mission in the mix diaries

I've been at Dance Mission theatre for more than 40 hours in last two weeks. I've washed my costume at least 8 times. I've used up an entire bottle of hairspray, applied enough blue eyeshadow to make an 80s valley girl proud; I've shaken, squatted, kicked, twirled and holla'd until my throat was sore. And I've had the time of my life. Again.

Mission in the Mix has been one of the highlights of an otherwise blasé year. For the last two weekends, we've been at the theatre for 4 hours a night to perform on stage for a total of 6 minutes. And it's been amazingly fun. Besides the rush of performing in front of a (sometimes) rambunctious audience, I've also met a group of awesome awesome people that I hope to see after the show.

The highlights:

• Opening Night (6/10). Suprisingly, I'm not nervous - mostly because there's no one in the audience for me that night. (I learned from last year to never have people on opening night!) But as soon as we get on stage for our Street Party scene, we all notice something odd... they're playing the wrong song! Oh well, the audience doesn't know any better, so we freestyle until they figure it out. During the interminal pause that they are switching tracks, we just all cheer.
  
  
  
• Sat 6/11, 6pm. Sigh. You're really never going to get the good crowd during an early show. Everyone in the audience was like 6 or someone's grandfather. The looks on people's faces during the Girl Fight was priceless. Someone actually shushed Micaya when she started cheering.
  
  Chuy calls me a "gay bug" by accident. I think he was refering to Clyde.
  
  
• Sat 6/11, 9pm. Mommy is in the audience, so I'm really nervous. But I shake it anyways, albeit probably less enthusiastically then I would have otherwise. The crowd? Rambunctious.
  
  After the show, my mother comments, "I've never seen so many people get this excited about butt shaking before."
  
  
• Fri, 6/17. We're all kind of low energy because its been a week since we've been in the theatre, and its Friday after a long week of work. All of my friends are here, so I'm nervous again. I do decently up until the last scene, when I'm in the front row. I don't realize until I get there that all of my friends are like 10 feet away from me. I mouth "oh shit - hi" and go back to my dancing.
  
  Afterwards, we head to Oxygen Bar for some sake. Wow, does that place suck. $20+ for a tiny bottle of WARM sake. I've never been so sober in my life. The DJ there apparently hasn't heard of mixing, and the crowd is nothing short of ghetto. The only good thing: seeing that big black momma from Deuce Bigalow. Ok, it wasn't really him/her, but it was a close thing.
  
  Oh, and I got into a brawl with some coked up parent at the theatre. It was like Girl Fight in real life, only with me, her, and some 9 year old kids holding her back. How sad is that?
  
  
• Sat, 6/18. We're all starting to get sick - something's going around, and the close proximity we have to each other is making it doubly contagious. Nonetheless, Saturday was possibly our best show ever. First of all, Fierce Dance completely rocked it in the first half, so the crowd was totally game. During intermission, Micaya gives us our pep talk. "I feel something magical tonight," she says. And she was right. We all just totally let loose, and had a blast.
  
  Later on, as I'm working the DVD sale booth, I recruit 3 new people to be auctioned off.
  

We have one more performance to go tonight, and I'm both sick of being at the theatre and totally sad that its over. I'll miss my friends, I'll miss performing, I'll miss watching the Girl Fight, and I'll miss the scent of carne asada from El Farolito wafting in through our studio. Why, oh why, is this only once a year?