Seasons of Love

I was fine until I started to call yesterday's blog "How Do You Measure A Week?"  In an instant, I was transported back to where we always were at this time of the year at One Life to Live--frantically editing what we called The Christmas Reel, a video that, over the years, went from being a five-minute highlight reel to being a half-hour series of 8-10 separate edited pieces.

While one of my fellow editors was expert at the annual fancy montage of all the great show material from the year, I gravitated more toward the warm, fuzzy, "make you cry" montage of all the people who worked there.  In the year before our last, it was with the song "Seasons of Love" from the show Rent, which so incredibly captured for me the feeling of hundreds of people making contributions large and small all year, both to the production and to their fellow production team members.  We shot an electrician drinking coffee for "and cups of coffee," we shot happy people and tired people for "in laughter, in strife," and we remembered our beloved stunt coordinator Danny Aiello, III, who had died that year.

Hard as it was each December to get the Christmas Reel done while in the midst of heavy production for the Christmas and New Year's shows, we dove in--after all, the reel ended up being a wonderful way to see how much we had done together over the year, and how much our collaboration had accomplished.  By the time we took our Christmas "hiatus," we were generally exhausted, but almost without fail, I left for the break knowing that I had given a gift to my production co-workers, and to myself (we watched the reel together at a holiday party, and we all could receive DVD copies of it).  Not only did people get to see themselves on screen, we all got a reminder of how lucky we were to be part of a truly excellent team.

In the midst of the insanity each year, I would never have imagined I'd be saying this, but I miss the Christmas Reel.