Closing Night - WET

This is our last scheduled performance. I know MARTHA may have legs. We have a few leads on other gigs, and for all I know I may be able to tour the show for the next decade... but for today, this is IT.
The rain is finally over. If it had been a few degrees colder, we'd be buried under a blizzard! I sleep late while June Lewin gets up early and goes off for her regular Sunday morning 2 hour hike. I feel a faint flicker of guilt: I could have made a round trip with Joan and Jeff and sung in my West Newton UU church choir, as usual. Could have-- but I know from long experience that if I am up late and then get up early for choir, I will have a raging headace all day. Better to save myself for the afternoon performance. I hang out with June's cat Pumpkin. We do stretches together, and she looks mildly amused by my vocal warm ups. I read June's current copy of American Theatre magazine -- that'll save me a trip to the library-- and some articles from a relatively recent New York Review of Books. When June returns we have a nice lunch of salad and plan "strike" and packing up. June will be returning to her Cambridge house on Monday, and wants to organize the exit from Gloucester as efficiently as possible. I do a line mumble. We leave for the West End theatre a bit after 3 pm, meet up with our colleagues, and check through all that needs checking. It fills up to be a nice house, a friendly house, and we establish a much warmer relationship than last night. Martha has a bigger dash of deviltry today, the Golden Girl who expects to get away with murder because nothing she does can really be wrong. Friends, relatives, crew-- we all go out for supper after the show, to a delicious smelling pizza place that we have all to ourselves because it is Superbowl Sunday and the restaurant doesn't have a TV! I eat Greek salad, of course. Rosanna takes pity on me and passes me a forkful of gooey cheese and mushroom and black olive topping from her pie. Gosh, I miss pizza! I sit next to Serena, who is 17 and in high school and already a professional lighting designer. I love listening to her plans for a Life in the Theatre. I wish I'd captured her voice in my notebook and were able to turn it into an upbeat monologue -- most of the "material" I hear these days is political, and depressing. But I don't have my notebook and I'm too tired to remember anything beyond what a pleasure it was to be in the young woman's company, and that of her charming mother. I do remember an anecdote about Serena's sail-maker father doing the custom antique sails for a recent film, and the family rushing out to see it when it opened: but although she said that I could build a monologue from it it doesn't want to fall into shape. Serena also said that she'd send me some fresh high school gossip to use-- I told her how I get email from high school actors who are desperate to find monologues that are age-appropriate, and all I can say is that I don't currently know many teens. I miss the freshmen I taught at Northeastern in the 90s.
Home with Jeff and Joan, arrive early enough that my husband is still awake to hear my adventures on the North Shore. He is taping Bleak House for me. I am too keyyed up from the show to go to sleep, so I watch Bleak House after he goes up to bed, and even check some of my email before finally turning in.