What have I learned from March?

Now that was a month.
Production week - a week and a half with a total of 49 rehearsal hours, most of which were spent in costume.
Recordings! - fourteen total hours spent at a recording studio with the corps, producing our first CD.
Parade - After four hours spent waiting in a parking lot, we marched in a 2.75 -mile parade for St. Patrick's Day.
Performances! - Two Friday nights, two Saturday afternoons, and two Saturday nights, with closing day involving spending the afternoon as Queen Gertrude and the night as Horatio, and getting home at midnight to find - 
Article - a request for an article for the Company of Fifers and Drummers magazine about the recording of the CD.

And then? Spring break ended, I returned to college, and the rest of my schedule continued or resumed. Theater ended with a cast party and is permanently done for me.

What have I learned?

• There's no better cure for fifty hours of "Hamlet" and prep for opening night than stacked pancakes and ten hours of Veggietales with a friend you can just chill with (in this case, a youth groupie who also participated in "Hamlet" and whose family and mine have practically adopted each other).
• After too much time in hoopskirts, doublets, waistcoats, high stockings, tricorns and other strange hats and garments, "civvies" are the best things ever. Excepting pajamas. PJs rock.
• You can study a work of literature from the inside for six months and still be able to not make up your mind as to who's the "good guy." You just develop prejudices that belong to your characters instead of yourself.
• Painful irony means coming down sick in the middle of a college biology class while discussing digestion.
• Thrones are nice, but perching yourself regally on the six-inch edge of yours because of the shape of your skirt is far less comfortable than sprawling in a folding chair in jeans.
• Hair nets are wonderful and convenient when you know how to use them. (If you have long hair, obviously.)
• The more politically impotent you have, the less likely you are to be assassinated or targeted.
• Sheet music - good. Sheet music that means everyone needs to relearn a basic song or ten - bad.
• The faster you get used to having five people "help" you change (assuming you're wearing shorts and a T underneath) the more likely you are to get to your entrance on time.
• If just one drummer can't play the song, it'll take a dozen takes before they finally boot out the offender and record the song correctly.

If the person you're holding is supposed to be "dead," be extra gentle because they're helpless and you're responsible for them until the pall-bearers turn up. And always, always, ALWAYS wait for all the lights to be down before coming back to life and leaving the stage for curtain call.