One of the most tiring weeks ever!
Well, this has been an utterly exhausting week!
I feel wrung out, and if I were wearing gingham trousers, I'd be like an old j-cloth, left out in the garden on a rainy day.
Recently, I've had one or two financial blips - occasions where I've had to pay out quite large sums of money unexpectedly. For example, I had to put my car through its MOT at the end of last month, and was horrified to learn that it needed £1200.00 worth of work doing to it, to get it to pass! On top of a few other recent expenses, it has left me feeling that I need to get pro-active about earning as much money as I can for a while, to top up the coffers.
I'm very lucky - it's not as if I work a nine-to-five job, where the monthly pay cheque is simply all there will be coming into the bank account: far from it. As a free-lancer of many years, through necessity, I've built up a range of skills (many of which were originally hobbies) that I can earn money from when the opportunity arises. So with a bit of dilligence and determination (if that's not a tautological statement - even if it is, you get the point!), when I have the need, I can, usually, throw myself into overdrive for a bit, and try to grapple back a little bit of extra cash!
I have my web-design company, which keeps me ticking over with little amounts every now and then, which always helps, but I have also managed to garner quite a lot of experience in the corporate market.
Many of you will already know that I work for a wonderful company called Elegant Entertainment, dressed as a waiter, working undercover as a singer for weddings up and down the country. I absolutely love doing these gigs. Apart from the fact that I earn money doing it, I get so much satisfaction out of helping to make someone's most special of days just that little bit more fun. Weddings are always times of love and joy, and to be able to sprinkle a bit more joy onto the day is an absolute treat. And an honour. They are often hard work, involving much travelling, but always an enormous amount of fun, and very rewarding.
I also work for a completely different kind of company, called DrumPulse. I've been working with Lisa and Mark from DP for about a decade. They are two of my closest friends (I also happen to be Godfather to their daughter, Poppy), and their product is simply amazing. We take a whole slew of drums into a conference, or a seminar or a dinner or whatever, and within seconds, transfom the entire room into a cohesive and exciting drum orchestra. The end result is always uplifting and enriching for the participants, many of whom will never have laid their hands on a drum before. Rhythm is something that is so much a part of my life. As is making a lot of noise. It's quite easy for me to take its value for granted. I love seeing people become utterly entranced by the simple rhythms that we get them playing; almost like they are lost in their own private reverie, which, of course, they are!
I also have my day job - box office at the Shaftesbury Theatre - keeping me off the streets.
With so many strings to my bow, I'm fortunate to be able to draw on these various avenues in times of need, and it just so happened that quite a lot of events have turned up for me this past week.
I've worked nearly 40 hours in the box office, including seven hours on what wuold have been my only day off this week, but due to sickness on the part of a colleague, I duly got a call from my manager, asking if I could come in and help. Of course, under my current mindset of "take whatever you can while you can get it", I said yes, and accepted the extra hours.
I took part in three drumming workshops in two days - Wednesday and Thursday - the first of which nearly killed me!
It was at the Royal Horseguards Club, just off Whitehall. I've done jobs like this in Central London before, and they can always be a bit tricksy. Very often, there is nowhere convenient to park the truck, and access to the old buildings can be arduous at best. This place was no exception.
We had over a hundred large drums in individual cases to take up to the third floor, for a two-hour session in the afternoon. To get the drums into the meeting room, the sumptuous Gladstone Library, we had to enter via the basement. This meant carrying all the drums down a flight of about twenty steps from the pavement down to the basement level. They then had to be carried/dragged down about half a mile of twisting, clutter-strewn corridors, through a very large kitchen (with lots of sets of doors to navigate through), round a few more corners, then down some more steps to a battered and TINY service lift. Eight slow-moving lift-fulls later, they then had to be carried through another corridor, and finally, into the library.
It took us a full two hours of panting and groaning to get the room set up, and we had no sooner finished, sweating like plum puddings in pressure cookers, than we had to launch straight into a very high-energy workshop, with a hundred bewildered delegates. Thankfully, they threw thenselves into the task at hand, and we had a very successful afternoon with them.
Once finished, all the drums had to zipped back into their cases, and returned to the street, back they way they had come. Nearly two and a half hours later, the van was once again packed to the hilt, and I made a hasty exit.
Hasty, because I then had just over an hour to get to Covent Garden to buy a new macbook cable, then hightail it out to Chiswick, where I was due to be watching a preview of You're A Good Man Charlie Brown at the Tabard Theatre. I held little hope of getting there in time!
£50 lighter (FIFTY FLIPPIN' POUNDS!!! - I know that this, of all weeks, is the time we should be celebrating the acheivements of Apple, after the sad loss of Steve jobs a few days ago, but come on! It's only a bit of wire and a plug, for God's sake!), I got onto the most crowded and disgusting tube I've had the misfortune to be on in ages, and we limped down the Piccadilly Line towards the west of London.
With just a few minutes to spare, I arrived at the theatre, hot, bothered, sweaty, stale, £50 poorer (did I tell you it cost £50?!), and sure that I would hate anything I ever saw at the theatre for the rest of my life ever(!), I sat back in my seat.
