Diary of a Music Director - Part VII: "It's a Hard Knock Life"

We're three performances into the show and things are going smoothly. The band's hitting a groove and most numbers have become fairly routine. When you first start running a show there are a thousand little details the musical director has to pay attention to, such as cues, tempos, fades in/fades out and such. When the show has begun to run though, those things become common knowledge to everyone in the group and I don't have to be as precise - everyone knows what's coming and reacts appropriately. That's what makes the first couple runthroughs and opening nights rough, until you get used to the flow of the show it requires a lot more concentration and you can't really enjoy yourself a lot. Now I find myself being able to watch some things on the stage I haven't been able to see before, and also to really enjoy myself on some of the bigger numbers so it's worth it.

Interestingly I seem to have become both a friend and a menace to local wildlife. Tonight's show (Saturday) saw poor doggy Sandy get loose during the final bows and run off stage. After the curtain closed and we began our exit music I saw the mutt run out of the curtains, jump onto the floor of the audience and begin running amok - much to the delight of the children in the front row. I hopped up from my spot in the band, ran over and cornered the confused canine, scooping him up and handing him off to Annie who with a few others had run through the curtain looking for him. Disaster averted.

Not such for one of the woodland creatures hereabouts - driving home last night from the show, I was broadsided in a particularly dark part of the Pellissippi Parkway (the route home) by what appeared to be at least a 4-5 point buck. The deer appeared out of knowhere in front of my car and to the left - he had apparently been trying to cross the highway left to right - and didn't quite beat my car. He plowed into my left front fender, scrambled and rolled down the side of my car and smacked into the drivers side passenger door before vanishing. I saw a car behind me swerve to avoid him as well, and that's the last I saw of him. If he actually survived the impact I'm certain he couldn't have lasted the night. I don't know how much damage was done to my car - my brand new (to me) 2005 Ford Focus, that I bought back in June, incidentally - and I'm afraid to find out....

It's a Hard Knock Life for us. For sure.