Oliver Cheryl Posts

David Cameron suspends critic in public row {new window}

So, I’ve been away for a while. I’ve been busy working on a show for the theatre I work for. So far, it has been an awesome experience, and I love the staff at the theatre. But it has been pretty time consuming. The play ends its run at the end of this month. After that, I’ll have no excuse to not update the blog.

During one of the recent shows, a bat landed on the stage and flopped around. I was backstage at the time and did not see what was going on during the performance. However, I did notice a giant shadow flying around in the lights. On headset, I asked the Stage Manager in the booth if there was something going on. A big moth perhaps? She told me that a bat had just landed on stage.

“Shut up,” I told her.

“No, there’s a bat. It’s flopping around on the stage. Now it just went into the front row. Okay. It’s back on the stage again.”

I laugh a little. Theatre people have really good senses of humor. “Get out of here,” I tell her.

“No. There’s a bat,” she tells me. “Wait, it just disappeared.”

Even though I can’t see it, the bat is maybe ten feet away from me. And now it has disappeared. Great. There’s a freaking bat on the loose.

I wore my hair in a ponytail that evening and the hair touching my neck made me flinch. That coiled rope behind the set became a whole bat family in my mind. The bricks in the wall in the darkness? A whole bat colony. Or swarm. Or whatever the hell a big bunch of bats would be called.

Hhhhhhhh. I don’t do bats. They are rats with wings. Scary rats with wings. Rats with big sharp teeth and screeching voices with creepy creepy wings. (Yes, I used the word ‘creepy’ twice.) People will come up to you and tell you that a bat won’t hurt you. They’ll say that it won’t dive bomb your hair. Yes, it will. It’s a fucking bat. A BAT. Not a bird. Not the tiny sparrow that the audience members all thought it was. It’s a bat. And it was all flopping on the stage like a creepy creepy bat. And I was close to it, but couldn’t see it, which made it all the more horrific.

Since it escaped, it is now on the loose. Now the thing could be anywhere. We have eleven more shows to do. Seeing as how it was all kinds of comfortable flopping around on the stage, it could be in the air or on the ground. There is not an inch of the playhouse that is safe.

I deserve hazard pay. No one will agree with that, but it is true. If the powers that be knew how terrified I was of bats, they would commend me each and every time I showed up for work with a bat on the damn loose. I sit backstage, in the Bat Dark, for approximately 51 minutes waiting for the bat to land on my face (because you know it will) and I receive the same amount of money as if the rogue bat did not exist. Fair? I think not.

I think that’s a pretty damn good excuse for not updating the blog.

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