This is me at work. Me, Cody and Jeremy. I play in a 7-piece band in the theater: piano, bass, drums, and four horns. Three nights a cruise, we play production shows behind a cast of singers and dancers our age. The cast stays on for six months at a time, and the production shows don’t change. For the rest of the cruise, we have a different guest entertainer every night: singers, musicians, comedians, even a few jugglers travel from ship to ship doing solo shows.

It’s a different performer every night, but it still gets repetitive after a few months. Sometimes my music stand seems like an Inbox full of Sinatra and Andrew Lloyd Webber. (The other night our trumpet player got in trouble for “looking too depressed onstage”–heehee!) Cody has been on the ship since August, and Jeremy since December. I’ve definitely gotten used to sitting between them and alleviating the tension and boredom with inside jokes and movie quotes. Both their contracts are up at the end of this cruise, so it’s going to be a very different band next week!

Tonight is a special show because Kate, one of the production singers and a friend of mine, is performing a solo act for the first time. She’s been working on it for months, picking songs, buying arrangements for the band, and choosing what to say between numbers. It’s been really cool to watch it happen. Break a leg, Kate!