Our comedy festival show opens tomorrow night.

I have always thought there should be a word for "not enough time but heaps too much time". Sometimes I feel like that when I see someone I haven't seen in a while. It has been ages since I saw them and heaps has happened but conversely it feels like no time has passed at all. That's what waiting for a show or a deadline to arrive feels like. Heaps to do, so little time, but so long away that you can't imagine it happening.

Maybe there is a word for that. Maybe the word is EEEEEK!

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.  

Man I love Amy Sedaris.

Thanks to Fahey for directing me the the new Vanity Fair edition about women in comedy. Check out this video.

Amy's the one with the backup plan, pregnant and chugging on a ciggie.

Sometimes when you're rehearsing, you work over something so much that you find yourself analysing how an actor says the word "the". You find yourself thinking about the possible meanings behind things. You think, wow, maybe this bit connects to that other bit and what's really going on here is a deeper reference to a far more important (yet more subtle) point in relation to the symbolism of this metaphor over here.

You know what's particularly interesting about this process in our rehearsals at the moment?

I wrote the play.

I'm finding double meanings in things I wrote myself. I'm seeing interesting links between things that weren't there when I was writing it.

It makes me think that all the kids in my English class were right when we insisted to our teacher that Sylvia Plath "really was writing about mushrooms". Nothing more to it, we reckoned. Not death, not lost love, not complex relationships. Mushrooms.

Discuss.

I am in the Diamond Valley Leader.

That's my home town.

In the photograph, I am jump-starting a gum tree, with jumper leads and (these are the photographer's words) "crazy eyes".

If you are a Diamond Valley resident who maybe went to school with me or something, please understand that I was not in a serious accident impeding my intellectual or physical abilities, but merely am a victim of the media machine.

While we're at it, why is it that if you're a woman you're instructed by press photographers to "stop looking pretty - we want to see whacky. You're a comedian".

Why can't I be pretty too?