Junior Year: The Theater
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Hey, thank you all for stopping by The Hive forum and saying “hi” yesterday. If you didn’t get a chance to, please do so – it’ll be nice to have a strong showing right from the start.
________________
Theater and me – we’re old friends, we go back to the first grade when I played the policeman in Frosty the Snowman. In the fourth grade, I believe, I was a zombie in our school’s production of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, the best play an elementary school has ever put on. In the fifth grade I played the father in the Thanksgiving play because I was the only kid in the school that was almost six feet tall.
In high school I started getting more involved in theater, joined the drama club, played Grandpa in “You Can’t Take it With You”, all the usual rites of passage for a slave to the stage.
NYC high schools had Sing – did any of your high schools have that? Sing was when each grade had a coupe of months to write, produce, direct and perform a musical. It was a competition that was almost impossible for the seniors to lose – we had a bigger budget and the judges wanted to send us off with our victory.
For senior sing I played the roll of “Hoodlum 1”. I had my hair braided, wore a visor backwards, Hilfiger from head-to-toe, timbos on my toes and five beepers attached to various articles of clothing. I had memorable lines such as:
HOODLUM 1: Yo, that ice-cream look dope!
HOODLUM 2: True, true, I want ‘dat too, yo!
Then I just sort of stopped doing theater in college – for the first two years, that is. I had better things to do like smoking dope and failing my classes, I had no time for theater. But along comes junior year – along comes a little brown kid called Guam – and me feeling free and refreshed and out of my sophomore year rut, I agree to go to improv with him.
Fuck it, I had a blast my first day of improv. I was loud, I was obnoxious – Guam and this kid Ryan ran the show and Guam loved my style but Ryan…Ryan wasn’t too fond of it. But I started performing and part of my shtick was to beat the fuck out of Guam in front of hundreds of people. We got laughs and Guam got hurt every night – it was good times.
There were fucking CHARACTERS at improv though.
Like Corey. The dude would fuck anybody who moved. If you complained of a stiff neck homeboy would materialize behind you like he got beamed down from the Enterprise and start massaging it. Boy, girl, inanimate object – didn’t matter, Corey will try to fuck you.
I talked about Chris. Christina was this Unitarian chick who was loud as all hell and rarely funny. In certain light she looked sexy but that light was some rare shit. Either that or her voice cracked the good light bulbs.
And then there was Ron. Ron was the definition of nerd. You know those girls who wear shirts that say, “I love nerds” or something like that? They’re not talking about Ron. Ron is true nerd. O.D. – Original Dork. He would tell these convoluted jokes that in order to “get” them you would need to know laws of thermodynamics.
I’m not kidding. We’d be at practice, Ron would be up, and he’d deliver some joke and awkwardly wait for us to laugh, follow it up with some shit like, “Don’t you get it? The Relativistic Boltzmann equation doesn’t supply an EXACT entropy differential so we wouldn’t know the room’s true state if it was indeed on fire.”
Fucking crickets, man. Every time.
We did it all for the cast parties, really. I honestly believe the cast party was the reason theater was invented. Same thing every party – show up at ten, get drunk, hook up with some girl from the troupe, sing show tunes, throw up, hook up with some other girl from the troupe, go to bed.
Of course, I usually skipped the hooking up part and sung show tunes all night – I can do a mean Colm Wilkinson, especially when I’m drunk.
Second semester found me sticking with improv but also acting in the spring one-act festival. A great little play called “The Whole Shebang” where I played white trash, wife-beater t-shirt and all.
As I’ve mentioned in the past I had a nipple complex of sorts and wearing the wife-beater in front of a large audience wasn’t really my thing. I spent the entire first show fixing my shirt – tugging on it, crossing my arms. R and I were friends again at that point and she came out to my show, commented afterwards how I need to stop playing with my shirt and my nipples aren’t that bad.
That’s an awkward conversation to have with an ex-girlfriend, right there.
The show went off well – I kept my hands away from my shirt for the next two nights – and the cast party was a good time, or so I was told. According to Guam I was “close to” making out with one of the girls in the troupe – a cute one, no-less, who was wearing these sexy leather pants and I’ve carried a bit of a thing for her during the year.
I honestly don’t remember almost hooking up with her but guaranteed, to this day, when Guam and I are drinking he’ll ask me, “Remember when you almost hooked up with ____ at the cast party?”
