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March 14, 2010

The Midnight Morning

I call this: On the Road Again,theatre — Posted by KP @ 3:43 am

Tonight at midnight, my alarm went off. In a more rational world, this might be because I accidentally set it for 12AM instead of 12PM. But no, I set it for 12AM. And I set my other two phone alarms for 12:45AM and 1:00AM. And my bedside hotel alarm clock for 12:45 as well. It is standard procedure for me to set four alarms for a load-in day. You’d be surprised how often I still nearly miss bus call.

Anyway, this midnight alarm was done totally on purpose. You see, yesterday was originally supposed to be our load in day. We have a 3:00PM show today, and when we start with a morning or afternoon show, generally we get in the day before and load in from 8AM to 6PM and then have the night off. Only in this case, there was some kind of beauty pageant at our theatre last night, so we couldn’t load in. Thus, we have to start load in with the same number of hours we would normally need to be ready for an evening show, which in this case means 4AM.

Adding further cruelty to this, it’s daylight savings day. So we are springing forward, meaning that sleep-wise, it’s actually more like a 3AM load in. I generally like an hour-and-a-half to get ready in the morning, because I like to have a little breakfast, drink my energy drink, read my regular websites, and then get in the shower and begin packing up to check out of the hotel. So since our bus call is 3:30 I would have to get up at 2AM, but since the time changes and the hour from 2AM to 3AM won’t exist, I really would need to get up at 1AM. If this is making your head spin, then you may understand why I decided just to set my alarm for midnight and see if I felt like getting up, so that I would be well clear of the whole time-change drama.

Sometimes, depending on my mood, I would rather lose an hour of sleep to have an hour of calm in which to spend more time reading the web, or as I am now, blogging. And since I woke up after three hours of sleep wide awake, I decided not to hit the snooze button. So now it’s 1:30, which will soon skip to 3AM, and I actually have a lot of time. But I did download the trial of Filemaker 11 overnight, so I thought maybe that would be fun to mess around with if I had more free time than I intended.

We had a 5AM load-in once before, in Fairfax, VA. I don’t remember much about it, except that it was very weird getting off the bus in what appeared to be the middle of the night. I was practically comatose, because it was one of the first nights of the Olympics, and I stayed up a bit too late watching speed skating, and then decided that I wanted to go up to the crew room to take a shower before bed. I still must have gotten more sleep than I did tonight, though. But sometimes being woken up by Bobby’s traditional “Good morning, sunshines!” 15 minutes before you have to start working makes you more groggy than waking up in an actual bed, in an actual room, with a shower, and not having to squeeze past six other people just to put your shoes on. There’s something to be said for being able to go to sleep anywhere and knowing you can sleep until 5 minutes before you have to start working, but I also like being able to organize myself and have some free time. I hope that I will have an easier time of it today.


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