I was determined to pace myself. Which, for a person used to springing out of the gate at 5am, is no easy feat. It started well--staying in bed until close to 8, sleeping off the night of work that ended well past midnight. I seemed to be "pacing myself" as my version of "cleaning up" was throwing away about three things an hour. I assumed I was "pacing myself" as I stayed inside with my kids, rather than running all over to do errands or grab some fresh air (an oxymoron anyway in New York City August). Yet, as midnight (at work again) approached, I became painfully aware that my version of "pacing myself" would have to change. That a sufficient version of "pacing myself" would require not just doing things slowly, but slowly adding some sleep along the way.
When I was a Booth PA at One Life to Live, I used to say that the timing of scenes (and we Booth PAs lived and died by our timings) could vary widely, based on things as simple as what the actors had eaten for lunch. We might try to predict the pace of a scene--emergency scenes going quickly, emotional ones going slowly--and we were expected to, but in the end, we could really only record what the pace actually was, and possibly take the heat for estimating incorrectly.
My version of guessing at pace is clearly not so different these days. I can only estimate what will be a reasonable pace for my set of scenes. My pace, and how it fits the show of our lives, will change, just like the actors' pace way back when, depending on what I've eaten and what I need to do, whether in my work life or in my personal life. For, you see, life, like soap opera, doesn't always run according to the stopwatch. So we'd better keep pacing ourselves, so that we make it to the next cliffhanger.
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