When life throws you bozos, write a play

My high school senior Homecoming resulted in my first original one-act play -- a farce.

The play, “The Play About Homecoming,” went over well with its high school audience, and my cast did great. The show brought considerable laughter to an auditorium full of teenagers. But what I and a few friends had to endure to get it…

I was very last-minute with the whole Homecoming thing. Three days before the dance, I learned one of my female friends was dateless, so I figured I’d swoop in and save the day.

She wasn’t the problem, and neither were her two best friends—but their dates left pretty much everything to be desired.

One was a 21-year-old guy who for some reason wanted to go to a high school Homecoming with a 17-year-old girl he barely knew. The other was our same age, but not our same level of hygiene, and he wore a tie-dyed shirt under some garish sportscoat.

I’ll withhold the names of the girls. They suffered enough. I don’t even remember the guys’ names at this point.

Neither fellow qualified as a gentleman. I’m not saying I was Mr. Wonderful, but I was at least Mr. Tolerable. However, Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum...no.

Who was this John Hancock fellow anyway?

I saw a clip from Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? in which a woman was shocked to learn that Europe was a continent, not a country.

John who?

We all have lapses in common sense (some more than others, it seems), but we should at least have some shame when we do.

I was reminded of an incident from my retail days. I was an assistant manager at a store in an outlet mall. For reasons that were never sufficiently explained, whenever I completed a refund transaction, I had to get the signature of one of the other employees -- in addition to my own and to the customer’s, resulting in a most impressive triple-signature document.

One day I asked a 21-year-old co-worker to sign one of those receipts, and she said, “Alright, I’ll give you my John Hancock.” Then she stopped and thought for a moment, wondering aloud, “Why do they call a signature a John Hancock?”

I immediately responded, “John Hancock was the first person to sign the Declaration of Independence, and he signed it really large.”

She laughed, clearly not expecting anyone to actually know such a thing. “OK, nerd.”

Why theatre?


A few years ago, I wrote some theatre education articles for another website. I'll gradually transfer them over here for whoever happens to be interested. Here's the first:




Every city needs a theatre district.

With so many forms of media in existence, what’s the point of continuing to do theatre? After all, theatre is old enough for Sophocles to have taken part. Ancient Greece had no television, movies, CDs, iPods, or anything of the sort to keep them entertained. They didn’t even have the printing press back in the day.

It’s clear why theatre appealed to people in ancient times. Their options for artistic recreation were limited. But why do we continue thousands of years later?

Just because something is old doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it. Theatre can do things no other medium can.

The Night of the Pink Sweater

Rules sometimes lead to ridiculousness—like that time I visited a Williamsburg nightclub.

Yes, I was also surprised to learn that “Williamsburg nightclub” was not an oxymoron, but that wasn’t the most ridiculous thing that night.

This was back in 2005. My time at the College of William & Mary was nearing its end. Classes were over. I completed all my exams. I was free and directionless.

One night, a friend invited me to join her and couple of others at this nightclub. Clubs have never been my thing, but I figured a change of pace wouldn’t hurt.

So three young women and I journeyed to the non-colonial part of Williamsburg and arrived at the nightclub, only to encounter…a bouncer. (You can be gainfully employed in Williamsburg, Va. as a bouncer. Who knew?)

The bouncer politely informed me that my attire did not adhere to the club’s dress code. I was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Apparently, I was supposed to wear either a collared shirt or a sweater.

Be nice to retail employees

I was once a human bull’s-eye.

During breaks from high school and college, I worked at Target. I started as a cashier, and when that became boring and monotonous, I switched to the “Guest Services” desk, a.k.a. the refund counter.

That was not monotonous.

Some people had valid receipts. Some had expired receipts. Some were shocked and appalled to learn they even needed a receipt to get their money back.

Some requested simple exchanges. Some brought back entire baskets of duplicate wedding gifts, spread out among a good dozen or so gift receipts.

Some were excited to learn I could look up their receipts by swiping their credit card. Some failed to realize that if they discarded the tags, I’d have no barcode to scan.

Then there was the week after Christmas.

Adventures in Makeup

I have been makeup-free since January 2005.

I had a lot of fun acting in plays in high school and college, but I always dreaded the makeup.

The final time I had to endure the wretched stuff (well, only wretched when it’s on me) was the final time I acted in a play, Gilbert & Sullivan’s Ruddigore at the College of William & Mary.

I knew when I auditioned that would be my last time acting. It was my senior year of college—I had my fun for several years, and it was time to focus on some other areas.

There’d be much to miss about acting. Not the makeup, though. But I figured I could tolerate a little bit one last time.

