Last weekend, Night Mother opened, bringing seven months of work to light. This weekend those seven months came to a quiet end with the closing of the show. It was a great experience, invaluable lessons learned and all that business. While it wasn’t exactly what I wanted, it was exactly what I needed. The family came in from Michigan, in fact I saw old familiar faces that had been missing for too long. And for the first time since I graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in NYC, 2001, I have actually ACTED. Imagine that. For years now I have been telling people, “No really. I CAN act!” But I haven’t been given a chance to really display the talent I continue to profess I have. So I got the idea to produce my own play. Why the hell not? I grew up doing mostly small theatre, I figured it couldn’t be that difficult to pull off a little show here. So I picked a two woman piece I have wanted to perform in since I first worked on it over 10 years ago, Night Mother, and off I went. A terribly unorganized often self destructive chick with a dream, to produce and star in a play. That’s it. Over the past seven months I have been tested in ways I certainly didn’t expect and still more ways I did. From losing my original co-star, to the director losing her home and our constant search for free rehearsal space I was pushed. Rehearsals became a wonderful escape from the building tensions in and around the show. My new found patience was tested time and again when it became clear that my hand picked director freaked out over all things great and small....

Just where has Nerd in Transition been? She has been commuting from downtown Los Angeles to downtown Long Beach five days a week, traveling two hours each way on our cities brilliantly engineered mass transit system. The reason for this oft repeated time suck? Free rehearsal space in Long Beach. As you may know from a long ago blogumn I wrote, I took it upon myself to produce a version of the play Night Mother. I picked a director I have known for a few years, yet never worked with, approached her about coming on board with me and she said yes. We cast the Mother role, I took the daughter role, and rehearsals started. Halfway through the woman playing the Mother dropped out. Looking at this as an welcome opportunity I pushed the show dates back from June to September, recast the mother role and started rehearsals back up a month later. This is the first time I have produced anything. It’s kinda a big deal. Aside from the obvious career push and artistic actor fulfilment performing in this particular show could provide, my reasons for taking on the producer role go much deeper. I have a horribly destructive habit of starting things and not finishing them. So I decided that the next step up in my period of transition would be to take on a rather large project and see it through to the end as the leader. I also have a wonderfully constructive habit of attacking a problem head on. Such as the time I decided to conquer my fear of singing in front of people by performing the National Anthem in the middle of a roller derby track surrounded by almost 2000 people. The way I saw it by producing...