Final Week of Rehearsal
page 12

Names Our directors know and use our first names (and we know and use theirs), but our dressers, who know us by the labels attached to our costumes, refer to us as Miss Lastname, which I find very professional. I noticed in the makeup room that all of the labels on the women’s makeup kits read Miss Lastname—I wonder if it’s an opera convention to use the salutation Miss, not Mrs. Our official working title is “mime,” one step below “dancer,” but in the dancer category. One of my colleagues has been referring to us as Mime Firstname, as a joke. She made what I assume is a Freudian slip the other day when she referred to me as Mime Devil.

Unions I'm now a member of the American Guild of Musical Artists. There are four performers' unions in the United States—SAG, AFTRA, and Actors Equity, as well as AGMA, and you can't join these unions unless you're offered a union job. AGMA doesn't appear to actually help you find work, but the advantage of being a union member is that you can audition for union-only work.

Efficiency Over the last five weeks we have spent about 113 hours in rehearsal. I'm onstage for 54 minutes (nearly half of the opera), during about half of which I sit still while a principal sings. So the ratio of hours of rehearsal to hours of performance is more than 100 to 1 for stage time, and more than 200 to 1 for active stage time.

I expect that as hard as we work on the details, many elements will go wrong, but it really won’t matter.

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Carolyn Dougherty is writing a book about her adventures in vintage motorcycling. Read excerpts at www.intemperance.net/carolyn.

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First Day - 1 2
Second Day - 3 4
Second Week - 5 6
Third Week - 7 8 9
Final Week - 10 11 12

“How would we know? We live in the basement. We don't even know if it's daytime.”
—Dresser