I’m still not entirely sold on the notion that theater is “back.” It’s dependent on wishful thinking, on assuming that a still-raging pandemic is somehow no longer an issue simply because you really really really want it to be over. But be that as it may, productions are taking place, in-person auditions are resuming, and all of the usual trappings of performance are, indeed, coming back.
Which means, of course, that I need to have a body again.
Frankly, I’d gotten used to not having to worry about it. Zoom performances are pretty much all done in close-up – indeed, it’s probably the best on-camera coach I’ve ever had. And as somebody whose first love was writing, there’s always that part of me that wants the language to be the entire focus of the performing experience. Language, after all, is the medium for ideas, the vehicle for expressing beauty and terror and joy and all manner of unclassifiable emotions in ways nobody has ever expressed before, the way to push new philosophies and ideologies to the vanguard of the culture.
But, in order to do that, you have to put on a show. And since we’re putting on shows again, the physical equipment needs to work.
I’d gotten into some pretty decent shape by the early spring of 2020, after joining my local gym in a moment of post-Thanksgiving regret a year and a half prior. But that gym did not survive the pandemic, and indeed, these past few months, I’ve come to feel just how much of my own strength and mobility – my “gains,” to use the vernacular – had followed that gym into oblivion. I’ve been focused enough on writing, and table reads and hosting duties, to be able to ignore my body slowly going to seed. Almost.
No more. The overall work of physical maintenance has resumed. There is a gym affiliated with my day job, and while I’ve previously felt that I spend enough time in the building as it is, I have gone ahead and joined it. As I type these words, my shoulders are sore from my first work-out in nearly two years. This therefore will be a shorter than usual blog post, as sleep is necessary for post-workout muscle building, and I feel I may have overdone things just a bit earlierzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….