“Remoted” – Saturday One

I don’t even know what to call today. How do we count weekends in the stretch of Remote Days? Sheltered Days? Self-Quarantine Days? Remoted – Saturday One? Not sure how to label it. So confusing.

In an amazing development, the dogs slept until just before 7 am. Waking up without Moose’s shrill and nagging bark AND it was light outside, was confusing. Was I dreaming? Was I dead? Did a miracle occur?

This was the day that the dance troupe I’m in (Troupe Salaamati – Farsi word for “cheers”) and many other dance groups, were supposed to be performing at Bellies for Hope, a belly dance fundraiser for the American Cancer Society Relay for Life. Like every other event scheduled during this crazy time now overshadowed by COVID-19, it was cancelled.

When the event cancellation was posted a couple weeks ago, I stopped practicing our two numbers each day before and after work. All it took was the removal of the deadline for me to break the routine. I went through them today and they were ROUGH. Oy.

In a combination of thinking about Bellies for Hope and creating a video for our dance group Facebook group that might also work for a video project at work where team members are staying connected through video greetings, I decided to create a tiny choreography to the Mission Impossible theme music. The music choice was partly because I liked the idea of it (sometimes the world right now feels impossible), and largely because it’s only one minute long.

There were  many decisions and tasks involved. Sourcing music took a while. Creating choreography and choosing costuming, checking lighting, testing the cameras on the laptop and the phone (the phone won based on sound quality), and rigging props to hold the phone at the right height and angle all took forever. Rugs needed to be rolled back. The phone needed to be near the TV for the music, but positioned to avoid backlighting. Space was tight. There were many bad videos taken that maxed out the cell phone storage and forced the deletion of apps and files. Fussy costuming that had taken forever to assemble was ultimately rejected in favor of jeans.

When hunger finally won out and quitting time was finally declared, the result was a very rough little dance on video to share with my dance group. With all the production chores involved, it seemed the smallest amount of the time was spent on the actual dance. It took six hours. SIX HOURS for a still rough one minute product. It's a stunning example of a saying I learned in business school -- "Work expands to fill the time allotted." But it kept me occupied, right? And it's not like I had plans to be anywhere else.

What a learning experience.