Reality Check.

So Thursday night, I'm backstage at my show. I'm spacing a little-- two more quick-changes and I'm outta there, going home, pouring a glass of wine, and catching up on abc.com with "Pushing Daisies." (Which-- sidebar-- I know I shouldn't love for so many reasons, but I do. They're really pulling out all the stops here, which although yes, we've seen it all before, I still can't help but just adore. The cast is amazing, they've been able to sustain a seemingly unsustainable premise for four episodes now, and I really hope the WGA strike doesn't put it all on hold. But I digress).

So I'm prepping my next change, thinking nothing of anything, when all of a sudden we hear this horrifying sound coming from the back stairs -- as if a large weight was crashing and banging down them, hitting every single step until its final destination when it came to rest in one final, terrifying moan. Sure enough, I run over, dodging distraught actresses and freshmen techies, until I see my friend Cara, at the bottom of the stairs, in full Victorian period getup, eyes closed and moaning quietly in a tangled mess of petticoats.

Let me explain something about these stairs. The way the theater is constructed, the dressing rooms and costume shop are all upstairs, on the building's fourth floor. The theatre itself is on the second; we have a set of stairs that connects the backstage area to the fourth-floor dressing room area that scares the bejeezus out of everybody. They're old and steep, with carpeting to help muffle the noise (because they are old, they are creaky, and because they essentially are directly over the audience's head, the creaking really distracts from the performances-- thus, even the most cautious of actors still tend to avoid going up or down them during performances because they know just how noisy they can be). They're also steep motherfuckers-- essentially connecting the fourth floor to the second in one staircase, so people are cautious on them in part because of the noise, but in part because to fall down them would hurt. Badly. Kind of like what Cara discovered.

Turns out she's been feeling woozy the past several days as a side effect of her antibiotic, but because the girl's a trooper (very Long Island I-Could-Break-You-And-Quite-Possibly-Will), she powers through the show anyways. She doesn't actually remember what happened at the top of the stairs, though she does remember thinking mid-fall, and I quote, "Oh, shit...."; and she remembers waking up at the bottom and thinking "I have to go onstage now...."

Needless to say, seeing as how the girl just broke a 33-step fall with her nose, she didn't go onstage. Once she proved that she could stand and move on her own without her neck being broken, we got her out of costume and upstairs, where the rent-a-cop campus security chief and his medic were waiting; and about ten minutes later I'm holding her hand as the EMTs body-board her with a cervical collar onto a stretcher and put her in the back of an ambulance. (Neither did we stop the show, either, which was part of the reason why I was the one to get in the ambulance with her at all). We spent about four hours in the hospital getting her x-rayed and questions answered and poked and prodded, and-- get this-- here's what's up:

The corset and wig she was wearing probably saved her life. The corset kept her spine straight when she finally landed into the wall at the bottom of the steps, and the wig-- with her hair in pincurls on top, and with the extra cushioning and padding-- acted as a helmet to keep head injuries to a minimum. She had a contusion on her wrist (I didn't know what it meant-- basically a nasty bruise) and a headache like none other, and now 48 hours later, she's pretty banged up across her chest, torso, and upper arms, but other than that-- she's FINE.

What I'm to make of all of this, I really don't know. I honestly went home that night-- after getting her safe back to her dorm room, with her roommates and a Wendy's spicy chicken sandwich-- and emailed my parents, because I decided I didn't tell them I loved them enough. I'm not trying to get religious here now, since I have a lot of really unresolved issues in general, but I do believe that spiritually something happened that night that saved her life. By all accounts, a fall like that should have broken her neck; it's hard for me to imagine how quickly everybody's lives could have been changed. Every time I've gone down those stairs since I keep thinking how horrifying a fall would be, and how in the thirty years people have been saying "one of those days, someone's going to take a header," I can't believe someone actually did.

Moral of the story: Be careful what you're doing. Life can change quickly. If you love somebody, tell them, and if you are in danger of falling down thirty-three steps in the middle of a musical, I would recommend doing so in a corset and Victorian updo.