Cue Friday.  Enter Malia stage right, back in Santa Barbara–in the place and with the people who will always have and hold a big piece of her heart.

Picking up at the scene of graduation, she gazes into the eyes of loved ones she has not seen in a year.  She beholds their dear face so close to her own and senses within them an extraordinary amount of growth.  She can’t fully decipher all of the details, and yet she hears and understands perfectly the stutter of their hearts.  How is that?  Well, because hers is stuttering too and yearning to know everything about the other and to be known in the same.  Thus as all words fall, fail, and fade into the background of inadequacy, Malia and the other actors spend their short time together in a long embrace, their friendship reaffirmed once again.

And so concludes the scene as all exit into their separate wings and prepare for the next, Malia to act again with some, some more than others.  And though at times she wishes she could do every scene with every actor, she knows that that’s not possible and henceforth takes comfort in the fact that in the end, after the Director takes the stage, there’s going to be a humongous cast party to follow.

It’s going to be one heaven of a party, and she can’t wait.