And so, after two(ish) weeks of rehearsal, we came to performance day, and it was awesome.

Our final “normal” rehearsal had been Wednesday night, in which the Grand Finale was choreographed – to my singing the piece, because the dancers needed a mirror to do the actual choreographing, which was only available in the dance studio, which didn’t have a piano in it. Thus I spent this rehearsal trying to sing a three-part harmony with myself, which probably would’ve gone a  lot better had I actually been schizophrenic.

Thursday morning the cute little upright that was available to me was tuned, and I arrived at one o’clock (after a major panic attack about whether or not I had left my phone in the train; subsequent to some running around and spilling an undeniably tragic amount of réally góod coffee I found that I had not – never underestimate the depths of a woman’s purse) to start running through.

Absolutely no hardship – several ladies had already been labouring in the kitchen for hours, and the smell of what I found out later was veal ragu was absolutely divine. My tragically spilled coffee was replaced, and about an hour later first Thami, then Pallas and finally Flo arrived, cueing the start of the General Rehearsal, with which we finished at 17:30; half an hour before performance.

Makeup was slathered on, tutus were pinned closed (which is actually a lót harder than you’d expect), dresses were zipped up, in one case diamond-studded eyelashes were applied (I mention no names) and we were off!

The audience, being of the 65+ persuasion, was a little hard to capture – for me at least; all Flo had to do, for instance, was pitter-patter in on her beautiful point shoes and everybody was staring – but when I caught on that telling them something about the pieces they were going to listen to helped it really took off.

We finished, roughly thirty minutes of dance, forty minutes of solo piano and three superb courses (the veal ragu tasted as good as it smelled, I’m told) later, around nine o’clock.

I have also acquired a new skill. When I was over for dinner at Thami’s a few weeks ago, I spotted a seriously cool fedora hat – one he never wore, because apparently it is too small for him – which I rather unceremoniously nicked (not that he seems to mind much, but still). For the grand finale, I wore it - and I have been taught the Michael Jackson move both for taking it off and putting it back on. I am quite ridiculously proud of this, actually.

So, in two words – awesome performance. And there’s more coming, too!