Little sleep and four auditions

A tired Emily makes. Regard the captive Emily slump into the door, slump up the steps, slump around the house, assure (slumpedly) familial unit that all is well and the show is cast and all is well and I am extremely happy with the cast and that this slumpedness has no bearing on actuality except that I am actually very slumpedid. Slump.

Have printed out cast list. Have I'm With You mix CD on. Glad to have suddenly found said mix CD which we thought had been long lost. Tomorrow we pay bills and are grateful for the opportunity to do so. Colleagues who are Marquess-like are.... Were I not a Christian woman, Elmira Gultch! But anywho. Alles gut. (Das Slump.)

Confessions went well today. Praise God for priests showing up! (Hmmm, there's a deeper meaning in that.) Just three days to vacation - can it be? Must finish script tomorrow. Made good progress on it today. Must do up review tomorrow for Islam with Juniors. Must make up test for Juniors for Thursday (regard the captive Emily grow ferally gleeful for a moment then decide to give into the inevitable slump). Must find out who has my "By What Authority" book so that I can brush up my chapter two for tomorrow. Impossible week this week - so many interruptions right before break that keeping the younglings on task will prove slightly daunting. Ah - whatever. Alles gut. Leviticus - here we come!

I'm still marvelling over the fact that we're actually - I mean, actually, not theoretically, not possibly, not maybe - we're really, really doing "King of Fools." I mean...I've been thinking of this silly play for the past, how many years? Since fourth grade, I think. That's when we moved to New Jersey - I had just turned ten. I think it must have been my tenth birthday gift from Grammy - that sounds right. And so that make it...seventeen years!??!? that I've been thinking about this story and this play??!?!?! (Hoooooooooly cow.) Didn't Wagner take that long to finish the "Ring Cycle"? Anywho.... That means that I probably wrote "Who is the Lord"...no, no - I think I read the story, liked it, came back to it my eighth grade year. Because that's when I saw Les Miserables for the first time. So, that puts it to 1991 since I've started actively writing music for "Thrushbeard" - so that makes it 17 years since the introduction and a "mere" 13 years since the first piece of music was written for it. And then very off and vaguely on since then. Holy cow. Frederick and Cassandra have been around and named at least since high school - towards the end, though - so perhaps that shaves things down to only 10 years since the preliminary adaptation of the plot. And now....

We're doing it. It's cast. I have faces and voices to put with the folk who have existed solely in my imagination until just a few hours ago. And then to hear - soon and very soon! - others singing those songs that I've known for so long. I still marvel - I'm in awe, consternation, bemusement, gratification, humility and humiliation and slow-burning pride that tries to wave it's teeny flag beneath the pile of other emotions - when my students hum my songs, when they make it their own. Can it be? I feel like a child being told a story, being led into some wonderful world where all is fantastic shapes and grandeur. This is my Heaven. This is the joy of theatre: to direct a story in order to be told it again and again and again.

And God is so good and all will be well and all things will pass and all that I fear will work itself out and there are ways and means and there will be time and there will be time (time for a hundred visions and revisions) and God is so very very good to His least deserving servant! Praise the Lord, now and forever! Amen! Alleluia!

Mood: Was slumpidity but is now rather exuberant
Music: "Into the West" on I'm With You mix CD
Thought: Right. Back to work. Ugh - too late! Must - make - self - do - it - anyway!
Thought Redux: Please let all my actors get along and like their parts. Amen.