They cast me as a bust. A marble, white bust -- a head statute that, through the magic of Gilbert & Sullivan, came to life. And was very, very white. Ghostly white. My shower and I spent good quality time together after each show.

Incidentally, I was the town drunk in earlier scenes, obligated to drink far too much awful-tasting iced tea shortly before being smothered in the white makeup and hairspray and stuffed in a box to hide everything below my neck. Oh, and for one number, I and several guys had to do the grapevine on a platform six feet above the stage, without a railing. Good thing I stopped while I was ahead.

Anyway, that white makeup wasn’t as bad as the blue makeup from my sophomore year of high school.

That one-act play was called “The Girl Who Was Asked to Turn Blue,” and my character was part of a utopian society of blue people (not the Smurfs, another one) trying to convince this girl to join us in our collective.

So, on top of all the usual adolescent anxieties 15-year-olds deal with, this play gave me a new one as I returned to school each morning: “My face isn’t still blue anywhere, is it?”

Luckily, most plays only required a minimal level of makeup, and in high school, some of the girls seemed to take bizarre pleasure in making up us guys. So at least I didn’t have to know how the stuff worked. I just had to sit there and take it.

College was different. Not only were we expected to apply our makeup ourselves, but we had to go out and buy our own.

Yes, my higher education made me the slightly embarrassed owner of makeup.

So picture this: myself and a car full of college boys being taken to Target and heading straight into the cosmetics aisle.

An upperclassman picked everything out for us (with uncanny speed and accuracy), and then the cashiers faced a sudden surge of young guys individually purchasing makeup, and only makeup.

Shortly later, we learned how to put it all on without turning into clowns. I remember little at this point, except that the eye-liner was particularly nefarious.

Then I had to smuggle it all into my dorm room.

Makeup certainly had an unfortunate but unavoidable presence during my performance days. In fact, it occasionally got too much credit.

For a production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest my senior year of high school, I was one of the bad guys, so I decided to be stereotypically evil and grow a goatee.

This prompted one of the freshman girls to say, “I like your beard. Is that real, or is it painted on?”

"I lost my phone number. Can I have yours?"

I work at a community newspaper that covers my old hometown and my old schools. So now, I get to observe it all from a completely different angle. But I wind up missing a lot of the little stuff.

Last year, I was reminded of a particular day toward the end of my senior year of high school.

A good friend of mine had been complaining for some time that I always wore solid, plain T-shirts of subdued colors, like black or gray or blue. No colorful design, no bright brand name, just a functional, monochromatic shirt, and a quiet monochrome at that. (The center of attention was not my favorite place to be.)

So, for my 18th birthday, he gave me a present: a black T-shirt with a message in tall, white letters.

It said, “I lost my phone number. Can I have yours?”

He said I had to wear it just one day. So, wanting to be a good sport, I complied.

I walked into the school commons the next morning with that uncharacteristic pick-up line T-shirt, and, in stereotypical teenage fashion, I felt like everyone was staring at me. My friends found it highly amusing. I just wanted to get through the day, be seen by as few people as possible, fulfill my obligation, and never touch the shirt again.

During one class, we were reading or doing a worksheet in complete silence, and out of the blue, the teacher started giggling. I looked up and realized she was laughing at me.

And that was merely the first class of the day.

I soon encountered a minor kink in my “be seen by as few people as possible” plan—we had an assembly that day. A school-wide assembly.

The younger students were seated in the rising bleachers on both sides of the gym, but all of us seniors were directed to chairs right in the middle of the floor, with three grade levels looking down at us, plus teachers and some visitors to the school.

Yeah, I felt a tad exposed. I crossed my arms and hoped this little shindig would be short.

I was happy to learn that part of the assembly would involve a slideshow. To run a successful slideshow, something else needed to happen: you needed to dim the lights.

I welcomed the darkness. That would be a few minutes in which no one would be able to see me and my silly “I lost my phone number. Can I have yours?” message.

They dimmed the lights and began the slideshow. I relaxed and uncrossed my arms. Then I looked down.

The darn shirt glowed in the dark.

I re-crossed my arms, and fortunately, most eyes were on the slideshow anyway.

So how was I reminded of this swell day?

I was looking through the newspaper archives for a little retrospective item. While seeking tidbits for a “10 years ago” slot, I came across an article about the school celebrating its 10th anniversary with a big assembly.

This bewildered me initially. I knew that was the spring of my senior year, so I must have been there, but I could not for the life of me remember attending an assembly about the school’s 10th anniversary.

Then it hit me.

“Oh,” I realized, “so that’s what that assembly was about.”

The 2001 article made no mention of glow-in-the-dark gag gifts.