Sweet Charity

The school play is over! It's so sad! I'm being quite ridiculous about it now, every time I hum one of the songs or see a prop used in it I get all sad. It was so much fun! Luckily nothing major went wrong in any of the performances. The last night was the most fun as everyone was in a celebratory mood. Before the show the drama teachers gave each group of people (cast, make-up, hair, lighting, stage crew, etc.) a big box of chocolates and me and Alice (co-stage manager) as well as the two main stars, a box each. Next, Dominique and Ellie, the Year 13s who are the two main stars, give each group another box of chocolates, as well as copious amounts of presents for all the teachers. After that, Alice and I head upstairs to the backstage area with our little stage crew team (made up of five Year 9s and 10s) and give them our presents to them - glittery baubles with their names on, and a big box of Chupa Chups. Meanwhile, Mrs Knights, the teacher in charge of backstage (although actually we order her around) has brought us yet another (the last of three) yard of chocolate fingers. Yes, a yard. OK, so you can imagine how many sweets and chocolates we had backstage. It was like a sweet factory. Everyone was so hyped up on sugar that night it's a wonder the show went on at all!

Everything went smoothly, with a wonderfully receptive audience, and then there were the speeches. The headteacher gave a boring speech about how well we'd all done, etc., etc and after that Dominique, Ellie and Phoebe (another key actor) thanked all the lighting, sound, costume, etc. people. They brought Alice and I up onto stage, which was very nice if slightly embarrassing, seeing as we were dressed head to toe in black and without all the heavy stage make-up everyone else was wearing. The teachers (after a lot of cheering, shouting and persuading) were called up onto the stage, even though they had expressly forbidden us to do that, and I got to hand them each a bunch of flowers. After that (yes, there's still more!) Alice presented Dom and Ellie with bouquets of flowers since it was their last school play. It was all very fun, happy and emotional, with huge amounts of applauding from everyone. After that it was a riot backstage, with everyone hugging everyone, and several people crying. Once all the cast had gone to get changed, the crew divided all the sweets up among themselves, and then the drama teachers came to give Alice and I bouquets of flowers, which was lovely of them and very unexpected. It was only when leaving the building several minutes later that I began to cry, and then I couldn't stop! It's strange, when thinking about it, it's only a school play and there are hundreds of thousands of them going on every year around the world, but when you're so deeply involved in it, it seems like the most important thing in the world, and certainly for the last few weeks before you go on it is your biggest priority, your schoolwork fading into unimportance.

Anyway, despite all the exceedingly long and tiring rehearsals and having no time to do anything, ever, and getting very stressed about it all, I think doing a play (or even better, a musical) is one of the best things you can do at school, or if you are like me, in life. It's so much hard work, but it's so worth it.

Talliestar xxx

(I had planned to talk about my subsequent trip to Amsterdam here, but I should do my Physics coursework now and you're probably all bored anyway, so I'll leave it until next time.)