In my career, I am a bit player in the cast of a large web/software application production. Do not get me wrong. I am happy in my little bit role. No one person could do the whole blasted schlemiel. We need a small army of people using a variety of related but different skill sets to pull this stuff off. Several times a year. In a lot of ways, each production is the same old, same old. But then there are the things that blindside you right off your you-know-what. You carefully research and figger out what you’ll do differently the next time and then, the next time, there is a whole ‘nother set of problems to solve. It’s okay, I like to problem-solve. *Most* of the time. There are days (or parts thereof) that I just wanna sit and ruminate or whatever.

This is so much like my last “career” as a youth theatre guild administrator. We did five or six productions a year. We used lots of different venues, both for rehearals and performances. Different age groups. Different casts. Different scripts, sets, costumes, props, musical accompaniment (or not), choreography (or not). And then there were all the administrative hassles. Posters, tickets, video order forms, T-shirt order forms, media release forms, rehearsal schedules. You name it. I’m forgetting 90% of it. Every single play production, we would go through some sort of horrible, complicated mess. We would slowly dredge ourselves out of the mess and figure out how to make it work out. We would pat ourselves on the back and say to ourselves, “Well. Next time, we won’t have to deal with *that* because we’ll know what to do!”

But guess what? The next play would come along and there would be some totally new issue. One that we hadn’t even begun to think of before. I loved this stuff. Er, well. Sometimes I hated it. But. I loved the problem solving and the multi-tasking involved in running a youth theatre guild. I loved hanging around backstage with the producers. At least I loved hanging with Elena and Paula. Others? Well, they did their best. It was fun [usually] and there was always [always] something different going on.

One of the things I do *not* have to deal with in my current job is high-maintenance parents. You know the kind. “My kid is so talented, she needs to be the star.” “My kid has soccer practice whenever your rehearsals happen, can he still be in the play?” And there were those who jumped through hoops to evade the studio fee. Kee-reist, we are a blasted NON-profit organization. Who the heck do you think is funding us? And I won’t even go into the kind of crap that you get from the over-educated Planet A2 parents (who can’t tie their own shoelaces) about challenges and gender identity and blah-de-blah-de-blah. And some of *those* types of people were the ones who would try to avoid paying the studio fee.

Disclaimer: with a few very notable exceptions, I even loved the high-maintenance parents. Some of them even got on board with our program. And for the most part, the really awful ones pulled their kids out in quick order [thank god] and put them into commercials (or whatever) instead.

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