How my first visit with my new friend went!
So last week just as I was thinking "yeah, I really do get bored when I'm doing only one show at night" (my only-do-one-project-at-a-time promise only seems to be necessary when it's children's theatre - beautiful, exhausting, early-morning children's theatre), I got an email from my boss at Hope Stone that went like this:
We had a mom call with a daughter who has terminal cancer. She is 13 years old and the mother is desperate for someone to interact with her in some way. She is in bed on oxygen. She mentioned anything from guided meditation to music or storytelling.Her name is Lily. I thought, here is someone who I need and who needs someone like me. I can help entertain her, facilitate her creativity, give her a voice through some theatre, and doing that with her can give me a reason not to be stuck at home all day getting depressed. And trusting to the synchronicity of it all, I set up a meeting with her and her mom and stepdad. (I took Lucas with me just in case "Lily" turned out to be not so much a real person as the name of their gun.)
The initial meeting went well and so we had our first work/play session yesterday. We wrote a story together, read through a ten-minute play, and taught each other some games. I can see that I'm going to need two things: a) patience for when she's not particularly lucid and b) lots of two-hander scripts that are appropriate for a teenager in her situation for us to read through. We both had a good time and I'm seeing her twice next week. Hooray!