YAGMCB is utterly delightful, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I didn;t think anything would be able to bring me back from my foul mood that night, but this show was just what I needed. Fantastic performances all round, especially from Mark Anderson (Snoopy), whose Suppertime routine was simply wonderful, Lewis Barnshaw (Charlie Brown), who I worked with at that very theatre last Christmas in Just So, Leanne Jones (a VERY formidable Lucy) and the hilarious Hayley Gallivan (Sally). The show has been directed by none other than Anthony Drewe, and a very fine job he has made of it indeed. It is witty and inventive, with beautiful attention to detail, and lots of little tricks to constantly delight.
It took me a short while to become acclimatised to the episodic cartoonstrip-esque nature of the piece. There is, essentially, no narrative, but considering its sourse material, that's a very appropriate choice, and once I got used to that, I sat back and properly enjoyed myself.
Nick Winston's choreography is amazing. So detailed and innovative. I sat there thinking how much I'd love to do a show with him!
It was nice to bump into many friends there too - some in the audience, some in the show, many from the theatre itself, and some simply passing by! All in all, a really nice evening.
The next day was a double whammy!
It started with a twenty minute drumming session for a hundred people in Ascot at 9am. My friend Trevor and I got stuck in terrible traffic, round the North Circular - there just isn't a good time to get from North London to that part of the world, and through the morning traffic coutnts as probably the worst - so we were a bit late arriving, but we made up for lost time, and again, a good time was had by all. MUCH easier for access, as out of town hotels tend to be, and we were finished and out of there by just after eleven.
Home? Not likely!
Trevor and I set straight off down to Bristol, where another vanload of drums was awaiting us, for another two-hour session, at the Aztec West Hotel, just off the M5.
This was a slightly different event, as it was for the early evening, after the delegates had spent a fair bit of time at the free bar, and had yet to have their dinner!
To say their attention span was a bit wandery would be an understatement. At one point, it felt like we were talking to ourselves, and that we were at a birthday party trying to organise a game that no one else wanted to play! We got them though, and when we got them, we got them good and proper!
It happened like this:
One of my favourite things to do in these extended, longer sessions is to get everyone sitting in a circle with their eyes shut. One of our team begins to play a very simple, solid rhythm, and one by one, through the medium of touch, I invite all the other participants to join in, adding their own creativity to the music of the room. It's always magical, and never fails to make an impression. This time was no exception. It took some time to bring all forty players into the action, and they all took it very seriously indeed.
Something special happens when people play like this, with their eyes closed, that doesn't happen while they have them open. They connect with the drum, and the music around them in a way that they just can't do while their eyes can distract them with all the visual clutter of a busy world.
Several people were so deeply involved with waht they were doing that it was a shame to rouse them, and many came to with a bit of a jolt when I gently touched them on the shoulder to get them to reopen their eyes, so deeply engrossed in the sound were they.
It was exactly what the previously-rowdy room had needed. Bingo!
After such an tiring couple of days, all I wanted to do was get to bed, but I still had the long drive back to London to make, and I had also promised to attend a midnight cabaret in Brixton that night. I arrived back in South London a little after 11 o'clock, and went straight to the Brixton Club House, to meet Simon Greenhill from Elegant Entertainment. He and his company were hosting the cabaret, which is going to become a regular event, encouraging the best talent that the West End has to offer down south, to provide high-calibre entertainment to a late-night crowd.
The all-new venue is wonderful, and very atmospheric. An old converted cinema, this week was host to Jennifer Tierney, and her band and backing singers. Although I felt that it was the last thing I wanted, and I could hardly keep my eyes open, Jen was amazing! She has an extraordinary voice, and used it to great effect, blasting her way through a set of powerhouse songs, all very high-energy, with wonderful arrangements by Craig Adams. She sang songs from Adele, Lady Gaga, and tore the place apart with a blistering medley of Michael Jackson classic hits.
I hadn't expected it to be such a lovey-fest, but I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. It seemed I knew about half of the people there. It was a great atmosphere, full of like-minded people, and if this week was anything to go by, I see no reason why it shouldn't become THE place to be on a late night Thursday for some great entertainment. The next performer will be the beautiful Sophia Ragavelas, who played Eponine during my year in Les Mis.
I got home at about 2am, and had to get up early for an eleven-hour shift at the Shaftesbury, immediately followed by a performance of my own, at Naked Boys Singing.
That was yesterday, and I'm currently finishing off a ten-hour shift, again to be followed by naked japes at the Charing Cross Theatre.
Naked Boys Singing remains one of the highlights of my week. I love the show, and I love the cast. We have such fun together, that even though I'm half-dead from exhaustion this week, I know it'll pick me up, and let me finish this gruelling marathon on a high.
All new challenges next week: It's Brother Act's first performance at the Pheasantry next Thursday, the 13th of October, and I can't wait! You can book tickets by calling the venue directly on 0845 602 7017, or clicking on the link above, and tickets cost just £12 in advance. See you there!
We're picking up our specially designed costumes from our designer on Tuesday. I can't wait to see what they look like!
So, tired, but happy, this is me, signing off.
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