No Stranger

This was written on 20 July 2011 but I was too sleepy to publish it by the time I got home!

No stranger

Previously I thought my schedule was at its craziest when I had rehearsals during the day and futsal training afterwards. So, it’s 7am-till-11pm worth of physical and vocal activities. By the time I get home, it’ll be close to 12 and I’ll be too exhausted to do anything anymore. That went on for a few weeks!

I was wrong.

Currently, right now is definitely the toughest ever. Now that I am back at work full time and Dreamgirls has started running from 13^th July- 24^th July, it is beyond hectic! So, my day starts at 6.30 am. Office hours run till 5.30 pm for me, latest. Rush to Istana Budaya for my call time. Get dressed up, mic-ed up, and made up by 8 pm. Show starts at 8.30 pm and would end at about 11.30 pm ish. Get unchanged, mic-ed out, return back everything to step one and then go out to meet the audience. By the time I get home and get ready for bed it’ll already be about 2 am. That’s excluding weekends when we run 4 shows straight! I just don’t look like me at work on Monday!

6.30 am – 2 am. 19.5 hours of physical and vocal activities, mentally stressed and work exhaustion. Every. Single. Day. I’ve never ever felt this knackered before. I look like a zombie now and I’ve lost track of time and day.

What’s not a stranger to me anymore these days is the fact that I realize I wake up in my sleep. It wasn’t too chronic previously when I would sometimes dream of us dancing to a choreography. Once after watching Super 8, I dreamt of exactly the scenes from Super 8 when there were fights going on in the background, but this time with us dancing the Dreamgirls’ moves! And quite scarily, I think my dream came true the day we had the BERSIH rally. Fights were going on in KL, whilst we Dreamgirls continued rehearsing happily. 

But these days, I sometimes ‘see’ my fellow Dreamgirls. At times I ‘see’ my costumes hanging by the cupboard and when I get closer, there’s actually nothing there. I communicate with them that I ‘see’ too. Yes, I actually get out of bed and start taking my cue, interact and perform my routines. I am not kidding! Funny thing is, I realize all these happening, and at the same time also realize that it’s actually sleeping time. My system gets very confused! I tell my body to sleep, but it has this fear of missing a cue when I need to go on stage. Once, I found myself waking up on the floor. Unexplainably weird but I’m used to it already now.

The priceless experience that sometimes can be so unexplainable.