Another opening, another show.

It's opening night tonight which is always a special time in a thespians life. You get to give your fellow luvvvies cards and if you are especially flush little presents that cleverly relate to the piece you are performing. For example if you were opening 'The Importance of Being Earnest' you might give each other handbags with a baby inside, if you were opening 'The Crucible' you might construct poppets of all the other actors to distribute with needles inside the ones who are better than you or if you were opening 'The Merchant of Venice' you could buy a pound of different meat for each performer except for the actor playing Shylock who should never get a sausage. The only play where you are allowed to not buy pressies is 'Much Ado About Nothing'.

Anyway, I'm skint so I'm only doing cards tonight. Openings are always interesting as usually the whole house is papered. 'House' is a luvvie term for the people watching the performance and 'papered' is a luvvie term for all those cheap bastards who get free tickets to shows because someone thinks they are important even though most of them have plenty of money and could easily afford to pay unlike the people who really want to go and see the play who usually cannot afford to pay in excess of $50 bucks for a ticket and miss out on an experience they would get a real kick out of.

Openings also have people called reviewers who write things called reviews in which they tell you the plot of the show. These reviews then get printed in important publications like The New York Times, The Guardian and The Devonport Flagstaff and can make or break a production. I could write a whole diatribe about reviews and reviewers however I will wait until our review comes out on Monday to see if I have to or not.

Openings always have speeches afterwards, free booze and lots of other thesps in attendance who walk around with smiles on their faces and daggers in their eyes desperately trying to find someone to talk to who may be able to get them a big part.

We've already done two preview shows and they went well except for last night when I had a laptop malfunction. My character fiddles on his Lenovo laptop throughout the show and as I spend a lot of time sitting with my back to the audience the screen is quite visible to the punters. Everytime up until last night the laptop would doze so when I opened it up all the Microsoft Word mock-up spreadsheets and blogs were there ready to play with. Last night however the bloody thing had turned itself off and when I booted it up Norton Antivirus 2010 insisted on installing itself, Bill Gates really insisted I need to download 28 patches and the Lenovo itself really really insisted on trying to connect to the University of Auckland's wireless connection. Everytime I said no to Norton Antivirus it flashed back up again and I could hear the front row starting to snigger as I battled with the Symantec behemoth while trying to listen for my cue, which I missed while trying to stop the fucking Microsoft paper-clip helping me recover my Word files. It was horrible and threw me out for the next couple of scenes as I kept glancing at the screen waiting for the Norton window to reappear and start installing itself without my consent. Adobe decided it was a good time to update itself a few scenes later but by that time I was beyond caring.

At least it happened at the preview and not tonight. The lovely man who operates our lights and sound said he would fiddle with it to remove Norton and make sure it never turned itself off but remained in a permanent state of doziness, just like an insomniac or John Key...who may be coming tonight because he's only worth $50 million and needs a comp.

Right, I'd better stop here because I have lots to do and poppets to make.