It ain't over til the fat lady sings...

Therefore it's over.   I'm in a local amateur theatre show (The Metropolitan Musical Theatre's "My Fair Lady - come and see it please!  Tickets at www.metmusicals.com.au).  And one of my helpful cast members taped a rehearsal so we could practice a particularly complicated dance routine.

I started to watch the video and wondered where I was and who the fat lady was who seemed to be where I thought I was.  Yup. It was me.  Now granted, I was in baggy rehearsal gear and granted "the camera adds 10 pounds" but to misquote Chandler (to Monica in Friends) - HOW MANY CAMERAS WERE ON ME?

I know I've put on 10 kilograms,   I know I'm still 20 kilograms lighter than what I weighed at my heaviest.  I know my body has changed due to age and two babies, and weirdly, part of it isn't even the extra 10 kilos (I'm prepared for middle aged spread to some extent), what shocked me was the way I moved.

I've always been a dancer.  Since age 4.  I've always considered myself light on my feet, and pretty damn good on the d-floor.  Truth be told, dancing is when I feel my fittest, strongest, most powerful and sexiest.

But watching this video I saw someone clunky.  Someone who had to brace herself to get up from the floor, the way my elderly aunty does when she gets out of a chair.  I saw someone huffing and puffing to get her legs up for the spring kicks and someone who looked like she pounded the floor when she "elegantly waltzed" around the floor in the ballroom scene.

It shocked me to the core.  More than the ever-increasing waistline measurement, more than the 'oh-dear-I-have-to-buy-the-next-size-up moment in the dressing room.  Because this is something I've always prided myself on.  I've never really been hung up on my weight.  I've been skinny and I've been fat and everything in between and my self-esteem was not tied up in the number on the scale.

But this ungraceful, heavy, huffing, puffing, middle aged woman careening inelegantly away on the dance floor was not someone I found attractive, sexy or powerful.  So it's time to put down the fork full of schnitzel and hit the gym.  I'm not going to weigh myself, now or later, but I am going to, once again, feel light on my feet.

With a little bit of luck...

Around 10 years ago I suffered from anxiety due to a long term situation I was in.  It would start with a pain in my chest which felt like indigestion, but wasn't.  My heart would race and occasionally skip a beat, my hands would shake and adrenalin would surge through my body.  I'm long since removed from the situation and therapy has helped me deal with the anxiety.  I rarely suffer from it now, although if I feel I'm in situation similar to the one that used to trigger it, the symptoms will come on again.  However I'm now equipped with techniques to calm myself down, and have used them successfully.

I had a very different experience on Sunday with something I can only assume was blind panic.  I was auditioning for a role in a local amateur theatre production of My Fair Lady.  It's not my first audition, and I had worked with everyone on the audition panel in previous productions - so there were no unfriendly faces.  Now, I normally get nervous before an audition, but as someone who's been a performer since the age of 5 I know how to harness those nerves and always in the past, once the music starts muscle memory kicks in and a performance happens.  Also, I have this weird ability in job interview to harness nerves and normally interview really well.  So what happened next came as a surprise.

The pianist starts playing my audition song and I start to sing and I'm not in the right key.  I ask for another start and the same thing happens again.  The Musical Director, who knows I can sight read, offers me the libretto so I can quickly re-acquaint myself (with the song I had been practising for over three weeks on a daily basis) and try again.  I look down at the sheet of music and the words and they are suddenly a bunch of meaningless symbols that I can't translate.  It's like she's given me a book written in another language.  It was the most bizarre and frightening experience of my life.  I slammed the book shut and said I'll just try again.  I hit the key I was supposed to be in, but was so rattled by the experience that I lost the words of the second verse.  Bless her heart, the MD sang the third verse along with me to keep me going.

I went on to finish the dancing and reading section of the audition without any problems.  But for 10 seconds of my life I had the worst moment of blind panic a person can experience.  It was like something out of a nightmare, except I wasn't dreaming.

Panic and anxiety should never be underestimated.  It's a scary, scary thing.

Oh and one more thing: "C'mon Dover!  Move ya bloomin' arse".