Where have all the Russians gone?

The Russians left us on Thursday so we are down 7 skaters!!!!! Their visas expired and the company is struggling right now with replacing them with new visas. We have had scares of this happening in the past but this time it’s the real deal. It makes me mad because it seems like they put it off until the last minute and they should have not let this happen but I guess it is a lot harder dealing with Russia and work permits. We have no idea how long they will be gone; I am hoping Spain will give them a permit and they can meet us in Bilbao in about a week.

So as you can guess the shows have been crazy. Everyone is covering all the numbers the Russians are in. With them gone we were also left with no Bob (Mr. Incredible) because the principal as well as the 2 understudies are all Russian and this is a HUGE problem considering he is a main character! Last year they had another understudy Adam who now skates on High School Musical as a principal. The company shipped him over to us to help out in this chaotic situation.

The extra things I am doing are opening as Mom and Irina’s wench in the Pirate number. I had done a different spot in the Pirate number before but opening night was slightly a hot mess in this spot! At one point I overshot meeting Mark to do our polka dance and ended up in the middle of a circle and was trying to bust through people to get to my spot which I’m sure looking phenomenal. Then near the end we do this huge kick line and then break off skate in a circle doing split jumps. Somehow during the kick line, Joelle’s pants got caught on my skirt so instead of doing our split jumps we had no choice but to skate around the circle, together, just waving; it was pretty funny! We finally got unattached and were able to finish the number.