Way back in the olden days of 1982 I attended Malaspina College. I was fresh out of high school, full of spunk and determined to make a career of being a waiter. My training took the form of completing the two-year theater program at Malaspina.
Ho ho.
I had a change of heart in the second year and never finished, alas, so my career as an actor was nipped in the bud while I was still a teenager. Who knows what fame and riches I left behind? (If someone hands me a time machine I would be willing to go back and find out, even if the results were a reverse sort-of It’s a Wonderful Life and I experience the sad trombone of having made the wrong call back then.)
None of this is especially relevant to what I am about to show, except that back in that first year we mounted a spring production of Oh, What a Lovely War. There were 14 performances in all, which was about a dozen more than I was accustomed to from high school plays, and we all had multiple parts as the cast of dozens only had about a dozen people to fill the roles. I had seven parts, ranging from a German soldier cut down by machine gun fire, to a Scottish ghillie, a Belgian general and several others I dimly remember. The general wore a very tall and silly hat. The German soldier was a logistical challenge. I and three others walked onstage, got cut down by machine gun fire, collapsed dead to the ground and then had to sneak offstage while the rest of the cast paraded in front of us to begin the final musical number. But wait, there’s more! Not only did we have to sneak offstage, we also had to change costumes and then bring up the rear of the line that originally started in front of us.
Live theater can be awesome like that.
One scene involved the famous suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst handing out pamphlets in a town square. The actors also worked on props (I helped turn a rubber chicken into a duck for the scene with the Scottish ghillie) and several cast members produced lovingly handcrafted pamphlets which I kept after the show closed. Most of them looked like this (excuse the water damage–I have no idea where it came from, but these things are nearly 35 years old):
The spelling of “suffragette” varied according to whoever wrote a particular pamphlet.
A couple of the pamphlets were infused with what one might call a more modern sensibility (Mary was a cast member).
Finally, there was one pamphlet that everyone secretly dreaded–and thrilled–to receiving, because it was absurd and prone to making you laugh, which was wholly inappropriate for the very serious scene in which the pamphlets were handed out.
This worked even better because back then the McRib was still relatively new so making fun of it still had a certain novelty value.
Trying to make fellow actors break up onstage is, of course, a long tradition in theater. A friend, for reasons unknown, described this as “scoobing.” I don’t know why, but that seems to work.
Looking over this stuff kind of makes me want to go back into theater. Mostly it makes me wish I was 18 again. The world was fantastic and fun when I was 18. I got to wear funny hats and pretend to get shot and sing and dance.
I also actually liked the McRib. But I was 18, so I not only still had that teenage sense of immortality, I also had no taste. See also: my hair (which was cut short for the play, making it the first decent haircut I’d had in a decade).
