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

Due to the startling response that has rocketed forth due to the reaction towards my posts due to my not having enough to do aside from using the word “due” due to my severely limited vocabulary, I have decided to respond to your responses, indulging this wonderful audience with indulgences 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 the stage boards on many occasions.  While my memory is at best foggy and at worst completely full of fabrication, I can 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/threatening to shower us with Challenger debris, etc.)  Apparently, the school indeed had an actual basketball team!  Heaven knows when they played as I don’t even remember there being basketballs in the building.  Perhaps someone brought a ball from home on the odd occasion to have something to dribble with whilst intermittently jogging up and down the court.

Given the lack of a sport-based school initiative, the principal decided on staging musicals in the church basement instead.  And these would be no ordinary musicals!  No sir or madam or both or neither!  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 tryout process would weed out children that were so incredibly off-key, they would be told to mime along to save the audience’s eardrums.

I remember dutifully going from my kindergarten learning wonderland and venturing upstairs to where the intimidating 7^th and 8^th graders shared a harsh classroom.  The principal had us individually sing while he accompanied on the piano in the back of the room while the other older kids tried not to noticeably laugh.  Ostensibly, 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 photo albums, I discovered several 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.  Given that the other surrounding kids in the photo had other obvious uniformed occupations, I can only imagine that our version of The Lutheran Village People was such a hit that the actual Village People sued to stop us and had our minds erased to avoid copyright issues.

There’s another photo from a different production where I was dressed up as some sort of 19^th century immigrant waif in a chorus line.  I was in the front row, making the exact dance steps and arm motions.  I know this because every single picture my mom took has me looking stage right at the rest of the kids in the line and following their every move.  Come to think of it, 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 from that show that my children can now look at and ask “Daddy, what’s wrong with your head?”

There was another musical that involved riverboat hijinks on the Mississippi River 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 even if it had holes cut in it 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 suddenly 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. 

Then came the experience of being in the play Make a Joyful Noise! which was a Christian-themed kids’ adventure with a robot named Colby that teaches about how Jesus loves us all.  Now if that doesn’t sound a bit like the great Shakespearean dramas, you’re very perceptive.  This time the school was faced with a dilemma as there weren’t many crowd scenes in the show where dozens of children could be forced to sing.  So a solution was presented: two different casts would be assembled and they would have two different show times in order to accommodate everybody with a part.  Aha, so there!  And if we all cared just a smidgen more, we would have had some sort of competition between the casts to have the better show, but since 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.  At some point in the story, he got frustrated when he couldn’t reach something.  Amazingly, 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.

The boy that played that same character in the other cast was indeed short, so this wasn’t a problem beyond the horrible typecasting of a shorter person in the role of a shorter person.  (Imagine the prejudice that child obviously felt!)  In comparison, I wasn’t that short to begin with and was taller than some of my fellow castmates.  To make matters worse, I could easily reach the thing that I wasn’t supposedly able to reach. 

This meant that an audience would not only see that I wasn’t convincingly short, but also that I was seemingly dumber than a bag of cheaply made hammers because I couldn’t physically grasp something that was well within my arm’s reaching radius.  As you can see, this made the role rather demanding, insistent even.  Yet this was also my spotlight moment.  How could I pull off a character that even the great Olivier would have walked away from in a hissy fit of righteous disgust, that the great Gielgud would have resentfully rejected as being impossible, and that the great Paul Hogan would have just shrugged off while charmingly having a presumably Australian beer?  I certainly hoped that the years of mandatory grade school chorusing that I had under my belt would now lead me to the same well that all great actors manage to pull buckets of great performances out of to play this somehow.  

In the end, it didn’t matter as the spectators for these things generally are uncritical proud parents, glowing in their every review of the show regardless of whether I could portray some whiny shrimp that was led to the Christ by an automaton on the stage or not.  Yes, incredibly anticlimactic, wasn’t it?

Now dear reader, as I must prepare myself to fictionalize the other years of my lollygagging in front of patient audiences, I shall leave you for now.  More entries will follow momentarily at some procrastinated point.  Whenever I fill out the pages of my blank diaries, 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.  Yes, 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.