Parents are always encouraging their kids to do shit, and when their kids do shit they are happy. Jimmy should play soccer, Johnny should join the Key Club (this is probably a separate topic, but FUCK key club, national honor societies, academic achievement club, and ANY club that involves getting good grades and then going to a shitty dinner). Or, your parent might say, “Peter should try out for the play.”
I was in a school play in ninth grade. Looking back, this has to be one of the weirdest things that I’ve ever done.
Let’s start witht eh director. It must take a special kind of person to direct a bunch of 9th graders in a play. It must take a special kind of person to direct a line of 9th graders through a doorway, so doing the play thing, I can only imagine. Our director was special in a sense. She was younger as teachers go, always wore all black, and she told us the story of how her son was born, which involved a graphic scenario where her boyfriend at the time was jerking off in the bed and then shot all over her, which somehow impregnated her.
We have a lot of fun here at helpfulsnowman.com, and sometimes it’s hard to separate the jokes from the not so much jokes. Let me use this moment to remind everyone that this is 1o0% real.
Why you would tell a weird jerking off tale of impregnation to ANYONE, let alone a group of 9th graders, is beyond me. That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would work in a classroom to me now, not that it worked at all back then.
With her at the helm, we had auditions. Because she had us all in class, the auditions were pretty much already finished in her mind. She handed us scripts in class, told us who we should be, and we read the given parts at the audition. And it turns out we got the parts. What do you know?
I was Bill. Bill was the star quarterback who also worked at the school newspaper. The director made it very clear that I was being cast as the star quarterback precisely because I looked nothing like a star quarterback. I was tiny, the least quarterback-y person you could pick. If you were casting me in a role based on what I looked like… maybe you were doing a Holocaust thing and needed someone who looked thin and yet unfit in the background, schlepping a big shovel around, I would be your guy. If you added up all the minutes I’ve spent holding a football in my life, 99% of them would be from my time onstage.
This went over the audience’s head, I found out later. Nobody understood why I was the captain of the football team. But more confusing, nobody understood why my first scene involved me berating the other school newspaper kids while I took off my pants and hung them on a hat rack.
A couple days into rehearsal, the director decided that I needed a character quirk, something that really set me apart from the other characters. Rather than an amazing acting style or thoughtful blocking, something gimmicky was her first choice. She decided that the best thing to do would be for me to appear with a different article of clothing missing every time I came onstage. So, the first time I came on, I walked in, undid my belt, and removed my pants, sitting around in a beanbag in a pair of silk leopard boxer shorts.
In another scene, a dance number, I opened my letterman’s jacket to reveal my skeletal torso. Flanking me were a kid who was still rocking his kid fat and a tall freak kid who could already grow a beard in 9th grade. Both of these gentlemen were sprayed down with cooking oil.
As I write, I still can’t really believe this happened like this. How the fuck does a trio of 14 year-old boys end up oiled and half-nude onstage in a school play? And for unknown reasons that aren’t even in the script? If any other after-school activity went like this, you’d find out about it by the wrestling coach being led away in handcuffs on the news, screaming how oiling down boys was a perfectly acceptable Greek practice.
There were some other memorable moments too. Towards the end, my character was supposed to kiss this other character. We were enemies throughout the entire play, so of course we were supposed to have a passionate kiss at the end to signal how much we had grown and how tired we were of denying our true feelings and all of that shit.
Leading up to the play, we were supposed to practice.
Fake kissing someone is almost worse that actually kissing someone. The problem with fake kissing someone, especially in 9th grade, is that you don’t really know how you should do it. Do you kiss like you would really kiss, thereby exposing to the world that you are a terrible kisser? Or do you screw around, plant a sloppy one on her, and then when she says how bad it was you say, “Duh. I was IN CHARACTER. That’s how my character would kiss.”
I went for neither. Instead, I would freeze my face, make it as neutral as possible, then just sort of press the lower half of my face on the lower half of her face. Sort of like walking face first into a wall in the dark.
She took it like a champ.
Also, she took like a champ the first time I dipped her, “kissed” her, and then, unable to lift her back to a standing position, dropped her on the floor.
“I love it,” the director said, thinking that this was a character action that I had come up with as opposed to a physical inability to lift another human being. She added it into the stage actions, “Bill drops Stacy,” and this poor girl spent every audition after that being dropped on the stage.
I guess you could say I’m pretty method.
The show went off okay, as far as I could tell. Nobody mentioned me in particular, which was the goal I was shooting for. My mom, who came the opening night, did ask why I wasn’t wearing pants at the beginning. She didn’t go so far as to call Child Protective Services, but she did give me her best, I Still Don’t Get It look.
After the curtain closed, I went to one f the infamous cast parties. Finally! All this work is going to pay off. Illicit party here I come.
Everyone was in a backyard, sitting in a hot tub. I have no idea whose house it was or how that all worked out, but I would advise anyone with a hot tub and kids to fill it with cement on your child’s thirteenth birthday.
As these things go, there was a girl who was mysteriously interested in me. Was it my amazing acting, watching this skinny weirdo with acting chops so great that you really did believe he was a football captain, like some kind of Rudy situation? Was it the fact that I was one of those kids who had one cool pair of jeans and the rest looked like shit, so I wore the same ones four times in a row, then a pair of shitty jeans, therefore looking like crap 4 out of every 5 days, minimum? Was it that I forgot my swimsuit and had to wear my stage boxers, the famous boxers that, THANK FUCKING GOD, did not billow open and expose my balls onstage?
Whatever magic I was working, there I was sitting in a hot tub with a girl who seemed mysteriously interested in me. She smelled like Carmex, and she barely brushed her hand against my junk enough times that I had to wait forever to get out so that I wasn’t sporting wood.
This was far and away the best part of being in a play, although I would still suggest just not being in a play.
We ended up “dating” for about a week. Dating consisted of her calling me and telling me her parents were not home and me sitting on the phone on the other end, constructing a tower from popsicle sticks and hot glue, taking a break to say something like, “I don’t have a ride over there or anything.”
A few years later that wouldn’t have mattered. I probably would have sprinted across town to get to a house where parents were out for a few minutes. But just then, it seemed like a bad idea for both of us.
After a week or so, she got over trying to drop subtle hints like, “I’m half naked and my parents are gone” and moved onto someone else. I didn’t see her too much anymore after that.
The really weird part? Years later I was talking with an old friend from high school. She told me that this girl had been on drugs, fallen asleep next to a radiator and the heat had damaged her brain. Now she’s in a mental hospital, the same one where her mom lives, not that I knew about that before.
The jury remains out on whether or not this has anything to do with me and whether my penis carries a terrible curse, besides the lesions.
That brings us back nicely to my original point. Just because you’re doing something at school doesn’t mean you’re doing something good. You might be reading Shakespeare in a new light, or you might be getting oiled up to dance topless on a stage, something that I would never do now in front of parents for free.
Overall, being in a play is not something I would recommend. The brief feeling of fame is not worth being prepubescent and half nude, dropping someone on the floor over and over, and making out in a hot tub with a girl who would be destroyed in a few years. Overall, not a net positive. Avoid the theater as much as possible.