Let's be chill.

Today, I had the first rehearsal for a musical I was recently cast in. Little Women is the musical, and the part I am playing is Aunt March, the batty old lady. I've decided that for these blogs, I will try to mention my personal life/things specific to me as much as possible, and focus more on things happening around me and life messages (now doesn't that sound artistic). However, my post for today does begin at rehearsal. We started off the rehearsal with a read through, and I learned that when one is triple casted, one doesn't have many lines to read at the initial read. That being said, we finished the entire play, and then moved on to a team building activity with the time remaining. Our task was to create a 5-8 minute melodrama from the time period of Little Women (1800s) with our cast. We were successful, after a half hour of planning, in acting out a very dramatic scene that included a leprechaun, train tracks, English children, and a detective by the name of Sherlock Drew. And on that happy note, we all exited the building to go home, or, as a few cast members were planning on doing, go out to dinner. I sat on the bench outside the community house, watching people leave, and waiting for my mother to pick me up, when a small black car carrying a few people from the cast (who I didn't really know yet) who had decided to go out to a restaurant caught my eye. The driver, who was my age or a little older, turned the corner to get out of the parking lot, when a grey van backed straight into her car. A split second later, the girl jumped out of the car, burst into tears, told her friends to go home, and tried to get her mother on the phone. The old man, who had reversed into the girl's car, hopped out of his car and immediately began yelling at the girl about not being able to drive correctly and about all the damage she had caused to his car. Now, to cut this story short, the girl's mother arrived, she screamed back at the man, telling him he had to yield for oncoming cars, the girl was comforted by her friends, and the directors found the funny light in this scream-a-thon between the two parties. Looking back on these two incidences--the theatrical creation and the collision in the parking lot--I noticed that life really is just a melodrama. People get so worked up about things that happen in the space of three seconds, and end up being so devoted to their side of the argument, or their 'role' that people on the outside, watching the entire shebang happen, find the humour in the situation. Now, granted, this was a serious affair, both the man and the girl will have to pay for their cars to be repaired, I believe that people need to sometimes just take a breath and look at their performance as one looking in, and find the sunshine in the clouds. Let's just take a ice-pop and stick it down our shirts, okay? For just as the people acting in a melodrama believe their performance is serious and heart wrenching, there will always be one person watching who thinks it's the best comedy in the world.