Annie! (again) (sorry) (I had quite the day)

Today was the most amazing “Annie!” practice ever. Seriously.

Marcy, the stage manager, decided that today would be a good day to play pranks and make Nancy, the director, upset. So first all us backstage people put on fancy hats, held hands, ran out on stage in the middle of a scene, bowed, and ran off.

Marcy also instructed us to talk with British accents whenever we talked to Nancy. Which was sort of pointless in my case cause I never talk to Nancy.

Then we all grabbed hands again, including a few of the actors, and ran on stage singing “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

And then once the curtain opened and all the people who were supposed to be in that scene, plus the backstage people, were lounging on the couch and stairs and desk.

It was so much fun.

All my quick changes went quick and snappy today, although shoe changes are nasty. Tiny little buckles. Ugg.

President FDR asked me if I was a Mennonite, and went on to praise the Mennonites up and down. That was cool.

The problem with this whole play business is that I can never remember anyone’s first names. I think of them all by their character names. The worst is Grace, who I have to help change all the time. I always refer to her as Grace, her character name, cause I don’t know her real name and am too embarrassed to ask. But if I need to ask her a question I don’t want to be like, “hey Grace!” It’s kind of a problem.

I just now got the bright idea to look it up online. Her name is Michal. FDR’s name is Brendan. I remember that now, but I don’t remember anyone ever calling Grace “Michal.” Just “Grace,” or “the girl that plays Grace.”

Have you ever found yourself in a very small group of people who don’t know each other that well, yet somehow you are laughing and joking around as if you’re best friends? You know, like kindergarten? I love it when that happens.

It happened like that twice today. First me, Becky (the daughter of Marcy-the-stage-manager who isn’t an official backstage person but comes sometimes to help keep the kids in the green room under control) and Rooster were just wondering around looking at the hidden football field and chatting and stuff. We were waiting to unload the stuff from the truck, but it was the oddest group.

I’m gonna go see what Rooster’s real name is. Hang on.

His real name is Chris.

Normally people hang out on stage right (the right side of the stage if you are facing the audience), but near the end I was on stage left with some dresses waiting to do quick changes. There were two other people there. One was Ellie, a twelve year old girl who manages small props and is the only person on the stage crew under 18. She’s a mature twelve year old. The other was this boy wearing a green shirt. I don’t know what his name was. I don’t even know what his stage name was. He just had a couple small unimportant parts.

The boy in the green shirt wasn’t supposed to be there. The only time actors are allowed backstage is when they’re about to go on. But he had gotten so bored that he was doing it anyway.

I got Grace’s (er, Michal’s) red shoes out of the box. They had extremely high pointy heels. So me, Ellie, and the boy in the green shirt started talking about high heels, and falling down stairs in high heels, and breaking heels, and how dangerous the heels were. We joked around that we would write a play called “the high heel murder.”

Our conversations just got sillier and crazier after that. We always referred back to our “high heel murder” play, making it the best play ever.

Like, while people on stage were dancing to some song, me, Ellie, and green shirt boy started dancing too. But it was crazy dramatic dancing with huge sweeping arm motions. We decided that that was the sort of dancing our high heel murder play would have.

Then we got on the subject of bloopers. I think it was because Ms Hannigan’s heel broke. She had high heeled slippers.

We tried to figure out how you could have a blooper reel in a play, finally deciding that after our high heel murder play we would have people come back on stage and do scenes over, but wrong. You know, bloopers. And then we messed around for a while, taking the handheld props and making bloopers. You know, “I think I’ll take a drink from this nice goblet. Oops! I spilled it all over my dress!” It was so crazy, and actually reminded me quite a bit of the stuff that used to go on backstage back when we did those skits for Bible club.

In the play, there’s this guy named Rooster, who is the brother to Ms. Hannigan, the mean lady who runs the orphanage. So Rooster and his girlfriend Lily pretend to be Annie’s parents. But the girl who plays Lily wasn’t there today, so this bald guy who plays the laundry man took her place. It was hilarious. He mouthed Lily’s lines, and some other lady siting in the audience that I couldn’t see said the lines. It looked really funny.

Wow. So I basically did a post on “Annie,” didn’t post for a long time, and then did another post on “Annie.” And guess what I’ll be doing every single day this week? Annie, of course! Maybe I’ll throw another topic in there somewhere. What would you guys like to hear about? Economics? Alzheimer’s?