If All The World's Indeed A Stage, Where Are The Dressing Rooms?

Due to the absolutely startling response that has rocketed forth due to the reaction towards my blogging for yet another year due to my not having enough to do apparently aside from using the word “due” due to my severely limited vocabulary, I have decided to respond to your responses and indulge this wonderful audience with tales of my past performances in various theatrical productions.  Oh no, thank you!  And, as always, you’re welcome!

 

Yes, it is true that I have trodden upon those stage boards on many occasions.  While my memory is at best foggy and at worst completely full of fabrication, I can definitely remember the reason why I was thrust upon the stage while still in kindergarten: compulsory duty.  You see, my initial Lutheran grade school didn’t pride itself in sports.  Frankly, I didn’t even know the gym was used for anything other than as place to run around when it wasn’t snowing/raining/freezing/earthquaking.  Apparently there was indeed a basketball team!  Heaven knows when they actually played as I don’t even remember there being basketballs in the building.  Perhaps someone brought one from home on the odd occasion to have something to dribble with whilst jogging up and down the court.

So with the lack of a sport-based school initiative, the principal and his wife, who also taught there, decided that they would have musicals instead.  And these would be no ordinary musicals!  No sir!  Every single child in the grade school would have to be involved, whether they wanted to be there or not.  As you might imagine, this led to some of the most enormous badly tuned choruses ever assembled under one roof.  Worse yet, we all had to audition for a mandatory event.  The logic behind this escapes me, but perhaps the audition process would weed out children that were so incredibly off-key, they would be told to mime along in order to save the audience.

I remember dutifully going from my kindergarten learning wonderland and having to go up the stairs to where the intimidating 7^th and 8^th graders shared a harsh classroom.  The principal had us sing while he accompanied us with the piano in the back of the room while the other older kids tried not to noticeably laugh.  Apparently I had a passable voice, so I guess that I was checked off the “for God’s sake do not let this one sing!” list for all time while a student there.

 

Going over old family albums, I discovered a number of costumes and make-up worn for shows that I for the most part have had blocked from my memory.  There’s one of me dressed up as a fireman with a cardboard axe, which no doubt gave Ron Howard the inspiration to direct Backdraft several years later.  There’s one of me dressed up as some sort of early 20^th century immigrant waif in some chorus line.  I was in the front row and knew exactly what dance steps and arm motions to make.  I know this because every single picture my mom took has me looking stage right to the rest of the kids in the line and following their every move.  I don’t think I ever saw an audience that whole show.  My 1^st grade brain probably thought that I was being very surreptitious and clever at the time.  Instead there’s a wealth of pictures that my children can now look at and ask “Daddy, what’s wrong with your head?”

 

There was another show that involved some sort of Mississippi River riverboat hijinks that I also don’t remember.  I was dressed up like some kid that would follow Chaplin’s tramp around, if Chaplin’s tramp hung around in Louisiana wharves with children that couldn’t act out of a wet paper bag that had holes cut in it already that is.  However, this show was different as I had an actual line of dialogue!  An actual line for realsies!  The scene had me handing a pair of glasses to a riverboat captain that ran into our raft.  I would then say, “Looks like you need these, Mr. Steamboat Pilot!” and the rest of the Lost Boys wannabes in our group would cackle with laughter.  Why this river rat of a child that looks like he couldn’t find a crust of bread to save his life would all of a sudden whip out a pair of glasses from the thinnest of air to make this joke for his crew of pseudo-toughs is a question that I find unanswerable even today. 

 
Even more unanswerable is the fact that for this show many of the extras were made up in blackface to represent black laborers on the river.  My younger brother was one of these unfortunate children.  The insensitivity is striking for a show that was only about 30 years ago, but if there’s one Lutheran Caucasian child on the planet that would never in several hundred million years pass for a child of color, it would be my brother.  Even to this day, the most he has ever delved into that culture is his quest to find Sam and Dave albums on vinyl.

Then came the experience of being in the play Make a Joyful Noise! which was some sort of Christian-themed kids’ adventure with a robot named Colby that teaches kids to love Jesus.  If that doesn’t sound like a great time, you’re very perceptive.  This time the school was faced with a dilemma as there weren’t many crowd scenes to force dozens of children to sing along with.  So a solution was presented: two different casts would be assembled and they would have two different show times in order to accommodate everybody.  Aha!  And if we all cared just a smidgen more, we would have had some sort of competition between the casts, but as we didn’t, our performances weren’t as electric as they could have been. 

 

All I remember about my character was that he was supposed to be short and couldn’t reach something.  This was a major plot point that led into yet another song about how we’re all different but the same in the eyes of God or something else that is more accurate than the earlier part of this sentence.  Now in the other cast, the boy that played that character was indeed short, so this wasn’t a problem.  However even at that age, I wasn’t short and to make matters worse, the kid that was cast to be able to reach the whatzit that I couldn’t reach in the story was in actuality shorter than me.  This meant that an audience would see that not only wasn’t I convincingly short, but that apparently I was also dumber than a bag of cheaply made hammers.  How could I pull off a role that even Olivier would have walked away from in disgust?  I certainly hoped my years of mandatory chorusing that I had under my belt would now lead me to the same well that great actors manage to pull buckets of great performances out of in order to play this somehow.  In the end it didn’t matter as the spectators for these things generally are happy parents that will be glowing in their every review of the show regardless of whether or not I could portray some whiny shrimp that was led to the Christ by an automaton on the stage.

Now dear reader, as I have to prepare myself to fictionalize the other years of my lollygagging in front of patient audiences, I shall leave you for now.  Part 2 will follow momentarily at some procrastinated point.  Well, whenever I fill out the pages of my blank diaries from 1989 onwards, I’ll have a better grasp of my fictional backstory.  But rest assured, the theater world sobs with mournful regret over not having me around even longer.  Sure I can see the brave smiles and hear the shouts of “Good riddance!” but I know they are merely acting to hide their true feelings.