Damn near broke your neck!Not in any plays or anything but an embarrassing performance when I was asked to go out for a race at a Oklahoma City Dodgers minor league game.
Can you guess which one is me?
Friday #2 - A Little Bit it Drama
- Thread starter Angie
- Start date
Despite stage fright, I was pretty solid during speech contests. One year, our teacher suggested I try improv. She said I'd be the first person at our school to try it because I feel was a fairly new category at the time. I'm struggling finding anything showing when it first became a category, so I have no idea if she was lying to me about that.
I did well in practices and districts, but absolutely collapsed in state. I had a great drawing (race car driver, hitchhiker and someone is late) but my nerves crushed me that day. I was one of the last to go and had a bunch of people in the room with me and just froze solid. It was a painful 5 minutes. I was praying for someone to walk in the room with one of those oversized vaudeville hooks and yank me out of the room.
The next year, I returned and crushed it. However, during my animated improv performance, I accidentally kicked off my show (I was wearing some slip-on boat shoe) and flung it about 10 feet away. I worked it into my speech and kept going. #redemption
I did well in practices and districts, but absolutely collapsed in state. I had a great drawing (race car driver, hitchhiker and someone is late) but my nerves crushed me that day. I was one of the last to go and had a bunch of people in the room with me and just froze solid. It was a painful 5 minutes. I was praying for someone to walk in the room with one of those oversized vaudeville hooks and yank me out of the room.
The next year, I returned and crushed it. However, during my animated improv performance, I accidentally kicked off my show (I was wearing some slip-on boat shoe) and flung it about 10 feet away. I worked it into my speech and kept going. #redemption
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I miss the old school @cowgirl836 posts like this one.It's how I met my spouse. We had ensemble roles sophomore year and I just vaguely knew who he was because I became bffs with his cousin. I'll never forget her calling him a computer nerd so i was like oh, no way then.The next year I was ensemble again and he had a major role as one of the few males capable of carrying a tune. But computer nerd had grown about a foot since I'd last seen him so I my interest was piqued. We were then the only 2 who made it to state choir and I got to hang with him for a couple days. I was strongly interested in getting to know this boy more but he seemed rather obtuse about my interest.
Senior year there were a couple options being floated for musicals and I knew it was highly likely he and I would be leads. One option involved zero romance and little interaction between the leading man and woman. The other involved a kiss, marriage, domestic violence and the husband's death but oh well, gotta do what you gotta do. I lobbied HARD for that option and got it. Spent the summer getting to rehearse and then eventually kissing on stage in front of family. That's hella awkward especially when the "kiss" is the tiniest grandma peck because we were both too chicken.
Anyway, by the end of the musical everyone is like you guys should date but it took him a couple more months and a family party at my house where he kinda broke his face to get up the courage. But he did and we both ended up at ISU and did choir throughout.
And here we are 15 yrs and 2 kids later. Now whenever I sing, my 3 yr old goes "mommy stop, you aren't good at singing" to which DH laughs hysterically and I contemplate adopting out the kid. Kid doesnt know ****. His metric of "good" is the Blippi excavator song. My singing is the reason he exists
Cyclonepride
Thought Police
Some of these stories remind me of my son doing the church play when he was 4 or so. He was worried that he would forget the lines to the song, so I told him to just mouth the words when he forgot. He stood up there just opening and closing his mouth the whole time, without a single attempt to make it look like he was singing actual words 
I have two of them. In high school, I was in a play about Stephen Foster, the songwriter of the 1800s, whose songs were practically the only ones around back then. I played a bit role. I was one of two guys who were talking to Foster at one point. I had two lines as did the other guy with me.
My last line was addressed to the other guy with me, not the Foster character, and I called him by my character's name by mistake. As soon as I uttered it, I realized what I had done and as it was the last line in our little part and we were supposed to walk off stage anyway, I said to the other guy under my breath, let's get the f*** out of here.
While I said it under my breath, I'm sure it was loud enough for some of the people closest to the stage to hear it. There was no reaction and the rest of the audience probably never even noticed that I had fouled up but I was beet red walking off the stage.
My second one happened when I was about in my 40s. I knew one of the directors of the local community playhouse and he was always bugging me to be in one of his plays, but my job hours did not permit me to practice on the nights they had practice.
My job also made me sort of a very minor celebrity in the community, explaining the reason he wanted me to be in his play. One day, he came to me with the perfect role for me. I asked him if it was type casting. I was to play a dead person. The curtain rises and I'm already dead, no lines, no rehearsal, perfect.
I did go to one dress rehearsal and I'm glad I did, because the scene called for me to be slumped across a desk, one arm dangling down toward the floor, for the duration of a pretty long scene with a police detective on the scene and a handful of residents of the house.
I'm glad I went to the dress rehearsal because I learned that it's very tough to lay across a desk immobile for 5-10 minutes. It's hard on your cheek, your arms fall asleep, your back starts to ache, etc. So I took a small little heart-shaped pillow a little bit bigger than my hand to the actual play to lay my head on. It was small enough that I could hide it with my head.
I know what you're thinking: "how could a guy foul this performance up? No lines, nothing to do but lay there and not move." Well, that was the problem. About halfway through the scene, the detective was talking and all of a sudden, I coughed. It snuck up on me so fast, I didn't even have time to try to suppress it. the detective stopped in the middle of delivering a line and the audience laughed. I couldn't do anything, but just lie there. We eventually got through the rest of the scene and the curtain fell.
I later told the director that this was my first and last appearance in a community theater production. If I could even foul up playing dead, I could see no future for me on the stage.
My last line was addressed to the other guy with me, not the Foster character, and I called him by my character's name by mistake. As soon as I uttered it, I realized what I had done and as it was the last line in our little part and we were supposed to walk off stage anyway, I said to the other guy under my breath, let's get the f*** out of here.
While I said it under my breath, I'm sure it was loud enough for some of the people closest to the stage to hear it. There was no reaction and the rest of the audience probably never even noticed that I had fouled up but I was beet red walking off the stage.
My second one happened when I was about in my 40s. I knew one of the directors of the local community playhouse and he was always bugging me to be in one of his plays, but my job hours did not permit me to practice on the nights they had practice.
My job also made me sort of a very minor celebrity in the community, explaining the reason he wanted me to be in his play. One day, he came to me with the perfect role for me. I asked him if it was type casting. I was to play a dead person. The curtain rises and I'm already dead, no lines, no rehearsal, perfect.
I did go to one dress rehearsal and I'm glad I did, because the scene called for me to be slumped across a desk, one arm dangling down toward the floor, for the duration of a pretty long scene with a police detective on the scene and a handful of residents of the house.
I'm glad I went to the dress rehearsal because I learned that it's very tough to lay across a desk immobile for 5-10 minutes. It's hard on your cheek, your arms fall asleep, your back starts to ache, etc. So I took a small little heart-shaped pillow a little bit bigger than my hand to the actual play to lay my head on. It was small enough that I could hide it with my head.
I know what you're thinking: "how could a guy foul this performance up? No lines, nothing to do but lay there and not move." Well, that was the problem. About halfway through the scene, the detective was talking and all of a sudden, I coughed. It snuck up on me so fast, I didn't even have time to try to suppress it. the detective stopped in the middle of delivering a line and the audience laughed. I couldn't do anything, but just lie there. We eventually got through the rest of the scene and the curtain fell.
I later told the director that this was my first and last appearance in a community theater production. If I could even foul up playing dead, I could see no future for me on the stage.
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A couple of paragraphs into your community playhouse story I thought you were Kevin Costner in The Big Chill.
