From the Reclaimed Wood Desk of Haley: Adaptation

I’ve been a theatre nerd for as far back as I can remember. In fact, my entire life I’ve had to endure my grandmother bragging to various acquaintances about how I brought the Hanford Community Hospital’s nursing staff to tears with a perfectly scanned recitation of Ophelia’s “Oh what a noble mind is here o’erthrown” speech, mere minutes after being born. It wasn’t that good, if you ask me. But grandmas will be grandmas, I suppose.

In addition to memorizing Shakespeare’s entire canon by the age of ten, I grew up performing in children’s theatre and putting on solo Rogue-esque productions for…well, anyone who would pay attention to me. One of my favorite pastimes was picking up my mother’s Bible and giving impromptu sermons. My catch phrase was “And the Lord said…”. I’d repeat it, ad nauseum, throughout my homilies, inserting my own set of ever-evolving commandments for my ever-revolving congregations. My speeches (probably) included such gems as “And the Lord said, aunts and uncles should giveth quarters unto thy nieces so that they may spend them at the arcade and prosper,” or “And the Lord said, no child should be forced to sleep before nightfall, for the loving father, thy God, made the sun and the day for all his flock to rejoice in.” I obviously don’t remember what I said verbatim, but I have a very good and completely unbiased authority that I was a skilled orator and my views as a religious leader were compassionate and progressive, especially for the 1980s.

But I digress.

My point here is, I love theatre and I’ve been doing it my entire life. I even have a bachelor’s degree in theatre arts. Technically, my diploma says I majored in “drama,” and though that is probably closer to the actual legacy I left at my college, theatre arts is what I shall claim until I shuffle off this mortal coil. Specifically, with a “re” instead of a “er.” Because I’m fancy that way.

I love film and television, too. But outside of creating educational videos for grade school kids, working as an extra for Central Casting in my early twenties, and penning a few really mediocre screenplays, I have a very limited comprehension of how it all works. However, at Windsong, I’m learning. So far, the most obvious difference I’ve discovered is the timeline of pre-production. In the theatre world, you generally have a minimum of four weeks to rehearse and prepare everything. Making commercials goes more like this:

BYRON: Can you start looking into getting [random prop piece] for an upcoming shoot? We’ll also need [random location] and a few [random types of character actors].

ME: (sweating and breathless) Ok. It took some work, but I think I found reasonable versions of all of those things!!

BYRON: Oh. Actually we received some last-minute changes. We no longer need any of that, but we do need [string of completely different random objects, locations, and actors] by this afternoon.

And so on and so forth. I can’t say I don’t enjoy the pressure. Sometimes, like when it’s 10:30 a.m. and I have to come up with a large, custom sheet of glass by noon, I pretend I’m an ingenue in a Ridley Scott thriller, racing against the clock to put all the pieces together so that I can metaphorically stop the bomb at the last possible second. Hmmm. Maybe I really did graduate in drama after all.

Ballerinas and hibiscus flowers,
Haley

 

The Windsong Productions reclaimed wood desk was made by the talented team at Revive Industries. It’ll probably be the first thing you see when you visit our offices — or you might see Haley first, depending on how tall you are.