A Good Birthday

Thank you, Everyone, for your wonderful birthday wishes. Hugs and warm fuzzies back atcha!

It's not a milestone birthday by most standards. But, since I've also finished school, it might be considered a milestone of sorts. At 38, I'll be entering a new phase in my life.

It's been good birthday. I was more alert than usual when I woke up. Despite getting a late start on my morning routine, I got to work on time.

I had sushi for lunch.

I ate the last piece of cake the previous day's department birthday celebration. A nice, dense cake with strawberries in the filling. I didn't like the filling, but maybe it can be done with whipped cream instead of the super sweet stuff I scraped off.

I found gluten free cookies to bring to rehearsal. (One of the actors has celiac disease, and I wanted to make sure they could have some sweets too.) One cookie and several large fragments were all I brought home of that.

My sis and I had a conversation about the TV show Once Upon a Time.

There was a card, a box of Rice Krispy Treats, and a carton of mini Cadbury eggs on my desk when I arrived at work in the morning.

The front of the card: "Your life is filled with wondrous possibility."

I was not the only birthday at rehearsal. My stage son was also born today (Happy Birthday, "Murray"!). His mom made homemade fudge. (I'm in Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Yes, I'll wait while you look up some of the characters. Funny, eh?)

Video wishes from adorable tykes.

I noticed my sole gray hair (which I've had for a while) acting like a piece of lint after I declared on twitter that I don't look a day over 25. Well done, gray hair. Pop that ego before it balloons to big.

As Ice Cube said, "Today was a Good Day".

My First Management Position

Before I started my last quarter of school, I auditioned for the Civic Arts production of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I had a horrible audition. Still, I wanted to be a part of this fun story. 'I can help backstage if I don't get a part' I told the director.

'How would you like to be the stage manager?' she offered a week or so later. A phone conversation later and I was at the next production meeting. I was a stage manager!

With no idea how deep the pool was.

Sending rehearsal reminders, supporting the photo shoots and costume fittings and make-up classes, running production meetings, shushing the kids (who make up most of the cast) – that was the easy stuff.

Understanding the stage? My comprehension of left and right is slightly worse than that of a 3-year old. Despite the fact I've been onstage before, getting Stage Left and Stage Right correct – with 4 wings, 24 actors, props upon props upon props – took some serious diagramming. And even then, I got turned around the minute I went from the rehearsal space to backstage.

And that's still the shallow end of the pool.

Then came tech week. Or as it's known in theatre, "Hell Week". Come tech week, the stage manager takes charge. It's the stage manager who calls the lights and starts the show on time. The stage manager is there for every performance. The first few days of tech I kept telling the production team, 'Uh, guys? You do realize I don't know what I'm doing, right?'

I shouldn't have worried about being in the deep end of the pool. Theatre is a team project. One never works alone. Every member of the production team was an excellent teacher, available for my questions, setting me straight when I strayed. The theatre staff was wonderful; I asked, and it was provided. Crew and staff basically said 'Uh, dude? We're your water wings. Chill'.

Late nights, early mornings, no sleeping-in on weekends. It was good times.

We closed on a Sunday. Monday morning, I went to work with a sigh. No more animals, or playing cards, or mystical creatures. I missed my kids.

The Last Days of the MBA

My last two classes in the MBA program were entrepreneurship courses. In New Venture Development, we wrote a business plan for an idea that could not be a consulting project. In the Entrepreneurship Capstone, we did a consulting project for a local business.

In the business plan class, groups were limited to 2 - 3 members. Before class, we each had to come up with 3 ideas; as a group, we would select one to focus on for the plan. Instead of a book, we bought $100 software that did fancy machinations based on our entries. Presto! A pretty business plan could be spit out or exported, with tables and charts and graphs, oh my! It's cool beans.

There's a lot to think about when starting a new venture. If you're going to have an internet based business, how are you going to get folks to look at your site (or twitter or facebook page) in the first place? Who are your competitors? What are your estimated costs? How do you plan to harvest (sell or IPO) the business? (The bulk of an entrepreneur's money is made at harvest.) How do you plan to make money?

As an entrepreneur, all you do is sell. You're always seeking to close the deal. Not like a swarmy, pushy, used car salesman, but the type of salesperson you like.

If you know me, you know I've said "Oh, I don't do sales" at least a hundred times. Yet by the end of the course, I was thinking about trying to bring some of my ideas to market. Though I was worried at first (the professor has an in-your-face style), it turned out to be one of my best classes.

In the capstone, we filled out a questionnaire, were divided into four groups of six, did a few team building exercises, heard presentations from two businesses, selected our consulting project, did research, gave an interim presentation, re-tooled, and gave a final presentation and report. Yes, it did go that fast.

The capstone is the course where we apply everything we've learned in the MBA program. Our class had a live case study to analyze and comment on – a real company with real issues. Our suggestions should to help them improve their business.

Our group had three strong-willed women and three quiet (but by no means push over) men. There was no way we could make it out of the storming stage of team building by the end of the quarter. And if I didn't do what I do best in such settings (editing), the chances for misery would increase exponentially.

Yes, I thought about positioning and costs and how the company could interact with their community. But time and again, what I applied the most to the project was the knowledge of who the group was, and what I could control. I was much less stressed than I was at the beginning of the program when I was first put into a group.

Which is was the point, of course. If nothing else, we learned how to play well with others.

I'm in a play!

Civic Arts Stage company is presenting Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing, an adaptation of the book by Judy Blume. I play Mrs. Yarby, who just loves babies.
Tickets are available now at http://www.firehousearts.org/events/events-list.

IMPORTANT: We have 2 casts, so to see me on stage, you must buy for the following dates/times:

Saturday, 5/5, 7:30pm
Sunday, 5/6, 2:00pm
Friday, 5/11, 7:30pm
Sunday, 5/12, 2:00pm

See you at the Firehouse,