nostalgia and some crying

Yesterday I performed with my school's original choral reading, a type of theatre arts piece that involves vocal effects (multiple people saying a line in unison, one person saying a line, rippling the lines, etc) and a bit of song/choreography to tell a story, at the IHSSA All-State Festival at Iowa State University.

performed in this auditorium, heyyy shawty
actually this is a replicate selfie of one taken from last year's festival:

****nostalgia****

IHSSA stands for Iowa High School Speech Association, an association that I basically am forever indebted to for giving me the opportunity to create beautiful pieces of art with my school and friends. To be brief in this explanation, nearly 500 schools and 40,000 students across Iowa compete in 12 different events (categories/styles like group improv, musical theatre, mime) at the district level, then state level, then at the All-State Festival, where only 20 groups in each of the 12 categories are still in the game. By that point you're mostly just psyched to be there, the competition aspect is nearly gone, though not entirely--a judge for each category picks one school that they liked the best to win the banner, a huge, old, silk banner embroidered with the logo and everything. I was in choral reading last year too, and we won the banner for that performance. I cried for an hour.

see ugly crying by long-haired freshman wearing all black hahaha

THE GREEN ONE WAS OURS

This year we didn't, we didn't for any of our events. For most schools in Iowa it's not saying much to have left the festival without a banner, though West High is definitely a big name in the Iowan large group theatre crowd, so it was a little disappointing to leave without another year of possessing one of those silken beauties.

costume and makeup

The whole day I kept thinking about how I'll never perform in another one of these things again, per this whole thing where I'm moving to Oregon this summer, and I kept making myself sad about that. I   cried a little right before we went on stage (ugh) but was mostly at peace about it. I spent the drive home talking to my friend in the dark about things like which cities we want to move to and our experience with coming to our school as the new kid.

I went to bed at like 11, probably the earliest in two months. There was an after-party, but idk that was an awkward thing for me because the host seemed to want me to be there but no one assisted in figuring out how to actually get me there, and I ended up just going home. Kind of lame of them to just to leave me without any way of getting to the thing they were all discussing, but that's sort of how high school goes. I had an overwhelming and happy day.