Unforeseen Opportunities

So...life has a funny way of throwing you curve balls when you least expect it. (Of course, isn’t that the point of a curve ball?) Sometimes these “curve balls” can be bad or good, annoying or delightful, boring yet unavoidable or exciting yet terrifying (as in my case).


You see, I was just offered the opportunity to teach the morning theatre arts class for the creative arts camp I work for…and I accepted! So now I’ll be teaching the Monday & Wednesday afternoon technical theatre class as well as the Tuesday & Thursday morning performance theatre class. Yay—oh, wait…

Remember what I said about having a lot on my plate in my last post...*sigh*

First, let me explain a little about the camp I work for. It’s a creative arts camp targeted at 8-12 year olds interested in the arts. The camp offers various classes in visual arts (2 classes), media art, dance (2 classes), music, and theatre arts (2 classes). The schedule is an alternating schedule of the different classes with morning and afternoon time slots. The kids pick which classes to go to and have to choose the same classes every day. It’s a lot like having a “major and minor” class.

You can take the morning visual arts class and the technical theatre class on one day, and then take the morning dance class and the afternoon visual arts class on another day. Then you repeat that schedule for the next three weeks. There are breaks and eating times, a creative writing time, and time built in for free time where the kids can work on things from their classes or start new projects. It’s an all day event and the kids are kept super busy…and they seem to love it. Then at the end of the camp session, there is a final performance from the performance theatre, dance, media arts, and music classes along with displaying the projects from the visual art and technical theatre classes.

Still a bit confused? So was I until I actually started working there. But things make more sense once you’re involved. But now instead of just working two afternoons a week, I’m now working four times a week with two different areas of theatre. Uh…*slight panic*

Good news: I have a plan! Well…a plan that is forming in my head at least.

After the first session’s performance (which I could not attend since I was in Lubbock, TX for a wedding), the camp director decided she wanted the two theatre classes to be more involved with each other. She wanted the technical class to run the curtains, lights, and do the backstage work for the performance class so they felt more involved on the performance day. I whole heartedly agreed with her, and since I’m now in charge of both classes, this should be an easier thing to accomplish. I’m still working out the details of each class (and coming up with some good ideas), but I’m still slightly nervous since the second session starts on Monday!

So now that I finally set a schedule for this thing for days that I had the most free time on, I go and lose some of that time! But the extra money and experience from this second class will greatly help me…especially the extra money since I had some unforeseen repairs to my car yesterday. *grumble, grumble*

See what I mean about life throwing you curve balls? Let’s just hope I can knock mine out of the ballpark. *shrug* Wish me luck!

~Namárië