Talking Head

At rehearsal last night, we finally got up on feet, so to speak. You see, for my first scene, I am sitting at a table for most of it.

We played a few acting games, my partner and I, to get us to connect and then we jumped into our first scene.

Things seemed to be going well... as well as they can go when it's your first "real" rehearsal... until the director pointed something out to me:

"Nancy, do you realize that you have been sitting in the exact same position, without moving much more than your head, for about... oh, the better part of forty-five minutes?"

Are you kidding me?

I did not just do that!

I look down at my crossed legs.

Holy shit! I totally did just do that!

I'm tempted to mention that I did get up at one point to use the bathroom, but think it may be better to shut up on this one.

Would you believe that I've suddenly been paralyzed from the neck down? No? Ok, moving on.

Now I'm feeling very amateurish. I realize that my OLT director had banned me from crossing my legs for a very similar reason. Bad, Nancy! No more crossing legs for you!

I think Kris had the right idea though about getting off-book before rehearsals even start. I need to have the script out of my hands so that I can feel free to move around some more (or, you know, at all).

Although the second scene we did went much better than the first, I'm still kind of annoyed at myself. Fortunately, we ran it so many times that I'm pretty certain I will be able to do it next time without the script, calling out for lines when I need to.