and by opposing end them.
to die . . .
to sleep . . .
no more"
-Billy Madison
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Comedy
As part of my pad-the-college-resume spree, I was a member of the Wig and Mask Society for 4 years in high school. While that sounds like something Tom Cruise got to see in Eyes Wide Shut, it really just meant being affiliated with the play. I was an usher 1 year. I worked on the set crew for all 4 years, which gave me skills I would use later on in life. And while those skills include basic knowledge of hand tools, the real experience I gained was from the vast amount of euchre everyone played. Being a quality euchre player is ingrained in a Michigander's DNA, like bowling and the ability to grow mustaches.
Euchre is played to 10 points, with typical rounds going for 1 and 2 points, and the rare round going for 4 points. My friend Jim and I once beat our buddy Drew and his lady friend in 3 rounds, which is the fastest win possible. Granted, vast amounts of deck stacking occurred as the happy couple got schmoopie with each other and we continued to steal the deal, but a wins a win. In the words of Jesse The Body Ventura, "Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat."
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Tragedy
The head of the set crew was a teacher who we'll just called Mr L. I never had him for an actual class, and thus, only interacted with him via the set crew. He was one of the "cool" teachers at school that you could joke around with, but at the end of the day you respected him and did what he said. He encouraged the euchre play when there was down time, and always made sure the stereo was on (and usually made sure it was playing Rush. Several years later I would finally learn that Rush's lead singer Getty Lee was actually a guy).
Seriously. Without the soul patch, you might expect this person to be headlining Lilith Fair.
Anyways, the "cool" teacher story can only end in 1 of 2 ways. Either he teaches everyone life lessons that they will use for the next 50 years and reference in college applications and valedictorian speeches . . . or he fucks up and gets fired. Luckily, in the year of the Penn State scandal, I don't have to talk about Mr L getting shit-canned at an all-boy school for the stuff that makes you target 1A for rape in prison. He ended up getting caught buying beer for students, and at a Catholic school, that's easy grounds for dismissal.
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Comedy
Despite being an all-guys school, we had our fair share of gossip (yeah, I'm stereotyping ladies), as word traveled fast in our rather limited hallways. But no news traveled faster than when school play time rolled around and a girl showed up in the main office to sign up for tryouts. Before she finished the 90 second application, all 800 guys had done walk-by's to check her out. We certainly got enough female interaction at the sporting events and monthly club-like dances, but to actually have one in the building during normal school hours, that wasn't a nun? That was gold.
We really did get a ton of girls to go to our football and basketball games, and those monthly club-like dances in the gym where it was $5 to get in and only guys from our school could go? It was a nice 3-to-1 girl-to-guy ratio. An all guys school, but we did just fine for ourselves, thank you very much. End of rationalization paragraph.
My senior year I finally decided to suck it up, be a man, and actually perform in a dance in the play along with doing sets. At the very least, it would be a chance to hang out with some new people, AKA, meet some new girls. And while I did meet some new people during dance practice, no dates came of it. So come play time, we mostly hung out backstage with our crew of friends. But on the night of dress rehearsal, this girl Lara I knew, who went to the closest thing to our all-girl sister school, came over and said "Hey, there's a girl I want to introduce you to." FINALLY. So I followed her over to her group of girls and came face to face with a very cute dark haired girl with a great smile. I liked where this was going. I was a hip young 17 year old who could be in the market for a prom date. "Alan" Lara said, "this is Nikki, though I think you've actually met before." And we had met before, about 10 or so years ago . . . at our relative's birthday party. We were second cousins, and the brief romantic thoughts ended milliseconds after they started, as we spent the rest of the weekend igniting nothing more than a friendship (when I tell this story in the South, they consider this ending a tragedy instead).
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Tragedy
Along with re-meeting my second cousin, I also got to meet one other interesting person during my time as an actual participant in the play. You know how I said 800 guys would walk by the main office when a girl would come in? Well, that number should actually be 799. While the laws of probability say there should be more than 1 out of 800, there was only one out-of-the-closet guy at our school - Doug (a sophomore) AKA, "Dance or Die" (everyone at the play called him that because he wore a shirt that said "Dance or Die" to every single dance practice).
