Pays to be prepared!

If you read my blog regularly, you know that I’m all about having a positive outlook when possible and a strategy for handling life’s challenges. Or at least being open to new strategies – from friends, family, great authors and speakers.  You get the idea. 

Even with a strategy at the ready, sometimes we just have to let go.  Despite all the planning, practicing, nagging, hoping, wishing…things happen.  It’s the unpredictability of life.  Doesn’t matter your gender, your race, your social standing, what country you come from.  Life steps in to remind you that life happens just as it did for me the other day.  Here’s what happened.

I’ve been playing the Fairy Godmother the past several years with Rhode Island’s own Kaleidoscope Theatre.  Two weeks ago we had 4 performances at the Kelsey Theatre in New Jersey for school kids on Friday and for families on Saturday.  During the second show on Friday as I waited for Cinderella to return to the stage resplendent in the gown for the ball my magic had created, I got caught on my own gown or my shoe, something.  I felt myself starting to fall backwards.  Thinking I would fall on the box that was behind me, I let myself settle down on it.  But it wasn’t where I thought it was, so I let myself fall, unfortunately taking the table down with me.

The key words here are ‘let myself fall’.  I didn’t try to stop it because to do so would probably have caused more of a spectacle and perhaps an injury.  Trying to control it would have been the wrong thing to do.  It was gravity and I was going down.   So in front of hundreds of children and their teachers, the Fairy Godmother hit the deck.

No time to assess the situation.  Need to come up with an appropriate comment and move on.  You’ve heard the expression, “The show must go on!”  And so it must especially with an audience of impressionable kids.  They needed to see that the Fairy Godmother was ok.  So I picked myself up as I said something like, “I’m so excited for you going to the ball in your beautiful new gown that it knocked me off my feet!”  Then I crossed over to Cinderella, introduced her to her flower girl and coachman, and reminded her to be home by midnight!  Oh yes, we sang too! I had to keep going.  If I hadn’t sent her to the ball with the admonition about what would happen at midnight, the rest of the show wouldn’t have made sense.  The story as we know it would have been over!

So besides a chuckle at my grace on stage, what can we learn from this?

• when possible, pick yourself up and keep going       
• We can’t let the little things in life take us out (or in my case, down)
• No matter how much you prepare, life will hand you surprises

The sooner we realize stuff happens, the better so we can move on.  It happens to all of us – even those in the limelight.  Think President Gerald Ford if you’re old enough or President George W Bush who was photographed trying to exit from a banquet in China through a locked door.  Or Jennifer Lawrence tripping up the stairs on the way to her Oscar.  Life happens.

It’s best if we can keep a cool head and a positive attitude whenever possible.  Stress does nothing but hurt us emotionally and physically as more and more research is proving.  Oh yeah, and be prepared.   We at Kaleidoscope call it, “It’s been to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it!” strategy.  Words I actually get to say onstage this summer in Cinderella’s Wedding.  My strategy that day?  AWB – Always Wear Bloomers!