Our theatre group is producing You Can’t Take it With You in 5 weeks at a modest venue in our small village. We’re heavily into rehearsal now. We have a cast of 19 and all of the attending problems that go with a mob that size. I play a Wall Street business man, so I get to be slightly more bellicose and uppity than normal. We have a handful of very experienced actors from local community theatre.  They have been very gracious in putting up with tedious wannabe’s like myself. Curiously, I am not the only chemist on stage. The other chemist is far more experienced than I and she does a fantastic job.

For me, the hardest part is simply memorizing the lines. Nowhere in my life do I rely on memorizing large amounts of text. Being a scientist, I remember generalities and relationships and reason my way through problems as I encounter them. Recalling tracts of text from auditory cues is wildly outside my comfort zone. But that is what this is all about. Spending time outside the comfort zone and getting my remaining neurons active.