A Brief Entry

Some things that have been on my mind lately, summed up in short sentences:

-Lord of the Rings. I want to have an adventure. Gandalf makes me want to cry because he is so sassy and wonderful and mysterious. And Aragorn is perfect.

-Pirates of Penzance. We open in Lindon on Friday. The music is in my head pretty much constantly. Gilbert & Sullivan make me happy.

-Friends. I like having them. It still surprises me that I do.

-My image. I don't want to be seen as a silly girl. I'd rather be three dimensional.

That's about it for the moment.

What I'm Up To

Oh, hey, I'm alive and writing a blog post! Huzzah!

Big has been over for a while now. It was a huge learning experience for me, and I feel good about my performance. It actually made me appreciate being in the ensemble as well, because it is a heck of a lot less stressful! But it was a great time. Currently I'm in Valley Center Playhouse's production of The Pirates of Penzance, which is one of my all-time favorite shows. I grew up watching this movie on roadtrips, and I stand by my belief that it is the funniest show ever written. Pirates + Angela Lansbury + Gilbert and Sullivan = one very happy Rebecca
I'm playing Kate, one of General Stanley's daughters. It's a fun time, I especially love my fellow daughters.

I went to Florida last week with two of my sisters, Bethany and Julia, fulfilling a dream that we've had for years: to go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. It was AMAZING. Hogwarts just.....yeah, I'm in love. The employees were all in wizarding outfits (not just Gryffindor, to my delight) and Butterbeer is delicious and it was a wonderful experience. I am a Ravenclaw and proud of it! I stalked handsome men in the two-hour line for Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey (which was a totally awesome rollercoaster that I loved) and only got mildly sunburned. Winning!

We also went to Gatorland, where I saw more alligators then I've seen in my entire life ever okay. It was a little bit frightening....they were cold and didn't move much, but when they did you could tell that "Yeah, this thing could kill me without even thinking about it."

Our bus driver on the shuttle to Universal, Terry, was THE happiest person I've ever met in my entire life, bar none. I am not exaggerating. His enthusiasm never flagged. We sang "Wheels on the Bus" every day, and he honked the horn as we drove down the freeway, probably causing motorists to wonder what this bus's problem was. "B FOR BEST!"

The last thing we did before flying back to Salt Lake was Pirate's Dinner Adventure. I CANNOT SAY HOW AWESOME THIS WAS. If you know me well, you know that I am completely, one-hundred percent, absolutely obsessed with pirates. I have been since I was very young. I don't know where it came from, but it is here to stay. So to eat dinner while pirates participated in singing, sword-fighting, and generally being pirates all around me was another dream come true.

There was a lot of drama trying to get home, and we ended up getting the three of us on two stand-by flights in a row, but we finally got back to Utah. I wouldn't live in Florida, but it sure was nice to visit. I've never traveled that far in my life, and now I'm thinking I should start planning another trip. One of these days it'll be Europe, although probably not for a while.

Harry Potter and pirates are two of my favorite things in the entire world, and my sisters rank even before those. So to combine all of it together into a vacation of legitness was just what I needed. I've been running non-stop since August and I really needed a week of relaxation and no deadlines. C:

Running All the Time

Never in my life have I been so insanely busy. Never.

The Scarlet Pimpernel is still performing at the Empress Theatre in Magna for one more week. So Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays I'm there from 6-10:30 p.m. Big rehearsals are at the Empress from 6:30-10 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays and 9 a.m.- 2 p.m. on Saturdays. I am up for work at 6 a.m. Monday through Friday and often don't get out of the airport until almost 4 p.m. I have to leave my house by quarter after five to pick up my Scarlet Pimpernel friend Chrissy. When I say that I live at the theater, I'm not exaggerating. I'm usually not home before 11, and the only day of the week I see my roommates is Sunday. I have a whole new appreciation for the phrase "day of rest." Thank goodness for one o'clock church!

The Scarlet Pimpernel has been playing to sold out shows and getting great reviews. I don't even want to think about it ending on Saturday. I'm nowhere near ready to say goodbye. I am completely in love with my castmates, this show, the whole experience. Our cast is so cohesive...we've overcome more than one obstacle to make this show succeed, and it has only made us stronger. We are there for each other. I have made so many friends-- I can't believe that these amazingly talented people are okay with hanging out with me and putting up with my weirdness, but I am grateful that they are. All my love.

I will be playing Susan Lawrence in Big: the Musical next month. I've never been a musical lead before. I am excited and terrified and stressed and happy all at the same time. The cast is great, I love the music, and the dancing is fun; now it's time to see if I can get my act together and perform a choreographed solo! I'm glad to have such a supportive director in Becky Walk and a very understanding choreographer in Chalese Craig. They make my stress levels go down.

Being in two shows at once is exhausting in the best possible way. These shows ARE my life right now. I am bone tired and ready to collapse at any given moment, but I'm doing what I'm passionate about. What good is energy if I am not using it every drop of it? I certainly wish that I was getting more sleep, but something's gotta give, and sleep is the first thing to go.

One of the pros about such a frantic schedule is that it forces me to prioritize. If something is not one of the top three or four things on my list, it isn't getting done. I don't have time to waste time! 

In other news-- I greatly enjoyed the new Hobbit movie, although I'm still not sold on the whole making-it-into-a-trilogy thing. The snow we've gotten is much prettier now that the roads are fairly clear. (One night it took me over an hour to get home from Magna, a drive that usually takes around twenty minutes.) I have decided my spirit animal is a sad cow. That's not necessarily a negative thing; I just discovered that I'm really good at making sad cow noises.

