her.

I took a midterm and I don't think I bombed it. Due to the fact that I actually paid attention in class, a guy in my class pretty much bummed my notes off of me, which should have been annoying but was actually pretty flattering. See, this homeschooled bookworm didn't have the chance to get upset when people cheated off her hard work, so it was honestly kinda nice. Especially because I didn't give him the full copy. (He was supposed to give me the link to the Google doc to which he was using my notes to gain access, which he didn't. Two thumbs up though, cause my full copy got me through the whole test.)

I saw a show Off-Broadway tonight called Robber Bridegroom in which an NYU Tisch alumnus was A) pretty darn amazing and B) SO excited to see a group of freshman Tischies outside the theater after the show.

I accidentally auditioned for a student film today. I was waiting for a friend in the lobby of a dorm and some dude asked if I was there to audition for the student film. I told him that I had no idea what he was talking about, but asked him about the project, found out he was living a friend of a friend next year, and next thing I knew I was reading a side with a guy in front of a camera. Thanks college.

So yeah. I think I'm back on track with this whole writing thing. I'm un-falling off the bandwagon, if you will.

Hi, my name is Kaila, and I'm addicted to this city.

(Maybe I should have put that bit in the beginning...)

Do you want to watch or do you want to shoot off confetti cannons?

My dear friends, with much happiness I can say I am back in the city and have conquered my first weekend of northern winter.

You guys, it is deceptively cold. It's the kind of cold that at first makes you think, "Nope, I can do this," and then two minutes later, "Huh, my fingers are kinda numb, I'll put on my gloves," and then in the next thirty seconds, "Interesting, my ears are burning. I guess it's time for a hat now."

These are the thoughts that were flurrying through my mind as I trekked through the cold to the midtown Hilton for the first ever Broadway Convention.

Last month, I submitted an application to volunteer at BroadwayCon. I was accepted the next week, and stayed excited until the moment I walked through the door on Friday morning. They had an hour-long orientation session, and then we were loose for the day until our respective shifts started. Mine wasn't until nine that night, so I grabbed my day pass and my volunteer shirt and set off to explore for the day.

The Spring Awakening cast was in the first room I walked into. I watched part of their panel before wandering into others and really just taking it all in.

I don't know if you've ever been in a room where you can make any obscure reference within your main frame of knowledge and someone within earshot is bound to catch it and understand, but it's such a euphoric feeling. Halfway through the day I felt silly for even thinking of theater references, as if I was subconsciously just trying to do it to fit in. That's how much I was in the right place.

Later, during the first day, a friend of mine and I were walking around the conference, exploring until we were ready to get in line to watch the opening ceremony and then the Hamilton panel (when we weren't working it was encouraged that we watch and enjoy), when the volunteer coordinator approached us.

"Hey you guys. What are you doing right now?"

I answered, "Just figuring out how to get in to see these next two events."

"Ok... would you guys like to watch the opening--if so that's totally cool--or would you like to watch it, or shoot off confetti cannons at the end?" She wagged her eyebrows.

"Shoot off confetti cannons, probably," my friend and I answered in unison.

"Great," She grinned. "You can come with me and watch it from the front, too."

This is the story of how I came to be crouched in the dark on the ground  of a Hilton ballroom with a confetti cannon aimed at Laura Osnes and Alice Ripley and so many others. This is also the story of how I got to watch the Hamilton panel a few feet away from the stage.

One of the jobs as a volunteer was making sure that the first five rows were only being used by people with VIP passes, so once the events started we got to sit on the ends of the front rows to keep people from sneaking in.

That said, not everything about this was a positive experience. People with strong intentions can be horridly mean. For instance, the vicious woman with the general pass and the sneering smile who intended to stay in her front row seat, or the photographer who snidely requested upon reading my tshirt, "Could you volunteer to move? I'm going to put my stuff there," as I stood at my station in front of a curtain partition.

Why, I wondered, was this biting negativity so jarring? I, as a seasoned older sister am totally accustomed to pushback from those around, so what about this was different? For one, these are grown adults who should know better, sure. But the bigger and more important reason is this: there were hundreds of people at this convention, and every single one of them was so enchanted with the fact that they get to be a part of this, stars included. This convention is so clearly by the people and for the people, and EVERYONE knows it. It's bigger than a theater convention, it's a large gaggle of oddballs who are being embraced for their habits of breaking into song and their inability to be "normal".

I have never been to an event this big with such a lack of stereotypes. There are people of every age here. Every. Single. One. Every income range, every race, every gender. There was no norm. And it was beautiful.

Everybody was in for a frozen surprise when the blizzard hit, snowing everyone into the city with no way to get out. This wasn't a problem for me of course, because most of the underground train lines were completely untouched, but it sure did affect a lot of the special guests who were trying to come in from out of town.

As of today, everything is back up and running. Everyone was able to come in for their respective events, including some of the cast of Something Rotten, some of the cast of the new show Disaster!, and Sara Bareilles, who even did an impromptu performance from her new musical, Waitress.

The entire weekend was a dream. At the very end they had a closing ceremony, and brought all of the volunteers and staff on stage to do a singalong of "Seasons of Love". From the stage you could look into the audience and see people in the first few rows literally sobbing because it was over.

All in all, I do think that this was a pretty ok to start my first week back. Classes start tomorrow and I haven't even wiped out in the snow yet. Success? I think yes.