If I had ever paid much attention to my star signs, I’m sure today Ms. Mystic would be telling me this month is a big week for employment.

The first is an offer i’ve decided to accept that i’ve had standing for quite a while is to tutor a boy in early high school in Maths. Obviously, maths isn’t my greatest area of expertise, but I coped quite well studying Advanced Maths at an academic high school and did well in it for my HSC, so let’s keep things in perspective. I’m good at everything, check.

The second offer is to join a company who packages children’s birthday parties, asking if I would like to be a party entertainer, namely a clown, pirate and what not. It sounds like a whole lot of fun, but as it is always weekends, it would seriously clash with my theatre work, so that’s a major concern. I’ve been at a meeting about it tonight where we recieved some details about what it would involve. Just to prove i’m not making this whole thing up, here is a picture of a balloon dog I made. Isn’t that cool?

The third offer actually came just before the meeting tonight, as a pianist I know through the theatre is being forced to stop teaching some of her piano students and asked me if I would like them referred to me. She said she was looking for someone she could trust, and my name came up. I still have to talk to her again to find out what kind of level the kids are at (or they might end up teaching me things). I think this job would be the most time consuming, surface the highest number of personal insecurities, but probably pay the most. Who knows.

On top of that, I’ve started working on a new kids musical. In the long run, this could possibly be a small opportunity for income as schools and what not put on the show, but in the meantime, it gives me a creative outlet.

On my first relaxing day in quite a while, I sat down to read the Sunday Telegraph to find it’s drowning in self-proclamation of its cheesy metrosexual image. I read too many reviews about “must see events” costing far too much, and “must visit resturants” charging far too much for so little food. The same goes for clothes and pretty much everything else within the pages. What bugs me most is how on one page they will feature an article where one of the journalists denounces ‘tabloids’ for writing rediculous stories that are obviously not true, when in another section, there is an article about how Ellen Degeneres apparently recieved a christmas card from Anne Heche, before “throwing it right in the bin”. Obviously our bacteria-leeching gossip queen sitting in her minimalisticly styled (read: white boxes for all furniture) Sydney apartment tapping on glowing mac laptop while listening to some overly commercial “Chill Out” compilation CD would know the inner workings of the Degeneres household.

After that little spray, (i’ve calmed), I can tell everyone that the pantomime, my first show as Musical Director is now over. The season went well, with great houses. I’ve decided I won’t be going to see Rufus Wainwright or Bette Midler in concert because I sort of have a policy about spending that much money to see people perform. I can’t help but keep thinking of that time I saw Falsettos in Sydney, costing under $20 even though it was the best thing I’ve ever seen live. I also can’t be bothered to deal with the crowds at both those events.

Oh, check out Becky’s blog, but I helped her set it up. Okay, so I set it up. And she’s using my server. I have a lot invested in her, she better pay off.

I’ve been very busy these past few days with continuing performances of the pantomime daily, as well as battling with my computer to get my new hard drive in and working. At first I had just wanted to copy the operating system partitions across and then create bigger data storage partitions, but windows xp didn’t take to that idea at all. In the end I needed to do a full reinstall and then salvage whatever I could.

Somewhere along the way one of my ram sticks died, bringing my ram down to 344megs, which is just not enough for all the stuff I have going at once. The computer now takes a long time to boot up and occassionally Firefox won’t open properly and malfunctions if I have too many programs going at once. One step forward, three steps back.

The pantomime opened today. I was in there from 10am onwards rehearsing with Greg. The opening show was a little… dramatic.

First act went fine, bar a few squew-iff tempi. Second Act I sat at the piano waiting for the lights to dim when I realised I didn’t actually have a lighting cue for the opening of Act Two (technical elements were a little rushed with this show). The house lights slowly dimmed to nothing, then the stage preset changed to the same cue I have for opening of act one. The band started playing the intro of the opening song, myself playing electric piano. I get to the end of the intro I look up and the singer isn’t on stage so I turn around to the band to tell them we are just to continue on from Bar one, ie. just doubling the introduction. A few bars into our second introduction the singer arrives on stage and picks up from where we would normally be, I get the band back to the right spot (after a very ugly patch change on the piano to get to the grand piano sound it would normally be on at that point of the song). All goes well and everything is running smoothly when at the end of the song, I notice the singer sings the keychange section again. I suddenly decided there was no way I was sight-reading the final chorus a third, higher key so I hammered out her notes so she’d stay in the right key, and we finished off with an extra chorus.

Mind you, none of this was the singers fault, she was just very flustered because they had not been given warning the second act was about to begin. Communication seemed very poor. Then I checked where we were in the script, and turned to the keyboard player to discuss what happened, thinking maybe I had played the keychange too early, but we decided that wasn’t what happened.

I turned back around trying to find where they were in the script and they were over the page, having skipped another song. I turned to the band and warned them we may need to keep going ahead if they didn’t go back and cover dialogue, but I had a sneeking suspicion they did actually do the cue line and I missed it. The cue line came for the next so I told the band to skip and we finished the show off rather uneventfully.

After the show I was very concerned. It is a well known fact that no matter what happens on stage, it is ALWAYS the Pianists fault. Even if its a mind blank, lyrics lost - its the pianist fault. I also had the suspicion (which I truely believed) that I had missed the line and it WAS my fault. When the director headed over I asked him what happened and he said they messed up the dialogue. I spoke to an audience member who opened the conversation with “Can you play [the missing song] now for me?” and she said that the poor actress was trying to get the cue line out but other people just kept going until they got to the next song. I tried to speak to her, but she was upset and didn’t seem at all interested in talking to me about it, so I let it go.

I spoke to the director again who said she was being pretty hard on herself about it (thankfully not me, I thought!), but it was really inconsequential because the effect on the show was minor, the flow was certainly not interupted, and the kids just had a ball.

It’s somewhat scary that this is the precedent for the future of my musical directing career (which was apparently boosted by the director’s very favourable review of my work in the committee meeting).