Being an all-boys, 98% white, 95% middle-to-upper class Catholic school doesn't exactly breed awareness in diversity (meeting the Jewish girl next door to our dorm room freshmen year of college was like meeting a martian). So I can't imagine what it was like for the one gay kid in a testosterone-filled sausage fest. What I do know is that some of the brief stories he told us backstage at the play aren't fit to rewrite here. But our little group of friends treated him well, and I'd like to think that we made him feel good about being himself, as he got to hang out with seniors and wow us with stories about hanging out with lesbians (telling lesbian stories to guys at an all-boys high school is like telling a sumo wrestler about visiting Willy Wonka's Chocolate factory). And after being a close-minded conservative Catholic my whole life, hanging out with Doug may have been the first time I said "Ummmm, I think me and the pope might be on the wrong side of this gay-is-a-sin thing" (Update - relative to this issue, I am definitely not on the pope's side anymore).
Being an all-boys, 98% white, 95% middle-to-upper class Catholic school doesn't exactly breed awareness in diversity (meeting the Jewish girl next door to our dorm room freshmen year of college was like meeting a martian). So I can't imagine what it was like for the one gay kid in a testosterone-filled sausage fest. What I do know is that some of the brief stories he told us backstage at the play aren't fit to rewrite here. But our little group of friends treated him well, and I'd like to think that we made him feel good about being himself, as he got to hang out with seniors and wow us with stories about hanging out with lesbians (telling lesbian stories to guys at an all-boys high school is like telling a sumo wrestler about visiting Willy Wonka's Chocolate factory). And after being a close-minded conservative Catholic my whole life, hanging out with Doug may have been the first time I said "Ummmm, I think me and the pope might be on the wrong side of this gay-is-a-sin thing" (Update - relative to this issue, I am definitely not on the pope's side anymore).
Sadly, as this falls under the Tragedy headline, you already know where this goes. The 3-night play was a success, everyone had a great time at the wrap party, and a few days later, Doug committed suicide. I can only assume he waited until he had that last great moment in the sun, and he got to go out doing what he loved.
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Hmmmm, well that's a tough story to come back to the present from. But, if I'm going to talk about my experience with our HS play, I might as well tell it all. The blog occasionally needs some serious meat to go with the fluffy potatoes I suppose.
Anyways, I told high school play stories because I ended up going with friends Jessica, Ryan and Buddy to Shakespeare on the Common in downtown Boston (yes, its now winter. That tells you how much I've lagged on these last couple post-list-completion posts).
The stage was the high tech thing on the left. Not the cool circular thing on the right.
Since college, I think the extent of my play-going was seeing the Slutcracker (both last year and this year) and seeing the Rocky Horror Picture Show in NYC (starring Skid Row's own Sebastian Bach!). So Shakespeare was definitely a change of pace. That evening's show? All's Well That Ends Well. Yeah, never heard of it. But I figured it was better to see something NEW, right? At first, that was a poor decision, as trying to decipher ye olde timey English from 50 yards away in a park proved to be rather difficult (a special thanks goes out to my smart phone and its ability to let me follow the plot via Wikipedia as necessary).
Shakespeare Enjoyment vs Time
But as the plot slowly began to unfold (3 hours of old English = SLOW), and I slowly began to understand what the hell was happening, I eventually did come to enjoy it, as that Shakespeare fellow kind of knew what he was doing. Your 10 second synopsis (Shakespeare Spoiler Alert!) - Helena wants to marry Bertam. Bertram says "ummm, no thanks" and ditches. Helena eventually hunts him down and tricks him into marrying her. Fin.(insert 80's comic joke about all girls being crazy. I mean, women be shoppiiiiiinnnnng! Am I right?!?)
The way the whole thing played out was fairly dramatic, and while Helena got what she wanted in the end, it was actually kind of sad for Bertram, who seemed to accept his destiny in a "well I'm screwed" kind of way (and I'm not just saying that as someone who used to enjoy the motto "marriage is for suckers"). It sure seemed like a tragedy . . . until I talked to the resident renaissance man at work about it the next day and he informed me that its actually intended to be a comedy, at which point the plot seemed to make a lot more sense to me. Despite the lack of laughter derived from that particular performance, Bertram wasn't the guy you feel sorry for, he was the 90's sitcom character who gets his comeuppance and learns a oh-so-hilarious lesson at the end just as the camera goes to a freeze frame.
So while you're not supposed judge a book by its cover, in this case, you couldn't even judge the book by all the words inside. Next time I see Shakespeare, I'll request the version with the director's commentary.
