or, “Knitting in the Orchestra Pit” In late November 2001, I started working for a production of My Fair Lady at Arizona Theatre Company. The show opened in Tucson in December and went to Phoenix in January 2002. There were about 75 performances altogether. Added to the touring production with Richard Chamberlain I did a few years earlier, I’ve done this show at least 91 times!
On Wednesday of the week before Thanksgiving, I moved into the apartment that the company provided in Tucson. On Thursday we had 5 hours of rehearsal on My Fair Lady, then I drove to Phoenix (eating dinner in the car), rested for about 30 minutes in the parking garage, and played Mozart’s Don Giovanni for Arizona Opera. I drove back to Tucson after the opera because home was 30 minutes in the other direction. I repeated this routine on Friday and Saturday, except Saturday night I got to stay home, the final performance of Mozart being on Sunday afternoon. During my night driving, I was entertained by the Leonid meteor showers. I jammed all my private lessons into Monday and drove back to Tucson on Tuesday for rehearsals the rest of the week.
By the time Thanksgiving arrived I was in no mood to spend any time in the car! I talked my husband into coming down to spend the weekend with me. On Friday we went to Purls yarn shop and I talked him in to buying me:
- Shawls and Scarves: The Best of Knitter’s Magazine
- 2 skeins of Lorna’s Laces Helen’s Lace
- Needles: 1 set of dp, and 2 different lengths of circulars
It all came to about $95. Today, I think it would be almost twice that… I cast on immediately and spent all my off-hours knitting the shawl.
There is quite a bit of dialog in My Fair Lady. Many musicians read during dialog, but I’m always afraid that I’ll get too engrossed and miss an entrance, so I usually just sit there or watch the stage (if I can see the stage). After a week I realized that a couple of the dialog sections were pretty long, so I brought my shawl and worked on it: yarn in a bag on the floor, bass leaning against me for quick retrieval, and pretty much in the dark. There are probably lots of mistakes, but I haven’t searched for them. I finished it a few weeks after the show closed.
The pattern is “Dayflower Daydream” and was designed by Eugen Beugler.