from the bottom of my broken foot

we area half an hour into learning the second half of the ladies' entrance dance for Love's Labors Lost. i have been on cloud nine for weeks, having gone through a Shakespeare intensive and been cast in this production by Shakespeare Santa Monica, whose company members produced Pericles Redux at the Kirk Douglas earlier this year, quite possibly the greatest theatrical endeavor i have seen in the last 7 years. i am thrilled to be able to cross Rosaline off my "Shakespearean Dream Roles" list and am pretty psyched at how quickly i'm picking up all the movement pieces. we pair off to come up with a couple of new 8 counts, and i immediately run to Anna, who is a former ballerina, convinced we can come up with something stupid awesome and show everyone up. i was half right.

anna executed a beautiful chanee turn into a stag leap. when anna does it (and when i do it in my mind), a stag leap looks like this:


looks pretty advanced, right? yeah.

i made an offhanded joke about my lack of skill, but attempted it anyway from a standing position, and while it was more like a fawn-walking-for-the-first-time-jump as opposed to a stag leap, it was ok enough for us agree to add it in and put it in the combination. so we chianeed accross the floor into the leap, and upon my landing, there was a roll onto the outside of my right foot. and then...i heard a pop.

i have never broken a bone before, and i am sure as i sit on he rehearsal studio floor this is still the case. i'm not in a lot of pain, but i certainly can't put any weight on it. so i sit for awhile, thinking that maybe it will go away, right? a few cast members come up to me, and the dancers, i notice, all have the same expression on their faces. a kind of, "i don't want to worry you, but..." kind of thing. so i start calling my boyfriend, getting a little panicked. unfortunately for me, it's 10:30am and he won't be awake for another 2 hours. so after an hour of phone calls, i'm able to secure a ride home. by this point, my foot looks like this:

now i'm a little freaked out. even more so when the free clinic i've hobbled into is no longer taking walk-ins that day. so i have little choice but to go home and wait until the next day to try to get an appointment somewhere. after a trip to rite-aid, the boyfriend begins me on the ice bath treatment. having a lot of experience in sports related injuries, he brings me a tub of ice water and tells me to stick my foot in it. FOR 10 MINUTES. if this is something you haven't done, just try sticking your finger in a glass of ice water and leave it in as long as you can. now multiply that awful fucking pain by the number of minutes you THOUGHT you were going o be able to handle. it's awful. but what is worse, is that we must do it 3 or 4 times before wrapping my foot in an ace bandage and keeping it elevated to drain the blood and reduce the swelling. i sleep on the couch with my foot up on a stack of pillows. fuck this.

next day, after another failed clinic adventure, the boyfriend makes an appointment for an x-ray. and to spare you the hobbling details, this is what they give me:

broken. very, very broken. a complex fracture of the 5th metatarsal to be exact. complex because the bone is so displaced, that it has likely torn soft tissue in the foot. what does this mean? it means, friends, that i will likely have to undergo surgery to reset the bone, and will be in a cast for upwards of two months. i will be unable to work (i was waiting tables and in a theatrical performance on weekends that requires stairs and a heavy bag). so it looks like i'll be getting to those regular blog posts after all!

and hey, i did want a change of pace. i didn't anticipate the pace would slow to immobile, but hey. maybe i should have been more specific.

and who knows? i may have the greatest two months of my life. i've decided that my movie watching will have a crippled theme: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Rear Window, An Affair to Remember, Misery, My Left Foot...i will draw inspiration from my hobbled people.



so stay tuned, as who the hell knows what will come out of this. and here's the view from here.