There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

One of the struggles of being a young artist is finding the funds to finance your projects. This is why I work well over 40 hours a week between all my different projects, as do most of my fellow company members. But no matter how much we work, there's never enough to cover all of our expense, so we are constantly looking for breaks in rehearsal space.

A little while ago, we thought we had finally had some good luck. A local theatre company with plenty of rehearsal space said that we could have the space one night a week for free! We only had three hours to squeeze in two rehearsals, but the space was bigger than any we'd had before. And it was free, so we didn't have to dig ourselves deeper into debt with every rehearsal.

When I arrived for our first rehearsal in the space, I was cold and tired and hungry and totally unprepared for what awaited me. One of the artistic directors of our company met me at the door practically pulling her hair out. "There's staples in the floor!" she cried. Not understanding what she was talking about, I quickly went upstairs to find half of the company on their hands and knees pulling industrial size staples out of the wooden floor with pliers. Tape marked any staples that had been found that were still awaiting removal and the pounding of hammers echoed off the walls as staples too mangled to be removed were beaten into harmlessness. The first twenty minutes of that rehearsal were spent concentrating on making sure that at least half of the floor was staple-free. The rest of the rehearsal was interrupted with banging hammers as dancers who weren't being used worked on the rest of the floor.

While it was certainly a less than ideal situation, I couldn't help smiling to myself throughout the entire night. It reminded me of my best friend's favorite saying: there's no such thing as a free lunch. We didn't spend any money on the space, but at what cost? To this day, we still find staples in the floor and every time we do, I smile.