There has to be a reason for things like MacDonald’s, reality TV and the really bad chick flick or action movie. Sometimes the real world is too much to process and our brains need a break. This is the hardest thing I have ever done and I knew that it would be going in. I am still to figure out parts of my life before this and am trying to hold off on thinking too much about the future. Through it all I am doing my best to maintain a rather Buddhist mentality about the whole thing, accepting the difficulty, feeling it truthfully and letting it go. For the most part I feel like I have been pretty successful and I am getting far more out of it all than the minor pain I have to endure. But sometimes days just suck and all you want is to ingest some crap and turn it all off for a while. Today was one of those days. I had a really rough ballet class and let the frustration of my gracelessness get to me. The agitation was almost out of my system when I got a weird message from someone back in LA. I wasn’t sure how to take it and lapsed into familiar obsessive tendencies, worrying for no reason about stupid things that have nothing to do with me anymore. Acting class is usually my salvation. The minute I get in the room I just shut out the rest of the world and instantly feel better, but today I couldn’t do it. My mind was out to lunch and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t focus. I felt so disappointed in myself, saddened that I let it all get to me, that let it affect my work, and just wanted to go home, curl up and cry. Unfortunately, Alex had called a friend of his before he left and gotten all the NIU kids tickets to ‘Mama Mia’ in Russian.
I really did not want to go. A musical based on the music of Abba doesn’t exactly strike me as genius and the thought of listening to it in Russian just sounded down right wrong. And it was. It was so, so, so bad that it was fabulous! I have not laughed that hard since I got here. Every part of it was just so wrong it was amazing. The theatre was the most westernized of all the playhouses I have been to and was clearly a purely commercial venue. There was a Ford Focus in the lobby and at intermission one of the shows choreographers came out and taught the audience a disco line dance. It was hilarious. We grape-vined, we shuffled, we had a blast. And then the choreographer put a spotlight on us and announced to the audience that we were Americanskis from MXAT and the entire auditorium cheered. The show, which I think would be just terrible in English, was hilarious in Russian and when they launched into the post-encore concert, we were the first people to get up and dance. The Russians looked at us like we were aliens but no one cared and by the third song everyone around us joined in the fun. It was exactly what I needed, three hours without thinking or feeling anything but joy. It was the theatrical equivalent of a Big Mac on a really bad day.
