I arrived home late last night, began to pull the miscellaneous colored threads off my jeans and proceeded along with my nighttime routine, knowing sleep itself was a long way off. Next to my reflection in the mirror, a sticky note glared back at me, “Write!” Just over a month has gone by and I admittedly have already failed my one and only New Year’s resolution: Write a least 15 personal pages a week.

Go ahead and add me to that 80% who renounce their resolutions within the first month of the year, for it has been roughly a week since I have even opened my journal. Yet, sure enough, that disapproving yellow paper sent me back to do what I foresakenly thought I had no time or will to: write. With little creativity in my reflection, my prose quickly turned into an overwhelming to-do-list, which caused an even greater frustration, resulting in my throwing down my pen, thinking, “ I have no time to write. This aspiration is impossible!”

The word stopped me. I whisked the pen back up from my hamper of unfolded laundry and wrote down the phrase that has been frequently quoted amongst the techies when building the set for the upcoming musical. “Great takes a day; impossible takes a week,” and so I wrote.

It is hard to believe it was just a month ago I returned to back to Thacher after a restful winter vacation. Like many others in the Thacher community, the rest wore off quickly for me and before I knew it, I was absorbed back into the busy Thacher lifestyle. Yet among the typical activities here at Thacher, the upcoming musical seemed to taunt me with even greater challenges than I anticipated. The reality of all this show would entail began to set in and I questioned how we would pull it off in such a limited amount of time.

Yet here I am, five weeks later and while the show appears to be in no shape to open, I cannot help but relish in what has already been accomplished. Songs have turned into music, movement has morphed into choreography, actors have created characters, fabric has been fashioned into costumes, and scraps of wood have evolved into staircases and bars. While it is still difficult to believe there is a show that admits all these separate entities, it is also hard to believe that all these pieces cannot make a whole. Please do not let my slight optimism fool you, for it has yet to cure the anxious pit in my stomach or put my sleepless nights to rest.  Yet, if it true what the techies say, “Impossible takes only a week,” then I suppose we have just enough time. So put on your paint masks, start memorizing those lines, and build those light cues, because it may be possible that we have just enough time to do the impossible.

So see you in a week, for opening night!