Since Angie didn't have one today, I thought I'd try my first Friday OT. Tell us about your acting experience. Are you a good actor, a terrible actor, were you in school plays, did you ever have any embarrassing experiences on stage? I'll go first.
I'm a terrible actor. I've been in exactly two plays, one as a schoolboy and one as an adult. The one when I was in school was either in my junior year or senior year and we were putting on a play about Stephen Foster, so kind of a musical, kind of not. I played some insubstantial role that could have just as easily been cut from the play and nobody would have been the wiser, but the play's director played it up like it was the pivotal plot point of the whole show. It wasn't.
I had two lines and then we were supposed to walk off stage. It was me and another guy talking to "Stephen Foster." I blew my last line and addressed the other guy talking to Foster as my character's name. It was the last line of my "performance" and I muttered under my breath, "Let's get the "eff" out of here, only I used the real word. I said it under my breath, but I'm sure people in the front row right in front of the stage and maybe a few rows back heard it.
My second role was in a murder mystery as an adult. I was hornswoggled into playing the dead man. I wasn't even part of the community theater, but I knew the director and he begged me to play the part of the murder victim. I had no lines so I couldn't blow this, surely. Wrong. As the curtain rose on the play, I was slumped over a desk in a den, already dead. I even had the foresight to provide myself with a little pillow that was hidden from the audience because I had to lay that way, head on a hard table for about 10 minutes. I learned during rehearsals that it would get painful without the pillow. Try supporting your weight on your head for a while with one arm sprawled on the desk and the other flung over the side of the desk for dramatic effect and you'll see what I mean.
So I'm laying there as the other cast members ... the detective investigating the crime, family members of the victim etc. ... said their lines when all of a sudden, the corpse coughed. It just came on me so suddenly, that I couldn't have suppressed it if I wanted to. The audience tittered and I still had five minutes of playing dead left to go. If they had been paying attention, they could have seen the corpse's face turning red.
So that's my very brief and disastrous career on stage in two of my most embarrassing moments.
I'm a terrible actor. I've been in exactly two plays, one as a schoolboy and one as an adult. The one when I was in school was either in my junior year or senior year and we were putting on a play about Stephen Foster, so kind of a musical, kind of not. I played some insubstantial role that could have just as easily been cut from the play and nobody would have been the wiser, but the play's director played it up like it was the pivotal plot point of the whole show. It wasn't.
I had two lines and then we were supposed to walk off stage. It was me and another guy talking to "Stephen Foster." I blew my last line and addressed the other guy talking to Foster as my character's name. It was the last line of my "performance" and I muttered under my breath, "Let's get the "eff" out of here, only I used the real word. I said it under my breath, but I'm sure people in the front row right in front of the stage and maybe a few rows back heard it.
My second role was in a murder mystery as an adult. I was hornswoggled into playing the dead man. I wasn't even part of the community theater, but I knew the director and he begged me to play the part of the murder victim. I had no lines so I couldn't blow this, surely. Wrong. As the curtain rose on the play, I was slumped over a desk in a den, already dead. I even had the foresight to provide myself with a little pillow that was hidden from the audience because I had to lay that way, head on a hard table for about 10 minutes. I learned during rehearsals that it would get painful without the pillow. Try supporting your weight on your head for a while with one arm sprawled on the desk and the other flung over the side of the desk for dramatic effect and you'll see what I mean.
So I'm laying there as the other cast members ... the detective investigating the crime, family members of the victim etc. ... said their lines when all of a sudden, the corpse coughed. It just came on me so suddenly, that I couldn't have suppressed it if I wanted to. The audience tittered and I still had five minutes of playing dead left to go. If they had been paying attention, they could have seen the corpse's face turning red.
So that's my very brief and disastrous career on stage in two of my most embarrassing moments.
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