Right now, Zorica is preparing for her debut…
…and I’m not going to apply for a Wardrobe Supervisor position with a professional ballet company in a neighboring city.
My husband said, “This is why we have memories.” (so we don’t make the same mistakes)
I love the idea of working in theater. I love theater people. When you make a living doing theater, you become a different person who does, without question, things that no other employee for any other company in any other career would even consider.
I miss being one of them. Not enough to want to go back to it.
That’s one reason I love reading about Zorica’s journey. She comes from a theater family, she makes her living doing theater. She writes detailed accounts of her day in the theater (at the office) and I get to remember what it was like. On the best days. They came rarely for a Wardrobe Supervisor in a LORT B Equity house struggling in a city that values a losing sports team more than an award-winning ballet company. I worked most of the shows plays by myself, serving 5 to 10 actors per show. Usually, that was fine. However, every season seemed to have a show that was mostly local actors who thought a great deal of themselves now that they were working toward their equity cards. Demanding, childish, disrespectful. Disrespectful of me was annoying but manageable. Disrespectful of the costumes and of the craft of acting was intolerable.
I only worked one show for the ballet company — Giselle, still my favorite. I started out being asked to make some beards for the non-dancing chorus and then expanded to helping with makeup and suddenly found myself shifted away from all that and next to the assistant stage manager helping him with calls because I could read music. What I learned working with all those local dancers was that their level of professionalism was higher than anything I had encountered in the play world. I think that dance is so demanding that it becomes a lifestyle. You don’t get to leave it at the theater if you really want to be great. And every dancer I’ve ever met wants to be great because they want to be the best version of themselves they can be. It’s as though they feel they have been given the gift of dance and they work every day to earn it by being great.
Working with dancers is one of the best life lessons I’ve gotten.
I am thinking about Zorica and her first full-on, with an audience performance and I’m glad that she’s getting to celebrate what she has worked so hard for, for her entire life. Best wishes and be safe, Zorica.
