Last night I was killing time on campus before I met up with Katie to go see The Incredibles, and I managed to wander into the UT lounge. Yesterday was "UT Day," which is held quarterly on Friday of reading period, and consists of an entire day's worth of performances, staged readings, experimental techie stuff, end-of-class performances, and virtually anything that anybody wants to put stage-- they'll give you the space, and the rest is up to you. So the theaters had been packed all day, but at 8:00 the UT lounge was deserted, a mess of strewn bookbags and cold french fries left in the wake of the exodus to set up for tonight's performance of The Crucible. It was a few minutes before curtain, and the cast (which is considerably large) was in the room across the hall. I could hear them murmuring and laughing nervously. You know, that pre-performance buzz of adrenaline and queasiness. I found it pleasant to observe all that energy while I relaxed comfortably in my rolling chair, completely exhausted and sleepy at the end of a very long day. I reminded myself of the way my grandfather looks when he is lounging on the sofa after dinner, passively watching his youngest grandchildren run around him like electric balls of energy. It was nice for a moment to be so close to that excitement of performance but detached. But at the same time, it made me want to jump in with the rest of them. I was trying to decide some way I could find a reason to casually walk into that room so I could at least tell them "break a leg," you know, so I could be somehow a part of that energy, to at least momentarily touch it and thereby become tied to it. Already I miss doing plays.

Pre-performance is different in the Blue Gargoyle. We stand on the staircase outside the auditorium all nervy and jumpy, and imagine it is something akin to football players waiting to run out of a tunnel beneath the stadium onto the field. Not that I don't like that; I love the chanting and the mantras and that mad anticipation or dread of the unknown, but it's different from the controlled expectation of theater. It's different from murmuring quietly behind the stage.

I used to be worry that the only reason I gravitated towards theater was because it got me recognition or minor notoriety. I think that was probably true, and it is doubtless that I am still a laugh-whore, but improv hinges so much on getting a reaction out of the audience that being given so many opportunities to be a laugh-whore has just desensitized me, like if I ate 7 bags of peanut M&M's-- too much of a good thing. Thus, lately that recognition aspect seems less bound-up with the act of performing. In other words, I'm finding that I get a genuine pleasure out of studying or performing theater that has nothing to do with seeing my name in lights. I know what an immature stage that is to move out of at my age, but I'm just glad that now that I've moved out of it, there seems to be what looks like a permanent attachment to performance, and the confirmation that I don't like theater for all the wrong reasons.

Well, I'm in the library all day today and tomorrow writing 2-and-a-half final papers, and then it's off to St. Louis-Alpharetta-Vermont. I could do with some driving around the Retta. Maybe I'd even pop in some old Dave Matthews album and stop at Hardee's to relive glory days. This has been such a hard week, physically and emotionally. But some things that were wrong, interpersonal relationship-wise, seem to be in better shape, and the tension is sliding off just a little.

PS-- Why are Occam's crowds so much better-looking than ours? I guess it is because they bring in the athletes and the greeks, where we tend to bring in UT people and pasty people taking, well, Accelerated Attic Greek.