Our HUGE and CRAZY Project: Blog Installment #3

And we're BACK!

When we last left our intrepid theatre apprenti they were on the precipice of vague challenges and undefined tribulations as they journeyed forward on their quest for oral history goodness. Continue on to read the penultimate installment of their adventure...

So there we were it was late fall, we had finally chosen a story for our piece and we had breathed a huge sigh of relief...little did we know about the months and months of work ahead of us. The first step was to get in touch with Joe, the double hip replacement surgery friend and his wife, we'll call her Jenna, and ask if they'd be willing to even be a part of our project...if they said no we were pretty much back at square one (or hexagon six, depending on what game you're playing).

Thankfully, though after some frenzied emailing they were on board as were David and Lee, the woman from Boston who had just gotten cochlear implants. So they were willing but we still had to do all of our interviews. "Oh that'll be the easy part," we naively thought. As it turned out we were really busy at the theatre, this was during the fall right around the time I was in The Elephant Man and all of a sudden our fall turned into December. And December ended up being crazy with the Christmas show, and then as it inevitably happens, the holidays were crazy for everyone so it proved to be almost impossible to schedule solid blocks of time to sit down with people and have them share their stories. In the end, it was around the second week of January before we had a chance to catch our collective breaths and almost immediately my and Jacqui's collective hearts began to beat nervously...we were running out of time!

At this point I should also mention that other people had now come on board with our project. As we told more people about what we were doing there were others who had similar medical experiences or knew someone with an amazing story of recovery. By January we had a cast of 10 characters:

*Joe and Jenna-double hip replacement
*David and Lee- deafness and cochlear implants
*Jacqui's brother, Mike, a high school friend of Joe and a close friend of David.
*A young man who contracted rare flesh eating disease and went into surgery thinking he was going to lose his leg.
* A woman who struggled for years with clinical depression.
*A young actor who dealt with Crohn's disease for years and then within a month of Joe and Lee's surgery underwent surgery to remove his colon.
*A guy who sprained his ankle really badly and then had God heal him while receiving prayer.
*A 58 year-old pastor and professor from the University of British Columbia who had chronic migraines since he was a boy and who's son also fell off a 120 foot cliff and was in a coma for 30 days suffering brain damage.

So we had a TON to do and as can often happen when people are motivated by personal nervousness we embarked on a frenzy of productive activity. We knocked out about 5 interviews in a week and then slowly picked up the rest over the next few weeks, some in person, some by phone. So there we were breathing another sigh of relief. WHEW!...however then came the dreaded word that would plague our days and nights for the better part of three solid weeks: TRANSCRIPTION! (DUN-dun-DAAA!)

There is some amazing technology out there right now. What it does is takes recorded human speech and turns it into text with about 98% accuracy, just incredible...MAN WOULD THAT HAVE EVER COME IN HANDY IF WE'D HAD IT! But alas it costs about 300.00 dollars and we didn't have the funds so it was up to our four ears and 20 fingers to take all of the words that had been shared with us and write them down. IT WAS INSANE!

Imagine hours and hours of experiencing moments like "Dang it! Did he say 'It was a really amazing thing'? OR 'It had a very definite ring'?" or going "Was is 'Um, and then, like, um yeah, maybe...'? OR 'Ah, well, like, er, yeah, well, maybe'?" It took SO LONG to do. It bordered on depressing us. Having to listen so intently and then spending like an entire hour typing only to find that you've only done half a page. We were typing and listening to tape for such long hours that our brains hurt. We never imagined it would be so tedious and time consuming. Finally, in the end after all of our hard work we had over 100 pages of single spaced interviews. And then came the enormous challenge of turning those 100 plus pages into something that resembled a performable script...

(cue tense violins "weee-ooooo, wee-ooo, we-oo!")

(Cue George Clooney):

Will our heroes survive or will the task of sifting through mountains of paper consume them in a sea of despair and confusion. How much sleep will they lose? Will there be tears of sorrow or tears of joy?And how many buckets of each? Will there ever be a way to turn booty dancing into an acceptable form of formal greeting? As usual find out the answers to these questions and more next post!