Team Building

When a group is well formed and high preforming it makes it really hard to say good bye.  In college, I did a lot of theater, and the shows I hated to end the most were always the ones that were on the highest level of performance.

One show in particular that was hard to end was one that I helped write, and gave a lot of my time time and insight to. The show was entitled "Man Day" and it was written technically by three of my best guy friends (one who is now my husband) but I was at every meeting, read every version of every script helped change things, I helped mediate fights and I was in the play. So to me, and to my guy friends, it was just as much mine as theirs. Every bit of the cast and crew worked great together. 

We had very clear established norms, and it was one of the very few plays I have ever been in without any major drama on or off stage.  The show was not by any means a Broadway hit, but it was a hit in our small town at our small school. 

Here is some pictures from the goofy show:

Here I am pretending to "be in character" as a dog.  The guy in the blue is my "real life" now husband. This picture makes me laugh because this is how he looks at me every time I am silly!

  

This is a picture from the crazy show with in the show. As you can see it was full of silly and odd characters. 

This is a picture of the whole cast on closing night. These are some of my closest and dearest friends to this day. 

To close every show we had an awesome adjourning ritual. Everyone would stay to "strike the set" which is a fancy way of saying tear the set down. We would each take a piece of the set and have the cast and crew sign it. After the set was down, we would end the show the way we began every show, in a circle holding hands. I went to a Christian college,  so we would start the circle with a prayer. Then the director would hand out out the burlap award, which was just a piece of fabric, but meant a lot to the person who received it.  The award went to whoever really showed the values the college stands for during the show. Then we would end each circle by singing "Amazing Grace". Each time we ended a show we did this ritual and it is one of my most cherished memories.

I can not begin to imagine how we will adjourn from each other at the end of this degree but I know it will be  hard and weird because although I have never met any of you face to face, I feel like you are all apart of my life because of discussion post and blogs. Adjourning is just as important as beginnings because it gives you the closure needed to move on to the next part of life. The middle is the most important, but you have to have a beginning and an end to have a middle.  One of my favorite quotes has to do with this fact. It is from the movie Hope Floats. I will end my post with it.

"Beginnings are scary, endings are usually sad, but it's the middle that counts the most. Try to remember that when you find yourself at a new beginning. Just give hope a chance to float up. And it will... "