No clear definition of what “almost” means, unfortunately.
________________
Theater and me – we’re old friends, we go back to the first grade when I played the policeman in Frosty the Snowman. In the fourth grade, I believe, I was a zombie in our school’s production of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, the best play an elementary school has ever put on. In the fifth grade I played the father in the Thanksgiving play because I was the only kid in the school that was almost six feet tall.
In high school I started getting more involved in theater, joined the drama club, played Grandpa in “You Can’t Take it With You”, all the usual rites of passage for a slave to the stage.
NYC high schools had Sing – did any of your high schools have that? Sing was when each grade had a coupe of months to write, produce, direct and perform a musical. It was a competition that was almost impossible for the seniors to lose – we had a bigger budget and the judges wanted to send us off with our victory.
For senior sing I played the roll of “Hoodlum 1”. I had my hair braided, wore a visor backwards, Hilfiger from head-to-toe, timbos on my toes and five beepers attached to various articles of clothing. I had memorable lines such as:
HOODLUM 1: Yo, that ice-cream look dope!
HOODLUM 2: True, true, I want ‘dat too, yo!
Then I just sort of stopped doing theater in college – for the first two years, that is. I had better things to do like smoking dope and failing my classes, I had no time for theater. But along comes junior year – along comes a little brown kid called Guam – and me feeling free and refreshed and out of my sophomore year rut, I agree to go to improv with him.
Fuck it, I had a blast my first day of improv. I was loud, I was obnoxious – Guam and this kid Ryan ran the show and Guam loved my style but Ryan…Ryan wasn’t too fond of it. But I started performing and part of my shtick was to beat the fuck out of Guam in front of hundreds of people. We got laughs and Guam got hurt every night – it was good times.
There were fucking CHARACTERS at improv though.
Like Corey. The dude would fuck anybody who moved. If you complained of a stiff neck homeboy would materialize behind you like he got beamed down from the Enterprise and start massaging it. Boy, girl, inanimate object – didn’t matter, Corey will try to fuck you.
I talked about Chris. Christina was this Unitarian chick who was loud as all hell and rarely funny. In certain light she looked sexy but that light was some rare shit. Either that or her voice cracked the good light bulbs.
And then there was Ron. Ron was the definition of nerd. You know those girls who wear shirts that say, “I love nerds” or something like that? They’re not talking about Ron. Ron is true nerd. O.D. – Original Dork. He would tell these convoluted jokes that in order to “get” them you would need to know laws of thermodynamics.
I’m not kidding. We’d be at practice, Ron would be up, and he’d deliver some joke and awkwardly wait for us to laugh, follow it up with some shit like, “Don’t you get it? The Relativistic Boltzmann equation doesn’t supply an EXACT entropy differential so we wouldn’t know the room’s true state if it was indeed on fire.”
Fucking crickets, man. Every time.
We did it all for the cast parties, really. I honestly believe the cast party was the reason theater was invented. Same thing every party – show up at ten, get drunk, hook up with some girl from the troupe, sing show tunes, throw up, hook up with some other girl from the troupe, go to bed.
Of course, I usually skipped the hooking up part and sung show tunes all night – I can do a mean Colm Wilkinson, especially when I’m drunk.
Second semester found me sticking with improv but also acting in the spring one-act festival. A great little play called “The Whole Shebang” where I played white trash, wife-beater t-shirt and all.
As I’ve mentioned in the past I had a nipple complex of sorts and wearing the wife-beater in front of a large audience wasn’t really my thing. I spent the entire first show fixing my shirt – tugging on it, crossing my arms. R and I were friends again at that point and she came out to my show, commented afterwards how I need to stop playing with my shirt and my nipples aren’t that bad.
That’s an awkward conversation to have with an ex-girlfriend, right there.
The show went off well – I kept my hands away from my shirt for the next two nights – and the cast party was a good time, or so I was told. According to Guam I was “close to” making out with one of the girls in the troupe – a cute one, no-less, who was wearing these sexy leather pants and I’ve carried a bit of a thing for her during the year.
I honestly don’t remember almost hooking up with her but guaranteed, to this day, when Guam and I are drinking he’ll ask me, “Remember when you almost hooked up with ____ at the cast party?”
No clear definition of what “almost” means, unfortunately.
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