Adam Oster, Novelist

Editorial Comment: It should be pretty apparent that I originally wrote this before I ended up being exiled from my own home for three days. All the same, I’m not sure my feelings on most of this have changed all that much.

This past weekend was the opening for our show, you know, this weird little script I wrote called Lei’d to Rest – A Hula-dunit Murder Mystery. It’s a goofy comedy with very little substance to it, but lots of jokes and silliness all around.

But the point of this post isn’t to do more marketing for it. In fact, I’m not even sure that you’ll be able to buy tickets by the time this post actually makes it to print. (Editorial Comment: You won’t. This was originally scheduled to be posted the Thursday before our final performances, which was two weeks ago.)

The point of this post is to note exactly how exhausting the weekend of our opening was.

By Thursday night, the night before we opened, things were still pretty rough. It was decided that in order to try and make things a bit better, we would show up early to the theatre and run lines while we prepared for the show. This also meant that I had to rush out of work, get the kids prepared for me and the wife leaving for the night by 4:45, which also included ensuring they had food for the night (which, I’ll be honest, my wife did most of the heavy lifting on), and getting out the door to the theatre.

We did, we rehearsed, we got dressed, and we put on a helluva show. We got some not-great notes from the director, most of which I feel were unnecessary, and decided to go out for some drinks to celebrate the opening, which led to me not getting to sleep until 1am. I don’t intend to leave the wife out, she was asleep a little before that, just because she’s amazing at passing out hard and fast.

The wakeup call my kids provide started at 6am, leading to me finally getting out of bed around 8:30, which put us on a whirlwind tour of getting a whole bunch of Christmas presents finally returned, shopping for pants for all three of our children, who somehow have all run out of pants, eating some lunch, getting back to the house, shoveling the driveway, taking the son out to shovel out someone else’s driveway, sitting at home just long enough to thaw out, before talking the kids through their process for dinner and bedtime and heading back to the theatre, performing an even more amazing show, sitting at the theatre with the cast for a drink or two before heading home and working my overnight shift until 1:30, putting me to sleep around 2am.

Leading to the 6am wakeup call the following morning, which had me out of bed, again, around 8:30, quick breakfast before we realized that we needed to be out of the house by 10am in order to make it to the tubing hill on time so we could go tubing with the Cub Scouts, which finished at 2, which gave us just enough time to rush home, change clothes, prep the kids for yet another night without the parents, before we made it to our ax throwing league, getting us home around 8:30 that night, and finally asleep early by 11pm.

Luckily for me, I had Monday off, so although I was up by 6am that day as well, this time due to my actual alarm instead of the kids, I did get the opportunity to try to rest a bit…which was broken up by the horde of animals in my house trying to figure out why I wasn’t giving them attention, especially considering the lack of attention they had received over the past weekend of busy-ness.

So, needless to say, I’m writing this on Tuesday, which is basically my Monday for the week, and I’m wondering what the optics are on renting a hotel room just so I can get a nap for a few hours. (Editorial Comment: Um…yeah…)

Good things we get to do it all again this weekend 🙂

Well…not all of it. We don’t have the tubing, I guess. And everyone hopefully has enough pants now.

I hope.

But I know differently, because they were already talking about pants issues this morning.

It really feels like the days of being in a quarantine with an unknown ending were the good ol’ days now, doesn’t it?