Today my wife and I celebrate our 5th Wedding Anniversary, but I doubt it would be your typical wedding anniversary. We both work for Wayside Theatre. I'm the Artisic Director (translation: chief cook and bottle washer), she's primarily an actress and teaches in our Young Performers Workshop (which she founded.) To give you an idea, let's go back to our wedding day five years ago.
We were married on Sunday, September 3, 2000. The day before we had two performances of the play, All I Really Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, which she was performing in. Since we were married here in the Northern Shenandoah valley area where we live and work, we had quite a few family folk and friends traveling in to see the show that night. Afterwords we had a lovely party and then it was on to the wedding day, which was the biggest jumble of different walks of life you could imagine with friends from the theatre, our respective families, and the many folks locally who helped us put the wedding together. We had a day off for a honeymoon and then on the Tuesday following the wedding we started rehearsals for our next show, Talley's Folly. So much for a honeymoon. (We did take a delayed one to Jamaica that next January.)
Flash forward to anniversary number 5. Today we have the two closing performances of God's Man In Texas, (which has had a sensational run.) This means that tonight following the second show we will strike the set, costumes, props, etc... and wrap that up with a brief repast with the rest of the company around 2:00am.
As we are now getting ready for tech week for The Killer Angels, today has not been just about the closing of the current show. I've spent the day with the sound designer working up the many battle sequences (gunfire, cannon barrages, bugle calls, etc....) that we have in the show. As we are short staffed this season, Thomasin has spent the day assisting the costume designer with fittings as the many Civil War uniform jackets we've rented, borrowed, and purchased are now ready for final fittings.
Tomorrow we begin loading in the tech elements of the new show at 9am and I have rehearsal from 1pm to 9pm and she'll be in the costume shop all day as well as we both head into a week that features 18 hour days until next Sunday's opening night.
This is our life on a regular basis. To say we don't love it would be contradicted by the fact that we've been living it for the past seven seasons.
So as I finish some blogging here on my dinner break, let me take this opportunity to say to the love of my life: Happy 5th wedding anniversary, sweetheart. I love you for all you are and all you do.
