The one in which I'm happy

written about the night of Wednesday 14 August, during my time as stage crew for the Grand Teton Music Festival’s seven-week summer season

hello and welcome to my website! as you can see, the format over here is a little different, and some of my posts aren’t up yet — that’s what happens when I’m depressed and also just moved across the Atlantic Ocean. I’m working on getting all of the content up before I begin my master’s degree on the 16th of September.

I’m meant to be taking a break from blogging right now. I am taking a break, because I won’t post this until September, but something happened to me tonight that I very much want to chronicle, to record, to have to look back on.

It started last week when one of my coworkers worked the Wednesday night concert and set the stage afterward, alone. It took him about an hour and forty-five minutes. (Ordinarily three of us would set the stage on Thursday mornings, taking half an hour to forty-five minutes.) He didn’t tell us he’d done this; I came in at 8:30 that Thursday morning and was a little thrown off. At the same time, a voice in the back of my head said, “If he can do this, why can’t you?”

This now ex-coworker is significantly stronger than me (can lift 3-4 times the amount I can, probably for longer than I can). Not that there are many heavy things to lift for this stage setup — the gong, the two cymbal stands, the podium, and the four timpani (no wheels) are the worst offenders, and the hard plastic chamber music shields are unwieldy — but taking three chairs off a rack at a time instead of one or two makes the set go more quickly, and there’s a point where the ratio of work completed to time elapsed becomes masochistic. So I wasn’t sure I could actually do it. I left the voice in the back of my head to its own devices as the week went on, and then it was Tuesday, and then it was Wednesday, and I was working Wednesday night.

My boss and I were talking logistics, because that next Thursday would be complicated and stress-inducing, and I said, half to pull myself out of indecision and half because I wanted to see how he’d react, that I would be setting the stage later that Wednesday night. Concerned that I might hurt myself, he asked several times if I was sure. In convincing him that I would be okay, I managed to convince myself as well; and there I was, sometime between 22:15 and 22:30, with a blank stage in front of me and an army of chairs, stands, stools, sound shields, and percussion instruments at my back.

I have always had trouble believing that I deserve to feel good about myself. I’m getting better at accepting praise, because I know that it’s a reflection of how others see me and not solely representative of how I see myself. I very rarely feel at peace. My mind is always whirring, recalling my social faux pas, professional errors, failed auditions, etc. Even a successful performance doesn’t completely make that go away. The closest I’d come before tonight was my senior recital and, sometimes, backcountry trips.

I was lucky. We had only moved one of the timpani during the stage strike earlier in the day; one of the sound techs was around to help me lay the podium down; and I’d lifted the gong and the cymbal stands before, so I had an idea of how to pace myself. It felt like slow going at first. Then, gradually, I began to feel the stage taking shape beneath my hands. It felt alive. I felt powerful (even though I knew my boss would arrive the next morning and adjust everything, because he does that). I felt simultaneously in command of myself and that I didn’t need to command myself, that I could just be and do this job and everything would be okay.

It’s difficult, even now, to express in words what my mind did during that hour and forty-five minutes. One of the speakers for the DePaul Honors Senior Gala last May encouraged us to be present, and although I understood the concept at the time, it wasn’t until now that I felt connected to it. My entire focus was on setting the stage and setting it well, in a way that it’s only rarely been on my instrument; but I think that if this were my career, that lack of focus would transfer to it, because I focus best on things that I feel no obligation to do.

And it was over, and I had done it, and until that moment, when I turned out the stage lights and let the backstage door shut behind me, I hadn’t truly believed that I could do this. I had set myself a concrete goal which I thought might be attainable (in contrast to my more abstract, intangible artistic and musical goals which don’t really have any end point), and I now found myself in the unfamiliar position of having reached such a goal. It was (and still is) an odd feeling, one that I’m not sure I understand, one that I may never experience again. I might have cried. I will remember that night for the rest of my life.