Brave Girl at Heart

I am bursting with happiness today. I get sick often and easily. I am depressed when I'm sick. Therefore, I'm usually depressed. でも今日は元気だ!

There is nothing that happened in particular to make me feel this way, but I guess I'm happy because there's nothing that's going wrong. =) I'll start by telling you all about our play last Friday.

I guess I consider the play on Friday a success. *smiles* On that day, I woke up at 5:12AM. My dad was still home and he ended up driving me to school (so I didn't need to wake up so early after all, but oh well). I was the fourth to arrive, after Vincent, Janelle, and Tammy. Dang, these people get up early. I thought I'd be first. xD;

Anyway, we made a first run-through before school started and it was horrible. Disgusted with our performance on stage, Ms. Naks said, "What is that? This looks like the practice we had...two weeks ago. What is going on? What's up?"

Sam replied, "Um, um, I think it's morning sickness!"

Ms. Naks replied incredulously, "Do you even know what morning sickness is?"

"No."

"Good. I don't want you to know. Okay, moving on~"

I thought that was a funny conversation. Anyway, we didn't even have time to do much before our first performance started. Someone asked me if I was nervous. It is strange. I didn't feel anything.

We barely got any practice at all so I think everyone really panicked during the first performance. Many, including myself, messed up on our lines. We couldn't find certain props. I forgot to change my costume between acts. Halfway through the show, I felt that everything was wrong, wrong, wrong. The audience didn't help either. Not only did we mess up, we had a horrible audience.

If we think way back, we remember that this is a history class putting on a play. None of us were a part of the McKinley Theatre Group and some of us has never done acting on stage before (I haven't). It didn't make much sense for a history class to do a play, but it made sense for us to do a historical play. The class was divided into five groups with four persons in each group. We covered different parts of the world: Hawaii (because we live here), America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. The theme was "Women in World History: Triumph & Tragedy". We wrote our own scripts, came up with our own props and costumes...everything was up to us. My group chose to do Europe and we focused on the European witch hunts and Florence Nightingale. Our first act was meant to be tragic, but we made it comedic so that we'd have something light to offer the audience. In this act, I was the mother of a child who accused said child's teacher to be a witch. This is followed with a hilarious chase scene (closely resembling Scooby-Doo) and then the execution. Kenneth and his dad created this amazing guillotine and we closed curtains before the "head" would roll out. (We had bought a styrofoam head from Party City). XD; Although our scenes were funny, there were some other acts in our play that were more dark and serious.

Misaki and Julia was in the Africa group and chose to bring some attention to what the women in Africa were going through (domestic violence and abuse). There was a scene where the husband physically abuses his wife and a raping scene (don't worry, the stage was dark). The audience proved to be very immature and laughed at parts of the play that shouldn't have been laughed at. They were disrespectful.

It was okay in the end, though. When we asked Ms. Naks for some feedback after the show, she bobbed her head and waved her fingers. She recieved mixed responses from the audience. One comment stuck to me like glue. "One person said, 'You know what? They were just talking so fast and I couldn't hear or understand them at all.'"

People only remember the bad, not the good. That was the only thing I remembered.

Our second performance started soon after. I did almost throw up the fattening pastries I had for breakfast but I swallowed it back in. It didn't help that I've had a sore throat for an entire week. I thought we did way better on the second performance (maybe it's just that I didn't mess up) but Hoang and Erica both thought the first performance was better (maybe because they messed up). But Ms. Naks response was good this time. The audience loved us. (And they were better this time too!) Sometimes I feel a sort of connection to Ms. Naks because everything she says is what I've been feeling inside. We have the same thoughts and opinions. I don't need to say anything because she understands.

Writing a script and creating a play, not to mention acting, is harder than it looks. The reason we went to camp was so that we could feel more comfortable around each other. Teamwork was essential then, and it was definitely needed to make the play work. Working together with twenty people is pretty difficult and it took us a long time to make things run smoothly. The acting was no problem. But there was so many things going behind the scene, things the audience have no idea we're going through unless they've been in a play themselves. However, Ms. Naks said that things ran quite smoothly the second time around and I'm glad of that. ^__^ We joked to Ms. Naks that she should tell the audience that we only practiced on stage twice, so that we'd sound more impressive and so if we messed up, it's not our fault. xD Ms. Naks simply rolled her eyes. Because of the good feedback, some started asking for more.

"Oh! And tell them donations are welcome."

"And standing ovations!"

Ms. Naks replied, "Okay, and pretty soon they're going to ask for your autographs!" XP

It's funny. I wasn't scared to go up on the Odyssey III and I wasn't nervous on stage at all. I would think it, but I didn't actually feel that way.

Our last performance was the best. Coincidentally, our period 6 audience was the best. I peeked through the curtains and saw that the majority of my friends came during the last period (Tracy, Erica, Victoria, Janet, Chunnie, Yang, Joyce, etc.) After the show, I rushed out to greet some friends but only Janet waved and gave me thumbs up. "You guys were awesome!"

Yes, we were. =)