Two days to go until we open.

Trades Hall is awesome.

And people! People are so lovely.

Having been locked in a room writing for six months, coming across actual human beings is always a shock. Coming across people who are clever or generous or kind or good at cards or funny walks or whistling... well, that's just a reminder of why you write in the first place: because observing things like that is delicious.

Here is a random selection of just some of the mind blowingly useful people who helped with bump-in today:

1. We have a magic fairy called Hannah who turns up and solves all of our problems. I don't know what you guys have got - probably, you know, iPods and stuff. But we've got Hannah. She seriously has a Mary Poppins bag and makes stuff out of thin air when you're not looking.

2. Paul and Johnboy, who made the whole place run for us while we ran about saying things like "Take it from the top guys" and getting downstage and upstage mixed up. Which is prompt, by the way? Which is off-promt? I never know.

3. Stew and Rits, who suddenly take on different roles as soon as we get into the theatre. Like, you know, running the place (same as usual) but differently.

4. These guys:

The cast (Megan, played by Julia Harari, Sam, played by Miriam Glaser, and Robin, played by Chris Buchanan). 

Hands up if you did this today:

- Awoke from approximately six minutes' sleep after night of thinking too much about everything.

- Up at 7.15 to iron shirt for big day ahead.

- Accidentally iron self.

- 8.30am meeting with Rita in which attempt to soothe ironed section of arm goes awry when cool silver sugar bowl in cafe (used for cooling down arm) gets warm and has to be rotated to put new cool silver part on burn, at which point sugar spills all over table. Apologies to the lovely Tim and Lilly in Dr Java.

- 9.30am meeting about kids' TV idea.

- Rush home to sleep. Completely fail to even lie down.

- Receive eight billion phone calls and emails. Deal with them. (Check The Age tomorrow for giveaways to our show, by the way!)

- Rush to my old school to do a talk about "having a career in the arts". Hilarious.

- Did I mention it's about 60 degrees in the shade at this point and my old school is on the other side of Punt Road?

- Sprint to the car in order to make it back to rehearsals at 5pm.

- Rehearse until 8pm.

- Walk down to dinner and a meeting. Put up a poster in Brunswick Street. Get attacked by crazy dude ripping poster down and screaming at us. Terrifying. Obviously he doesn't know much posters cost.

- Come home. Work. Sleep. See you tomorrow.

I ate lunch in the car. Oh yeah.

Career in the arts.

You betcha.

HOW EXCITING!

Our show, Greatness Thrust Upon Them, opens next week at Trades Hall, as part of the Comedy At Trades programme in the comedy festival. There are so many things to be done but the process of staging a theatre show is so much more fun than the process of writing one, for the following reasons:

1. Producing a play involves more than one person sitting alone in a room feeling overcome and wishing she was outside in the sunshine splashing about in a swimming pool.

2. Producing a play does not get thrown completely off course by websites such as lolcats or youtube or google searches such as "budgie sings Justin Timberlake" or "mime of Natalie Imbruglia song". Searching these things while attempting to write is, however, most dangerous and I advise against it.

3. Producing a play, if you know what you're doing, means lovely/hilarious/interesting people get to spend more time together rehearsing and producing and organising and eating jellybeans which are technically supposed to be props. 

4. One doesn't spend most of the time in one's pyjamas. This is normally a good thing, but rehearsals require an upgrade to tracksuit pants (fake velvet with a fake drawstring) which makes the transition to opening night frock less shocking than it would be if the process was PJs to frock. A situation with which I would not cope.

By the way, some of you people are lovely. Thanks for your notes and your generous support and I can't wait to see you next week. Hopefully in my fake velvet trackies. Awesome.  

We had our launch last night of our new show, Greatness Thrust Upon Them. It was drinks, pizza, conversations, dancing, and there were a couple of silent auctions to support the carbon neutralising and public liability expenses (which are always ludicrous).

I am not yet able to report on the event officially, due to the fact that I am still in bed, and I presume the rest of Standing There Productions is still in bed too.

But my God it's a wonderful thing to be in a room full of friends and supporters who always come to our shows but who we never get to chat to. Our friend Michael Roper hosted the event (although as he said, it was really the people who turned up who hosted it) and he was charming and funny and thoughtful - although his reference to my doing something nefarious with a small boy's underpants on the school bus was completely uncalled-for and probably libelous.

So thank you to Michael for running the show. Thank you to Trades Hall for being wonderful, as usual. Thank you to Maie and Rose and Lucia and Dee and Rick Thorn who all pretty much deserve a permanent thank you from Standing There Productions for doing everything for us, always. Thank you to those who bid in the auction, thank you to the Howletts, thank you Fahey, Kathy and Katie. Thank you to those of you who had a chat to us, who came for a drink, who skipped from one event to another.

And lastly, because this is "my" diary, I'd like to thank Rita and Stew. Stew is always so busy running around thinking of things we haven't thought of that he sometimes (like last night) misses out on being front and centre. He shouldn't. Thanks Stew. Rita, meanwhile, is always planning, organising, convincing people it would be a great idea to do something for nothing, and then turning up looking gorgeous and being charming and never forgetting anything. Standing There Productions is all three of us together, but lately I've been cutting corners (due to the script and the auditions) so it really does make me grateful for the people who actually do all the hard work so I can stand on stage looking like I thought of it myself.

Yay for all of you.

I'm going to get a burger the size of my head.

So I've been missing.

