I realized three things as I looked at this debacle:1. Not putting laundry away for over a month could explain why I couldn't find all three of my long-sleeved black shirts.
2. I have too many books (technically I knew that, but still).
3. This could explain why I've been having such trouble sleeping and getting my non-SM homework done.
"But," I hear you all say, "your bed [not pictured] is perfectly clear for sleeping in, and don't you have an hour on the train ride home each night to do your homework?" Technically, yes; in fact all three of the essays I turned in during the course of the rehearsal process were written at least partially on the train, and despite getting home at 1am only to get up again at 6am I did come home and sleep in my own bed every night. However, that's not really what I'm getting at here.
Whenever I'm attempting to write, be it fiction or school assignment, I pace in circles around the dining room table. In high school, my friend Sam said that he saw the pacing as a physical manifestation of my thought process. The act of walking represented the mental progression from some Point A to a Point B, and as soon as my mind reached a logical stopping place, I would stop pacing and be able to sit down and write. The state of my room is also a physical manifestation, this time of my general mental state. I clean my room when I'm really upset. Like, haul everything out of the closet and develop. And usually by the time I'm not upset anymore, my room is in pretty good shape. Again, physical reflection of mental state.
"But what does this have to do with Stage Management?" you all grumble.
Well, folks, it has to do with maintaining your own zen, for lack of a better way to say it. Stage Management is probably 75% paperwork and organization. If your personal space, the place where you escape from your SM duties, is a mess, most likely your brain will be too, and the more scrambled your brain, the more scrambled your paperwork will be. At the point of greatest stress in this last show, the week leading up to and week of tech, my binder was missing all kinds of paperwork and my emails were going out days late. My room also looked like a bomb went off. Once I got over the hump of tech, hung some shirts up in the closet and put all my socks away, my emails were more consistent and my paperwork was better organized again.
It really sucks, because when I'm Stage Managing in The City and living in The Suburbs I spend more time on trains and buses commuting than I really do at home. I think most SMs have this sort of problem; half my cast was utterly convinced that I was living in the building because they would leave the building while I was putting things away, and in the morning they'd arrive and I'd already be sending emails in the office. One of my actors had quite literally not done laundry in over a month and was borrowing clean clothes from a friend; the same actor spent about six night a week crashing somewhere other than her own apartment. Functioning on these less-than-ideal schedules, it's no wonder that one's personal space begins to resemble an archaeological dig site.
Honestly though? It's just as important to go be in that space, organized or not. When you spend all your time around other people, especially the people you're working with, you eventually show up to rehearsal covered in your own feces and screaming gibberish. Not that I've had personal experience with this, yet, but there are stories…
And now, a month after the shell of this diatribe was originally written, I look around and realize that my room looks about the same, though the piles are now more neatly categorized into groupings such as "schoolwork," "random books," "discarded Hallowe'en costume pieces," and "dead kittens." Remember kids, do as I say, not as the things living under my bed tell you to do.
