Prod Week
It’s the 5lb bag of Haribo Pink Grapefruit Gummi Candy that I remember most vividly after all these years. I’d ordered it on Amazon and brought it backstage into a dressing room, awkwardly buried under costumes and book bags, for us to snack on between staging rehearsals of our dances. Somewhat alarmingly, we finished the whole bag—even a 5lb bag of almost-pure-sugar comes to an end.
As a dancer and choreographer in my college dance group (MIT DanceTroupe, or “DT” as we called it), the end of every semester meant the culmination of all of our work in a final stretch of dress rehearsals and 5 raucous sold-out shows that we crammed all into one week. It was everything I loved about my dance group condensed into one surreal, exhausting, delirious week fueled by sleep-deprivation, loud music, final exam procrastination, and copious amounts of caffeine and sugar.
We lovingly called it Prod Week.
There was something about the collective intensity of packing a bunch of sweaty stressed-out overachievers into Kresge Little Theater well into the wee hours of the night (it felt like many of us basically lived there that week) that rather forcefully transformed me during Prod Week—the quiet, mild-mannered Engineering Student who to dances on the side got to become the sassy, confident Hip-Hop Dancer who studies engineering on the side.
The stage, the music, the lights, the change of scene, the energy I felt from my fellow DanceTroupers, even the smells (oh the smells) all added to the permission I felt to show up differently. More than permitted, I felt compelled. It was still sometimes awkward and uncomfortable, but it was overwhelmingly joyful and exuberant to step into the spotlight with my friends and shine. Not dancing like nobody is watching, but dancing like everyone is watching, and loving it.
And then it would end.
I always hated the morning after our last show—the adrenaline crash and subsequent withdrawal after a week of living in a magical alternate reality of excessive eye shadow, random hugs, loud music, and audience participation. The show was over, and we all had to blearily emerge from the theater to our Institute Gray™ dorm rooms and piles of deferred problem sets. More than anything, I hated trading my feather boa for a (mostly figurative) pocket protector and losing the version of me that came alive during Prod Week. I would have to wait an entire semester to be sassy and confident and playful again.
This past weekend I finished the last of a series of 5 intense in-person coaching training courses offered by the Co-Active Training Institute (CTI). Each course was three full days with a group of other like-minded coaches where we learned and practiced coaching skills with each other in a playful, vulnerable, deeply emotionally rich environment that we all created together. I loved it. I felt incredibly alive and energized. I felt seen and validated. I felt courageous in my skills as a coach and my worth as a human. I loved the version of me that came to life in those classes.
And then by 5PM on Sunday, it ended. And I cried. I grieved the end of a magical weekend and the end of a series of magical weekends. I grieved the “Coach Mason” who felt so alive.
By Monday evening, with a full day separating me from the immediacy of my sadness, I found a new awareness. What if what was alive during class carried on? What if the show never ended? What if all the world really were a stage? Do they still make those Pink Grapefruit gummies? What if all of those versions of me that I long to embrace never left at all? It’s actually easy for me to believe that there wouldn’t be very much point in spending all of the time and money in these coaching classes if I didn’t take the spark they ignited and bring it out into the world.
I hold that the world needs more spaces for emotionally vulnerable connection, more courage to offer our gifts to others, more random acts of sassiness, more un-self-conscious hugging, and a lot more feather boas.
Prod Week and my coaching classes always had to end. But now I realize that they were always a beginning to something too. If I love the version of me that felt so alive in those moments, how do I bring that version forward and out into the rest of my life? I’m realizing that I have a choice where I didn’t see one before: after I take my bow on the stage at Kresge Little Theater, do I step up and keep on dancing in the Big Theater of Life?
I’m gonna keep dancing.