Tuesday 25th August

Opening night.

The night towards which we have been working for the last 5 weeks or so. The night I targeted 6 weeks ago when I booked the theatre and put the date on the Head of School’s calendar.

And it was worth every minute, hour and day spent writing, preparing and rehearsing.

I love doing productions like this – with a fairly big, young and often inexperienced cast and watching them learn and blossom as they get it right. And tonight they definitely got it right, despite lights that failed (thankfully briefly) and broken glass flying – real first night jinxes 🙂

What is so interesting, and is a different experience for me, is to be working with ‘older young people’ – students as opposed to school kids. It is kind of the same, but actually significantly not, which is really nice and which makes the whole process that different.

What is also amazing is to have had the privilege to watch every single one of the students involved in this production grow in so many ways. As with any group, the degree of growth has not been the same for everyone, nor has the type of growth been common. There is not one of us who has not been affected by this process, though and we are all the richer for it.

Even at my advanced age, I know I have grown immensely.

This has, in fact, been quite a year for learning for me. I am definitely still learning lessons from the cancer thing. I think I will continue to do so for a long time to come. Maybe the lessons were always there, it just took the experience of actually having cancer to give me the impetus to focus on them.

Maybe, if we are all just a little more open to learning, we will see all the lessons around us, just waiting to be learned. Maybe then, we will truly be able to grow as individuals.