Pretty Girl

The new semester took off running and I'm still trying to catch up! I started out the semester with an ear infection and some sort of virus that left me in my bed with a fever and no voice.  After some good ole codeine knocked that out (quite literally) i got some other sickness that was all cough and NO play.  So after three weeks of sickness I'm finally feeling better.  We're now well into rehearsals for our next show (which is actually next Thursday!!)  It's called the Tarbell show.  A group of realtors here in town (Tarbell Realtors) sponser a big show for all their colleagues etc. (something like 5,000 people) every year.  The Young Americans host the show.  It's a four hour show and it's a tribute to Roger's and Hamerstein's musicals.  We're doing excerpts from Oklahoma and The Sound of Music in the first act and the second act is the full two hour show of South Pacific.  The cool thing about this show is that all the leads are played by actual broadway stars.  For instance Lora Bell Bundy (originated Elle Woods in Legally Blonde on Broadway) Bryan Stokes Mitchell, Hugh Panera, and Shirley Jones are among the stars.  Also our conductor is 5 time Emmy award winner Mark Watters (he composed music for lots of movies and won 2 Emmy's for 2 different times that he conducted the orchestra at the Olympics).  Also our pianist/musical director is Jim May and he has conducted for every major broadway musical almost and he just got done with Wicked in LA (he also wrote on my facebook wall and it's right under where it says that I'm friends with Mark Walburg... just to rub it in a little) 

Lindsay is now friends with Mark Walberg. 3:05pm - Comment

James May wrote at 12:09am Hi Lindsay! See you next weekend!!!

Wall-to-Wall - Write on James's Wall

Anyway... The show is gunna be really cool.  I got cast a dancer (farm girl) in Oklahoma... That's really fun.  I also got cast in a number called "I Enjoy Being a Girl" and all I do is walk around in a prom dress and show off my legs... haha that one is fun too.  

But now to the most important thing that I want to write about.  Rio.  Rio is a rehabilitation center/ Juvenile high school for kids who have committed drug related crimes, or have been involved with drugs in some way or another.  I work here every Wednesday.  I've only gone twice so far.  We go in a do workshops with the kids.  We teach them choral numbers and dance numbers.  Our new kid class is split into four different groups and we all work at four different sites, it's a program the Young Americans do called Overture.  I talked about it a little in my last post.  We work with the kids for 3 months and then at the end of the 3 months all four schools come together and do a show!  We've only been twice so far... but both have been an experience.  The kids were very stand off-ish the first week.  It's a very structuralized place.  They all wear the same uniforms, and are color coded into groups by their shirts.  The group of girls we have all wear yellow, but I'm not sure what it means yet... still trying to figure it out.  They have to walk in lines every where they go and they eat sleep and take classes and do EVERYTHING with their color groups, it's only when the Young Americans come every Wednesday that they get to interact with other colors.  A lot of the girls in our group have scars from cutting on their arms and scars from needle use.  It's such an intense place.  The first week there I started working with this girl name Deanna,  she's probably 17 or 18 and she's half mexican half white, she's a beautiful girl.  She was very reserved and didn't want to sing or dance or do much the first week there and that was really discouraging for me.  I felt like no matter what I said to her I couldn't get through to her.  She was very heavy on my mind the whole week and I was very nervous about going back.  I guess fear of failure and rejection had me worried.  But we went back this week and she walked in and I walked over to her and said hi, and a conversation got started and suddenly we were just talking about everything.  About her life and what she wanted to do after she got out and things were just spilling out of her mouth like she was dying to just talk to someone.  She was a different person this week... And I don't know if I had anything to do with that at all, but regardless, it was very encouraging.  She didn't leave my side the whole workshop and promised me she would be good so that she could come back next week.  Rio is the highlight of my week.  

I'm quite overwhelmed with school! Ballet and other dance classes are a lot harder and I have a paper due every Friday.  We don't have a day off this semester and when you add rehearsals on the weekends it's been getting pretty crazy around here.  It's been warm and sunny and I'm happy with life these days. =) Pray for me as I'm trying to touch some lives these next few months and as I'm preparing to audition for tour! I'll keep you posted as much as I can!