Life is confusing and hilarious and tiring and good.

Change of Seasons

“No land with an unvarying climate can be beautiful. The tropics are not, for all the sentiment that is wasted on them. They seem beautiful at first, but sameness impairs the charm by and by. Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with. The land that has four well-defined seasons, cannot lack beauty, or pall with monotony. Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in the watching of its unfolding, its gradual, harmonious development, its culminating graces-- and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away and a radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in its train. And I think that to one in sympathy with nature, each season, in its turn, seems the loveliest.” -Mark Twain

Preach, brother.

Life in Lyrics

"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."  -Berthold Auerbach

There are certain lyrics that speak touch my soul. They especially tend to turn up in musicals. Lyrics that I can't forget, because they say something about life that I hadn't put into words. But adding music raises it to a whole new level. I don't know how singing makes everything so perfect, but it does. Here are five examples from five of my favorite musicals. (None from Into the Woods in this post-- it is **impossible** for me to choose just one set of flawless lyrics.) 

Note: Except for Newsies, none of these songs are my favorite from the particular show. I just have to spotlight the lyrics.

(Listed in no particular order)

1. "Getting your dreams, it's strange, but it seems/ A little, well, complicated/ There's a kind of a sort of/ Cost/ There's a couple of things get/ Lost/ There are bridges you cross you didn't know you crossed until you've crossed them."
-"Thank Goodness" from Wicked

 

2. "I want adventure in the great wide somewhere/ I want it more than I can tell/ And for once it might be grand/ To have someone understand/ I want so much more than they've got planned."
-"Belle (Reprise)" from Beauty and the Beast

3. "He was never mine to lose/ Why regret what could not be?/ These are words he'll never say/ Not to me/ Not to me."
-"A Heart Full of Love" from Les Miserables

4. "When I dream/ On my own/ I'm alone/ But I ain't lonely/ For a dreamer night's the only time of day/ When the city's finally sleeping/ And my thoughts begin to stray/ And I'm on the train that's bound for Santa Fe."
-"Santa Fe" from Newsies

5. "Grab up your one golden chance/ Darlings, life is such romance/ Give this world a sweeping glance/ Let it set your soul a-dancing night and day."
-"Vivez" from The Scarlet Pimpernel

I'm definitely going to do another post like this in future.

Home

A little over a year ago I moved from a tiny town in Wyoming to Salt Lake City, Utah, filled to the brim with aspirations and fears and the feeling that my life was really going to begin. I knew no one besides my grandparents. I had no job, no school, no plans for the future. I remember driving around a corner and seeing the nighttime skyline of Salt Lake City for the first time on my own. Looking back it feels brave and out-of-character for me.

It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I felt the absence of my family and friends  as a near-constant ache. I had lived out-of-state for college, but it had never felt permanent. I became very familiar with the sinking feeling of being absolutely lost. I filled out an absurd amount of job applications. I wondered if I was making a huge mistake. I cried myself to sleep more than I ever have before.

In fall and winter I (slowly) learned to navigate. I got a job, albeit one that I didn’t enjoy. I met people. In short, I tried to convince myself, and everyone else, that I knew what I was doing. While I fell in love with a new library and the Capitol Theatre and Temple Square, the feeling of being an out-of-place visitor still lingered in the back of my mind.

I don’t make friends quickly or easily; at least, not lasting ones. I tend to be terribly shy around people until one ordinary day I am not, and never am again. If that explanation doesn’t make sense to you, well, it doesn’t really make sense to me either. I was bottled-up and quiet at church, work, and pretty much everywhere else. But I was able to open up around a select group of people-- the cast of The Frog and I. They were my friends when I desperately needed friends and seemed to like me when I desperately needed to be liked. God bless those wonderful people.

It was a poignant and bittersweet moment when I looked around recently and realized that somewhere in the day-to-day and the change of seasons this place had become my home, not just the place that I lived. It wasn’t the new house, the new ward, or the new job that had come with the spring, though all of those were great.  It wasn’t just the new friends in the cast that I joined in the summer. It was a culmination of every familiar landmark, every inside joke, and every late night walk downtown, along with a thousand other factors.

Home, I think, is the most beautiful of words. It’s full of love and hope and acceptance. It’s a warm place when you’re cold and a comforting shoulder to cry on when you’re sad. For me, it means that I can be my own strange self without a trace of embarrassment. It doesn’t mean that times are always good or easy, but there are people that you care about to make it easier. I lived here for months and months wishing for the return of this feeling of belonging, but it built itself back up in pieces so small it took me months to notice it was complete.

Home is truly where the heart is.

What's Going On

It's been a while since I've written. I've been keeping busy, which is actually a great feeling for me. In fact, I'm booked solid until Sunday morning. I work mornings Monday through Friday and perform Hello, Dolly! on Monday, Friday, and Saturday nights, as well as other miscellaneous activities. This Saturday and the one after it I will also be doing a matinee. On Tuesday-Thursday nights I just kind of go crazy and wish I was at the theatre. Because there is honestly nowhere that I would rather be. C:

My roommates and I are getting ready to move, albeit not that far. I hate packing. We'll see if I can find my motivation around here somewhere.

I've been reading a Beethoven biography. I am pretty much more in love with him than I already was. He's one of those famous figures that is actually as cool as he seems. I'm listening to the fourth symphony right this very moment and yeah....I don't understand how composers do what they do.

I'll be spending eighteen of the next thirty hours at the Empress Theatre. There's nowhere that I'd rather be and nothing that I'd rather do.