Here's why:

1. We have a cast for Greatness Thrust Upon Them. We finished auditions and we had long and agonising conversations in Vietnamese restaurants and pubs and we now have a cast. Chris Buchanan is Robin - the Prime Minister's Press Secretary, Miriam Glaser is Sam - who runs the United Nations Environment Conference, and Julia Harari is Megan - who works for Sam and eats jellybeans.

2. The publicity for the show has been keeping the rest of us busy - tomorrow night we have a show launch - an evening of drinks at Trades Hall bar from 7pm. Here are the deets, writ large because I don't know how to make the image smaller:

3. More publicity, including a photograph of me looking about twelve and sporting a bowly haircut I know I will live to regret: here.

4. More publicity, in the form of a photograph for the local newspaper in my home town of Greensborough will not be reproduced here due to the fact that I was photographed jump-staring a tree (with jumper leads - not kidding), hanging upside down from a branch, and testing our public liability insurance (and my own dignity) by falling out of the tree mid photograph. The reason for this is because our show is in the comedy festival and therefore I have to be whacky. I am not, nor have I ever been, whacky.

5. Our website has had a bit of a facelift. It was done by SuperPaul, who is our Website Guy and who we all want to marry every now and then for his design expertise, his speed, and his generous dedication of time and effort to make us look much cooler than we really are (I speak for those of us falling out of trees).

6. Tickets for our show, Greatness Thrust Upon Them, in the comedy festival, are now ACTUALLY ON SALE ALREADY AND PEOPLE HAVE STARTED BUYING THEM. Yikes. Go here.

7. Did I mention I finished the script?

8. I went on a two day trip to regional Victoria (Warrnambool) for my "other job" earlier this week. Just when I was starting to think the entire world was about Standing There Productions' new show (honestly, have you READ the paper? Environment this, environment that. They're all talking about us)... it was lovely to go somewhere with a beach and to find out about things happening in local communities.

That's it from me. Those are my excuses for my absence. Here's hoping it was shortlived. See you at the launch!

Hi everyone,

This is my last post for the year. Standing There Productions has had a fantastic 2007 - and 2008 is looking to be even more action-packed. The kids' TV show development, our comedy festival show, Greatness Thrust Upon Them, and our artists' residency in August at Bundanon... not to mention the things we haven't come across yet, the coffees we haven't drunk, and the people I haven't told off yet in the State Library.

Since we won't be back until January, here's something to be going on with. It's a rare treat - a bit of a role change - it's video we shot earlier in the year that's written and performed by Rita Walsh. Shot by Stewart Thorn and directed by me (pick who got the easy job) it's based on the early careers of Rita and myself. It's called The Receptionist.

Enjoy. Have a great break and see you in the new year. Thanks for playing!

By way of explaining my much lamented departure from these pages (thanks for all the mail. My secretary will endeavour to address each of you individually) here are some dot points:

1. It's official: we are putting together a show for the 2008 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. The show is called Greatness Thrust Upon Them and it will be performed in the utterly gorgeous Trades Hall precinct, in the Old Council Chambers. Every time I go to the Old Council Chambers I feel the history of the room creaking all around me. Our show is about history. Arguably all shows are about history, apart from a show I saw in second year university in a carpark, which appeared to be about a woman living on a futuristic planet with a bad case of hives and nothing but a feather boa and an eggbeater with which to pass away the hours. And they were long hours. But I digress.

2. I've been locked away writing our kids' TV episode draft with our script editor, Doug McLeod. It has been a priceless experience and I now have separation anxiety and no idea how I'm going to ever write anything including a shopping list or a birthday card without Doug's help ever again. *Hyperventillates into a paper bag*.

3. Obviously the script for our comedy festival show is some way off completion but we had to submit our image and our show description for the comedy festival guide this week. Submitting an image when you don't have a cast, and a summary of a show you haven't finished writing is an interesting exercise in issue-avoidance. Saying nothing while purporting to say something extremely interesting is a fine art reserved in normal circumstances for print journalism and teenagers.

4. Look, I have skills too. I can do stuff. Just because everyone else knows how to use photoshop to the maximum degree of hilarity doesn't mean I don't throw a mean frisbee or make an excellent cup of tea. Just because everyone else spends their spare time replacing Britney's head with Graham's from the accounts department doesn't mean I've been wasting my time. Just because it took me an entire day of googling things like "rasterise" and calling Stew in Thailand to find out what a dpi was and how come 100mm kept reverting to 98.2mm before I could do a simple thing like colour in the tie on a famous photo DOES NOT MEAN I AM A STUPID PERSON. It does, however, mean that Stew was boarding a boat in Thailand while saying "go to the dropdown menu". It also means that our image was handed in just in the nick of time.

5. I spent two days last week in Warrnambool with my law-talking-job, including a particularly enjoyable evening in my hotel room drinking vile cups of tea with UHT millk and putting the finishing touches on the episode draft until midnight. Still, it was an interesting trip. The Law Foundation is running an educational and community programme in rural areas (hence my previous trip to Mildura) so it's interesting work and I wouldn't mind living by the sea, if it somehow was made compulsory.

So those are my dot points to excuse my absence. Not really much point making them dot points if the only reason they are dot points is because they are preceded by numbers, but shoosh, I tried. I am writing this from my office (the library) and I am flanked on one side by a ball of phlegm surrounded by a sniffing human being and on the other side by a quite crazy lady singing and laughing and occasionally talking in tongues.

It is nice to be home.