The Official Salvage Vanguard Theater Blog

There were TWO bags of beef jerky in the green room. And a box of cashews. Three types of cheese and some organic crackers. Some Odawalla was sitting in an cooler. Fruit of various varieties. Coffee. Tea. Lemon.

Holy Shit.

Craft services? For real? Like, they get you stuff for doing a show? Holy crap. When Jason asked us 9 months ago what we would require in our dressing rooms, I said beef jerky. It’s good. It’s beef. It’s jerky. And here it was- nine months later, sitting in a small room backstage at the Hogg Auditorium.

Holy Shit.

I think that I’ve been doing a really great job of just not thinking about it. Of not thinking about how it’s going to feel to stand up in front of 800+ people and perform. Last night, during tech, I realized that everything changes when you are in a venue that large. I mean, we are used to doing this show at The Off Center or at The Blue. The booth would be where I looked when talking to Timmy. The bathrooms would be my visual reference when LB’s characters talked. The AC vents to the right would serve as spaceships landing, tall robots talking, etc. You can’t do that in the Hogg. You can’t even see the booth, let alone the bathrooms. Instead, you’re directing your focus at box seats, at mezzanines, at properly marked fire exit signs in the very far back corner of this very large space.

Holy Shit.

800. That’s tickets that are officially out. Some are comps. Most are paid. They predict that we’ll have a bunch of walk-ups on top of that.

Holy Shit.

I’ve still not absorbed it completely. Tonight I know I’m going to be popping a couple of Tylenol PMs because the brain has the ability to keep me up at night asking questions that I won’t know the answers to, repeating lines in my head (even though, technically, the show is a super-staged reading), freaking out about the improv sections of the show. (What if they shout out Margaret Thatcher? What kind of voice would I do for Margaret Thatcher?)

Holy Shit.

It’s TOMORROW. We’ve been talking about it for so long, planning for it so intensly, anticipating it with so much enthusiasm… and tomorrow it happens.

HOLY SHIT.