I know one of my lines is talking about being bitten by a snake, but it almost feels like some of us have been snakebit for real. If things continue the way they’re going so far, I’m hoping we won’t be missing any limbs by the time we finish the production.
I’m not sure where things got jinxed, but it started for me last Saturday while working on the choreography for Scrooge. We were all divided into three groups of four (we now have the proper male/female ratio for dancing in the background). At one point, each group was spinning in a circle ala ring-around-the-rosie and our little group… we may have been spinning a bit too fast. And the room was a bit too small. And we got a bit too close to one of the circles next to us.
In the middle of spinning around, I felt my left foot stop. Well, the inner half of it stopped. The outer half tried to keep going. I immediately let go of people’s hands and limped toward the side of the room. Feeling all of those little bones in your foot spreading out when they’re supposed to be closely connected is… unpleasant. Plus it kinda hurts. I was done dancing after that.
The bottom part of my ankle and my foot around it have been pretty tender since then. It’s not bad enough that I can’t stand or walk around, but it’s tender. I didn’t want to give any sort of self-diagnosis, but I decided that it’s officially a sprained ankle/foot when I looked at the outside of my foot yesterday and saw a bruise had formed below my ankle bone. I did some damage to the ligaments, they started bleeding, it eventually pooled into part of my foot that hadn’t experienced any direct trauma.
That in itself wasn’t a big deal. I bought myself an ankle brace when I drove home on Saturday and I’ve been wearing it off and on since then. It’s always on when I’ve been onstage for Trials, Tribulations and Christmas Decorations.
There’s a scene where Joe, our lead actor, chases me around the room. That wasn’t a big deal last week, but a sprained ankle tends to limit one’s range of motion. But it got better! Or worse, depending on your perspective!
During the course of that scene, Joe was supposed to crawl over the back of a couch while chasing me, fall on the floor, then get up and resume the chase. They put some kind of padding behind the couch for him to land on, but it wasn’t as effective as they would have liked. Right after rehearsal that night, he drove himself to the emergency room and the x-rays revealed a newly-broken bone. We’re not sure if it’s his collarbone or his shoulder, but suffice it to say that his range of motion is really limited.
But the show must go on! We’re trying to keep him from moving his right arm too much, no one’s putting any pressure on that shoulder, someone is ripping off his clothing between scenes… that’s not a recreational thing, he really is supposed to be wearing different outfits during each scene in the first act.
Then there was the chase scene last night. Opening night. The first show with an audience that paid to get into the theater. And I ended up bleeding onstage.
The problem is that at one point, I’m sitting in a chair yelling at Joe. He turns and lunges at my left side. It’s a chair with large arms, so I can’t roll off to the side—the only way I can think of to escape is by lunging out onto the floor toward the right. In doing so, I don’t just land and stay there, of course. I skid a little.
There’s one spot on my right knee that’s felt a little raw during rehearsals the last week, but this was the first time I sat down and noticed some little dark spots in my pants where I’d bled through the fabric. Then when I got offstage, people pointed out that I had skinned my right elbow and had blood showing there as well. Translation: I need to figure out a better way to land when I throw myself out of the chair or I’m going to run out of layers of skin by the third weekend.
Aside from all of that, things have been going pretty smoothly. If something happens to make them go less smoothly, we could have a problem. After all, if I’m out of commission, they’ll need to find a replacement male to do a ring-around-the-rosie in the background for Scrooge.
