A day in my lawful life...

Sunday, March 12, 2006

All these things we've done...

It's over. Notts Malaysian Night 2006. Lessons learnt. Weeks of preparation (not to mention I've got my life back!) and in an evening it's done. I've really forgotten how it feels. Back in Stella Maris, it used to be the norm each time there was a concert... The hecticness in preparing for weeks and on the day itself, you go out and do your thing.. and it's over. Our school had plenty of concerts in a year...(CNY/Raya concert, Merdeka concert, Feast Day, etc..) it seems like they find every excuse to have one... I miss our 4/5S Stella girls. They're a pretty unique bunch.. (not the bunch you wanna get into an argument)They're always up to the challenge. Ahhh.. getting all nostalgic here.

Well.. back to Notts Malaysian Night.. Lots of things didn't really go to plan but the important was we improvised and we pulled it off. A round of thank yous to everyone. Thank you to the Committee.. you guys did GREAT! Right from security to stage.. we did it, guys! Food was good and our guest really had a blast. Our actors were brilliant and spontaneous on stage and we made Notts Malaysian Night history with an audience of 430+! Reviews were great!

Basically, Malaysian Night started with a mocktail party. A first! Usually, it's a sit-down dinner kinda thing. So it's a mocktail party and people are meant to walk around and help themselves to food with performances going on. We started on time.. but people were shy to touch the food! Lol. Among the food we had were curry puffs, fried popiah, fried wantan (Credit goes to my coursemate, Catlynn for the recipe!), satay, seri muka, sago pudding, turkish delight and much more..! After a while, we had slight problems keeping up the food well-stocked.. people ate faster than we could refill! Some of the service points were a bit too far from our kitchen.. Nevertheless, it was a sucess. People were generally happy.

Next on the lineup was the actual play. We started off with some performances. We had a chinese fan dance, a rather modern malay dance, and some singing performances to get the audience warmed up. My bro and his housemate, Jasmine were emceeing. They did a good job.. My bro being pretty lame but still it worked.. lame humour tends to run in our family it seems. Lol. They did a great job nevertheless. I had to make a speech.. which I feel I could have prepared better. Lights glaring into your eyes and having 430 forced to listen to you can be pretty intimidating. Ah, well..

The play was unique. We constructed sets.. like a tv show set. Take a look.

We did it for the "OOmph"! Factor and basically coz, after all we were in a studio after all! We even played this up abit by acting as if we were actually tapping the play in front of a life audience. (Regine's idea!) The emcess took on the role of stage directors.. one(my bro) being an Ah Beng film director and Jasmine being the intelligent assistant. We had a directors umm.. 'gate', the black and white thingt.. and even played around with the 'Applause' cue cards!

The play was on P. Ramlee's classic film, Tiga Abdul. Those is 4/5s would remember Pn. Joyce letting us watch it. We adapted it to stage.. this was done by Akmal, our script-writer.
Some things weren't in the script like one of our actor's mustache falling off and our narrator's cloak sleeve knocking the mike black cushion part off.. but there were spontaneous and made the audience laugh more instead. The actors did great. In all the years, Nottingham Malaysian Night's strenght has always been in our play. This year has been no different.

Mm...From all the stress i've gotten the past weeks (evident with the shorter lifespan and exponential increase in growth of white hair) , among the lessons learnt I were:
1) Money makes the world go around.. working with a budget and a large event can be really tough...
2) Dealing with people.. this is always tough.. sometimes you just get people who cant work with each other.. some people will let you down in your darkest moments. Guess that's what friends are for. They walk in on you when others work out on you...
3) Assumptions - My dad always said this : Never assume! Always clarify. Mm.. how true.
4) Plan B/C - When you get plan B always make sure plan B works. And you should get Plan C.
5) Keep it simple - Sometimes, it's best to keep things simple and not try to cut corners or go for 'too good to be true' stuff...
6) Commitment - In life, you just meet people who will have different levels of commitment.. and no one person is the same.
7) Foresight and improvisation - Murphy's law. Things WILL go wrong. Improvise.
8) Patience - You can never have enough of this.. I was on the brink of insanity on the day before the event. There were times when I had two people asking me separate things and my phone would suddenly ring..

I probably write this for my own reference.. it's been a valuable experience.. I'll admit there were areas we could have improved but the past is the past.. Just gotta move on with this experience and make better, wiser decisions the next time.. mm.

Just this morning, we were back in the studio to clean up the area. At the end of it, both me and Aik Kuang just stood there. There was some music playing over the sound system.. and we just soaked it all in. It's over. A chapter has ended. We both admitted we felt abit sad. There's the accounts to be settled but at that moment it didn't matter. We did it. We pulled it off. Thanks, guys.

1 Comments:

At 6:40 AM, Blogger regine said...

hey u TOTALLY used ALL of my photos, including the gay one i took of u and prav!

don't blame the photographer, i just capture what's already there...

 

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