Spending Thanksgiving away from home is nothing new, I'm 3 years strong on that. But 2010 brought on my first "Christmas on Contract". I started rehearsals at the Arizona Broadway Theater on December 17 and with just Christmas Day and New Year's Eve off, it was a very Christmas. The down side (obviously) was missing out on a few extra days of New York's Christmas spirit, and a full week with my family in Texas, but the upside came in a great batch of young stranded actor type memories.
With rehearsal till mid-afternoon on Christmas Eve we (meaning the gaggle of us in from New York) knew we had 2 options: either make a sincere effort at cooking something nice at the apartments, or make it as tacky of a night as we could. Tacky won.
After half hour of calling every Chinese restaurant in a 10 mile radius to see if they would deliver to no avail, and realizing this truly isn't the city, we piled into one car and booked it over to Good China. Not to be cheated out of our styrofoam, we brought it back to the apartments, popped in Inception, ignored Inception, and had ourselves a merry little Christmas.
Christmas Day was a little more conventional. One of the out of town boys' parents came into town and invited us all over for Christmas Dinner. The house they were staying in was far enough away from hubbub that we could appreciate a really beautiful Arizona sunset and 68 degree weather. Even though it wasn't my family, being with someone's went a long way toward making it feel like the holiday should.
And New Year's Eve was SOOO MAGICAL!!!! Not that Crusade's PSW Winter Conference hasn't been great the last 3 years...but...spending NYE at ABT was pretty legit. The theater's auditorium and facilities are really lovely and attending a formal gala was such and adult-like thing to do. They have a fancy shmancy dinner menu to accompany the revue style performance. We'd had a few weeks to get to know the staff and resident artists, so the show was a chance to see them all in action. After ringing in 2011, there was dancing, and more dancing, and dancing with our bosses, and a really old couple that was swing dancing for serious. (the woman was wearing bedazzled heels and curtseyed to our applause when they finally left the stage)
With rehearsal at a very doable 1pm the next day, everyone recovered and got back to work. And all that work? Well its been rolling along till now, the start of the second week of our run. New Post with complete show musings to come.
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