On Saddling Up and Taking the Stage

Hi Owl,

You missed yesterday's post! Now we're even. In your defense, you missed it part because we were having such a great time hanging out and cooking meals for this week that you lost track of time, so that's a pretty decent reason to miss a post. Your challenge is forthcoming.

I enjoyed your post on musicals yesterday, and it encapsulated many feelings I share on the subject. This is something that I tend to forget we have in common, since neither of us are active in the theater scene these days, however, we both do share a common history in that regard.

Unlike Owl, my high school did not have a particularly strong theater department. Fortunately, this did not matter much for me. I started taking theater classes at a local community theater when I was very young---I want to say I started in 1st grade, though I'm not positive. I continued through my senior year of high school, and was active both on and off stage. I loved being part of the back-stage crew, and in fact favored it over being on stage, but I wanted to take this post to talk about acting specifically, and why I decided to start.

For me, acting was the most terrifying undertaking I could imagine. I was a painfully shy child, incredibly soft-spoken, and generally ill at ease addressing even one person, let alone a roomful. This was made all the worse by a speech impediment that, when I was young, was fairly pronounced. I had trouble pronouncing certain sounds, and struggled especially with words that had "R" or "W" sounds in them. I spoke way too fast and my words often ran together, and I got flustered when I couldn't be understood. Normally I didn't talk in public to avoid this frustration. Social situations terrified me.
Theater classes forced me to open up. In the beginning, I dreaded going to them. Even the warm-ups frightened me, because they generally involved improvisation or creative movement, neither of which I was remotely comfortable with. I had trouble making friends, and being an introvert in a class of extroverts meant that I was often overlooked by my peers, and occasionally by the instructors. Nevertheless, I persevered, and gradually, my confidence began to grow, both on and off stage.
The first time I truly felt passionate about acting was the first time I was given a monologue to read. I don't remember exactly what it was, but I think it was a passage from The Diary of Anne Frank. I had struggled with dialog in acting up to that point because I never could quite get the hang of the natural flow of a conversation, even in real life. Give-and-take dialog between two characters on stage seemed so unnatural to me because people don't talk like that, and I was struggling enough to figure out how people really did talk. But when I was given a monolog and told to recite it, all on my own, it was an immensely liberating experience. For once, I had the stage. Just me. I had this piece---an incredibly moving piece, one that spoke deeply to me even at a young age---that I could make my own, and I had the guarantee that nobody was going to interrupt me or talk over me before the speech was done. Suddenly, it was easy to speak clearly. I could pace myself. I could even enunciate.
I am sure I did not do a wonderful job with this monolog, but when I was done, I felt so proud. I was generally a laconic child in public (though I would rarely shut up around my family and a few close friends) so I think my theater classmates heard me speak more during that monolog than at any other point in the year combined.

As much as I wish I could say I went on to be an incredible actor, I did not. Don't get me wrong, I was okay. I certainly had my moments---I was great at Shakespeare, for instance, because I knew what all of the words meant and was good with memorizing long speeches. I was cast in several plays, both at the community theater and in school (and on one memorable occasion, both at once) and had some really fun parts to play around with. I stayed with my community theater for twelve years, acted on stage, chaired the props crew on numerous occasions, helped build sets, ran lighting, and helped with costumes and make-up. I had enough experience by 8th grade that when my middle school put on a production of The Sound of Music I was asked to be the assistant stage manager, though I think that was at least in part because my choir director wanted to prevent me from auditioning. (I do not have a good singing voice, but I was stubborn and loved musicals.) I worked as an office assistant at my community theater and later as a teaching assistant. I studied stage combat, Shakespeare, improvisation, and playwrighting. I even got competent enough to be cast in several plays, and culminated my acting career by playing an anthropomorphic lamb who befriends a lion and a blind girl in James Still's Hush: An Interview with America. And yes, this is when I learned that I could not "bah" like a sheep. My friends and family still delight in mocking me about it to this day. Ask me about it sometime; it's a fun story. I made friends and role models, I wrote a few plays, and my found my first boyfriend there. I thrived in the dark wings where the props crew waited for their cues, and in the shop where we built the skeletons of the sets that would later be rooms and houses and trees and (on one memorable and awesome occasion) dragons. I embraced each character I played with open arms and learned through each of them how to be more comfortable in myself. I fell in love with the stories that are best told on stage and with the way we tell them.

 I could quote a line about how "courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway" or "courage is not the absence of fear; it is acting in spite of it," and I guess I just did. (Thanks, John Wayne and Mark Twain.) But as clichéd as the sentiment has become, it really does ring true. At least, it did for my six-year-old self. I found what scared me most, and I put all of my energy towards becoming really good at it. Okay, I put some of my energy towards becoming decent at it, but that doesn't sound as poetic. And it may be a small accomplishment, and I may not have much to show for it now, but damn it, I'm proud of six-year-old me.

So: To my past self, thank you. You may not have been very good at what you did but you tried very hard to do it, and that counts for a lot. And to my future self, find what scares you most and own it.
Owl, to answer your question, I have many favorite productions, and many favorite songs. I meant to talk about musicals in this post but I got side-tracked a bit.