Making best friends used to be easier

I am working with a great cast in Wichita and the seven of us that are from out of town have gotten along famously this past week and all feel so lucky that we genuinely like one another. It is, however, becoming very apparent to me just how different I am from them. We operate from such different views of the same world and now that we've moved past the opening stages of friendship, it is hard for me to not feel sidelined with them because I don't have the same drinking stories. Oh, God, I've got to have more of you!!! On my own with them I just feel boring and inward. Use me to show them how great Your love for them is and fit me with the gospel of truth so that praises of You just spill out when I speak. May I either be persecuted because of Your name or the first to welcome these into the kinship of Jehovah. But keep me above all else from misrepresenting Your love for them or being over-focused on myself.

And...this is home.

Day 1 at the Crown Uptown Dinner Theatre...intimidating and a tad bit frightening. Full of wondering whether I can really do this and if they'll be disappointed that I'm not a prima ballerina. Unsure of what my cast members/housemates will be like. Checking into a ghetto motel and scoping out the town I'll be in for 10 weeks where there isn't a whole lot going on...

Day 2...I'm so glad I'm here! This is just exactly what I want to be doing in life right now and I feel so blessed to have a job doing what I really want to do! I am officially the dance captain for the show and understudying the lead (which is GREAT!) and regardless, every night I'll be dancing my tail off in the ensemble and have a nice ballet duet I'm in. This is such fun! I really like my cast. I think it will be relatively drama-free (which is rare in theatre crowds) and I've started a few relationships that I think will really build into something wonderful. I just can't wait to live life with them and let God spill out! We are staying in...dududuh...Motel 6, baby, for two weeks until the actors from the current show move out of the house we'll be living in. It will be soooooo (and I do mean soooooo) great to move into the house, but when I start to freak about the place we're in now, I just remember that my room in Spain was about 1/3 this size and I shared a bathroom with a very flatulent older gentleman, so I think that I'll be okay here.

I'm gonna be ok!...l-a-h-o-m-a, OKLAHOMA!

feeling a little blue

and I don't know why.
The Man in the Chair says I should put on an old show record. My heart says I should open the Word.
Instead I blog.

I love New York. Today was the second grossest, snow-storming day since I moved here and all I can think is how sad I am to leave so soon. On Sunday I fly to Wichita, Kansas to star in a production of the musical Oklahoma! And by "star" I mean that I will be seen onstage far more often then that girl with all the lines and solos. I am A REAL LIVE CHORUS GIRL!

So many hopes. Am I special? I spend my time vacillating between heightened knowledge of my smallness in comparison to my NY colleagues and heightened dreams of performing along the great white street of the restaurant at which I now waitress.

"I'm sixteen and every day something happens to me. I'm special. I'm special. Please God, don't let me be normal."
These words came from the sweet ingenue in the off-broadway show "The Fantasticks" that I saw last night and though I already knew them by heart before the play began, they struck a new chord with where I am right now. Such an ingenue, waiting to find my spot in the world, hoping desperately that it will love and cheer me on. Please God, don't find me normal.