Extreme Sports

For those of you who don't know how thrilling and dangerous my line of work is, let me let you in on a little secret: Musical Theatre is a contact sport. Yes sir, I step-touch on the wild side approximately eight times a week, risking life and limb to bring the masses a world where seemingly normal people spontaneously burst into 4 part harmony and synchronized dance steps. It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it.

You may snicker, but I'm only 40% kidding. I took one for the "Buddy Holly" team this week. Right in the face. And, true to form, I'm still whining about it.

Here are the details:

The victim: My face

The culprit: The evil 50s era microphone pictured here

An unsuspecting Sidonie pre-"incident"

Now sure, I'm smiling. But this was before I knew that this mic had it in for me. Allow me to explain: Because "Buddy" is a Rock n Roll musical we have a several rock concert scenes in the show. The sound design is a little complicated, in that we are double and, in some cases, triple miked. All the spoken lines are filtered through the small body mics, like this one on my forehead...

All concert singing is filtered through the twenty-something 50s era mics we have in house. The sound is more authentic and time appropriate and yadda yadda. Anyway, back to my tale of woe.

I do a whole lot of singing into these mics but I also do a lot of very energetic dancing with them, i.e. manipulating the mic stand/cables in every imaginable direction, jumping and shimmying all while keeping my mouth directly in front of it so that I can be heard. You can see where this is going...

With all that's involved I'm sure you can understand how the average actor would probably clobber himself in the face. But I'm not the average actor...so I did it twice.

The result?

lame.

*Sigh*. I didn't just chip my tooth onstage mid-show. I did it twice. Lemme tell you folks, it didn't feel good. But there was nothing to be done in the moment, so I just kept smiling and singing!

Now, if I've done my job right, you should all be feeling very sorry for me right now. You may send your sympathies in the form of cash or gummy bears to my dressing room at the Colosseum Theatre, Essen.

You'll be happy to know that I have since visited the dentist who (after he finished laughing at me) restored my tooth with some of that industrial strength dental silly putty and a really expensive nail file. It was a relatively quick procedure and I was contentedly eating a jumbo bag of french fries 45 minutes later.

Good as new!

Aside from the mockery, my new dentist is great-- a regular tooth fairy! I told him that I was not the first to break a tooth at "Buddy Holly" and probably won't be the last. He is enthusiastically looking forward to meeting more of my colleagues during the coming weeks-- starting with Buddy, himself!

Wishing you (and your incisors) all the best for the coming week!

Love you guys:)

s