Break a Leg

I have the flu.  I hate the flu.  There are times when it's nice to be sick.  You get to take the day off work, sleep in, eat in bed, and do nothing all day without feeling guilty about it.  But the flu knocks you down.  Suddenly, you've been in bed for three days and the only thing you can remember doing is getting up to go to the bathroom.  And you can't eat anything.  And you get the sweating shivers.  What the hell is that about?  And that, my friends, is just the start of it...

It all started last Jenday.  I woke up in the morning shivering and coffing.  Oddly, I didn't feel bad, bar those two symptoms.  I got up, showered, got dressed, and went to work.  As the day progressed my energy started to flag.  By lunch time I was in a pretty bad way.  This was really bad timing because I was finally going to have dinner with this girl that I had been trying to have dinner with for something like a year.  I had to cancel.  I went home and got in bed and stayed there...for a day. I was so out of it I couldn't even sit at my computer and play World of Warcraft.  That's how bad it was.

   This is where it really starts to suck.  Everything would have been manageable if I had just been able to ride the flu out in bed.  But no.  I could call in sick from work.  There were plenty of people to cover my absence.  But what I could not call in sick from was The Show.  As I have mentioned before, I am currently in a production of "Moonlight and Magnolias" with Sonoma County Repetory Theater.  this is a zany, fast-paced, very physically active show, where the actors are on stage pretty much the entire time.  And it's a small company, so no understudies.  And the theater is anywhere from 45 minute to 1hr 15 minutes from my house depending on traffic, which can be pretty severe at the time of day I have to drive to the theater: Rush Hour.  (Though why they call it "rush hour" has always been a bit confusing to me because nobody is moving very fast.)

   Have you ever had to do anything that was physically demanding when you were really sick?  It's not fun.  You break out in a cold sweat and you feel like you're made out of smoke: burnt and not all together.  Thinking, focusing, remembering: any mental action is like trying to hold water in your hand.  And you're tired.  So very, very tired.  All you want to do is lay down.  It's all you've ever really wanted to do.  You can't imagine why you wouldn't ever want to do anything else when lieing down is one of your options.  But you can't.  You have to push, pull, strain, stand, jump, run, tumble, roll, move, go.  And all on the edge of a cliff.  And if you fall, you take everybody with you: your fellow actors, the audience, the people who run the theater, the bartender down the street, the Viceroy of Malasia, everybody.

   So there's nothing you can do, but do.  And you get up on stage, and suddenly, you're not that sick guy any more.  You're somebody else.  You're Victor Flemming.  You invented the camera dolly.  You smacked Judy Garland around.  You don't take any shit from anybody, especially not some punk-ass flu.  And you fly.  You feel like you're riding just in front of some huge, menacing wave and if you trip even for a second, it'll eat you whole.  And you do it, you make it to the other side, and you didn't let anybody down.  And then you crash so hard even your hair bruises.  And there's no glory, no celebration.  It doesn't matter.  Because all that matters is sleep. 

   But you can't sleep.  The flu won't let you sleep.  You wrap yourself up in your blankets so tight it's hard to breathe, but it finds a way in there with you.  You drift on the edge of consciousness, almost falling off into that merciful oblivion, but the chills and the sweat and the coughs, and the fever-enduced dreams prevent you from making that final plunge.  And every time you look at the clock another 5 minutes has passed.  And suddenly you have to go to the bathroom again.  You take another shot of NyQuil hoping that this time, this one will finally put you under.  You stumble back to bed, but the act of getting up and going down the hall has instilled the chills with a renewed vigor and you feel like you'll never be warm again. 

   And then finally, after tossing and turning and coughing and shivering for hours, sleep decends.  For a time you can escape the fetid mire.  You float in a land of soft grey nothingness.  You think to yourself "Ah yes, if it would just stay like this.  I could deal with it if it would just stay like this."

   And then the alarm goes off and it all comes rushing back in.  It's time to do another show.  It's time to get up, get dressed, and decend into hell once more.

   And that was my weekend.  I also had some friends up from So Cal this weekend, but I couldn't spend much time with them because I was either at the theater or incapcitated.  I'm over the most of it now, though my head is still stuffed up and every once in a while I cough up a new lung.