The Show Must Go On

Live performance gigs are officially back.

Yesterday I supported my good friend’s live storytelling event about living, learning, and loving with brain cancer. My role was audio/visual effects designer and technician, which turned out to be a delicious smoothie blend of what I do at the office, what I do for community theatre, and what I do for social awareness.

At the office about three years or so ago, I designed and developed a program to help bridge the gap between what my clients understood about what it takes to negotiate and sign vendor contracts and how it actually works on the legal and procurement side. Every quarter for the past two and a half years, I’ve led the charge in creating an hour of content with all the standard corporate slide deck bells and whistles. There are 4 other people on the core team who pitch in, but I’m the de facto showrunner, and have a bregudgingly civil relationship with Powerpoint as a result — we don’t necessarily invite the other for coffee, but if we run into each other at the cafe, we’ll usually sit together.

Then there’s the theatre world, where I’ve been behind the back wall running lights and sound more times than I can count, following my cue sheets, finding songs that fit the tone of the show just so, hoping against hope that we don’t blow the system and need to light the show with a camper light and the audience’s cell phones — although such a night did in fact happen, and fondly lives on in the lore of my community theatre home.

Finally this also gave me an opportunity to raise awareness on how to face life in the face of tremendously challenging circumstances, like cancer, in particular brain cancer, more particularly glioblastoma which is what my friend spent the evening helping us all to better understand. As I move further into my middle years, I’m finding more joy in generativity, in being part of elevating what makes humanity more than just a bunch of organic matter getting in the way of other organic matter. There’s still a hedonistic component — I absolutely love the rush I get from being a part of it — but it feels bigger than that. Bigger than the happy hormones rushing to my head. It might even be big enough to be genuinely meaningful.

More of this, please.

Shot on Pixel 6 Pro.