I have missed performing. And it’s not just the getting up in the audience that I’ve missed, it’s the rehearsals. The process of working out a show is strange and fascinating, especially if you have collaborators that you can trust.

We’ve been rehearsing Peter and the Wolf for a couple of days now (minus a trip to ballpark for me) but yesterday marked the first day that I’ve been actively onstage. Since my puppet doesn’t arrive from China until Tuesday (we hope) the focus has been on scenes that I’m not in. We’ve run out of those, so started staging Peter’s scenes with me standing in for the puppet. It’s fun and odd.

I have to think about the kinds of movements the puppet is likely to be able to do and work through that. For instance, if you look at the illustration of the puppet (by Simon Wong director of the Ming Ri institute in Hong Kong) you can see that I’ll be standing behind it, which means that if I turn the puppet’s back to the audience all they’ll see is me. So I’m going through the rehearsals playing me as a puppet playing Peter.

It’s fun. I hope my guesses are remotely close to the puppet’s range of movement.