I know about pop-you-lar

First thing tomorrow morning, this is where my toes will be.

We held auditions at the theatre the past two nights for a musical that opens in early 2006. My friend's husband is directing and she is stage managing and I am producing. Which means I devise a rehearsal schedule that works around 45 people's personal schedule conflicts, hire the musicians, beg people to work on crew, order t-shirts, break up fights backstage and make sure the teenagers wear underwear when they go out on stage for the big tap numbers. A few of them decided during the last production that as a dare, it would be fun to be onstage sans panties. But our core audience is mostly elderly and had one of the dancers taken an accidental header onstage, we would have had cardiac arrest-city in the audience. Oy. So now I will be on panty-patrol as well. Great.

So anyway, the folks who show up to audition for your average community theatre production run the gamut from truly talented to really painfully, sometimes tragically, not (see Waiting for Guffman) and that is just the worst for everyone concerned. We sit there with smiles plastered on our faces trying to be kind, humane and supportive without giving reason for false hope without seeming to be big fat liars. And the kicker with this particular show is that the direcor is a former professional actor who worked on Broadway for nearly 20 years. So every person with acting aspirations from 20 miles around shows up to audition for my friend's husband whenever he directs, which is once a year. Which is about all I can handle anymore.

Let's just say it's been two of the longest nights of my life and if I never hear another song from Wicked sung badly by a writhing 14-year-old going on 45 in too-tight jeans with a belly-button ring hanging out of her too short top it will be too soon.