2007-03-20 - 12:50 a.m.
GREASE IS THE WORD
Charity has been watching this reality show about Grease, have you seen this thing? It's called Grease: You're The One That I Want or Grease: So You Think You Can Dance or whatever. These people audition for roles in the musical, and then they get eliminated and stuff. It's captivating television.
Keeping that topic in mind, I am about to tell you something that I've never told anyone before. Which is probably because anyone who I'd tell already knows about it, not that it's a big secret or anything. But that doesn't change the facts. The facts are that I've never told anyone about this. That is... UNTIL NOW.
Here it is. My shameful tale. I... yes, me, Jake... was once in a stage production of Grease.
Whew. That feels so good to finally get off my chest. I've been keeping it in for so long, it's like a great weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I feel five pounds lighter!
So here's the 411 on how it happened. Well, part of how it happened anyway. There's a fairly key component to this story that, for the life of me, I cannot seem to remember at the moment. If it doesn't come to me, Charity will surely know, so maybe I'll update this later. But for the time being, I'll have to leave it out.
Let me take you on a magical journey back to 1998. Seinfeld was finishing up it's TV run, you couldn't go five seconds without hearing about Monica Lewinsky, Stone Cold Steve Austin was capturing hearts and minds all over the world. And I was a junior in high school. At my school they had two major productions each year, a play during the Fall and a musical during the Spring.
During the winter break of our junior year, I did... something... that got me into the proverbial doghouse with my future sweetums. What exactly I did is the thing that I can’t remember. It wasn't anything THAT bad, it didn't threaten our friendship or anything like that. But I felt bad enough that I threw myself on the mercy of the court to gain her forgiveness. Which is to say that I offered to do just about anything to make it up to her.
I was thinking like... I'd drive her to school or buy her lunch for a whole month. Or do her homework if for some reason she wanted her grades to start dropping. Stuff like that. I offered to do her laundry, but she rightly suspected that it was just a ploy so I could handle her unmentionables.
She rebuffed all of my suggestions and, after taking a day or so to think about it, she came up with an idea of her own. She wanted me to try out for the school musical, which was having auditions as soon as school started up again.
Now, for you to understand why she made that request, I have to tell you three other things. First, and most obvious, I felt really guilty about what I’d done. Bad enough that she knew I’d grudgingly accept her decision and go through with the try-out.
Second, at some point during our teenage years, I started this goofy practice (that I still partake in today) in which I sung to Charity while we were alone. I’d do it like while we were driving somewhere or if we were in our rooms together, that kind of thing. I'd sing silly songs just to make her laugh, and even though the purpose of the singing was to amuse her, she'd frequently tell me that I had a nice voice. I didn't agree, and as nobody else in my entire life had ever told me that, I clearly had no reason to believe her. Not that I thought she was a liar, but, as I'm sure you well know, when you're that close to someone they tend to be a little bit blind towards your faults.
The final thing I should tell you is that I was not a stranger to the stage. Oh, indeed not. My first foray into the world of acting came in the fourth grade. We did a class play that year, the kind where the teacher just assigns you a part. I was awarded the lead role, a part I may have been born to play. Yes, sir, I can only be talking about the one... the only... Paddington Bear. We'd rehearse for 15-20 minutes each day during Reading class, and then we did the play for other grades and for our parents right there in our classroom. It was a rip-roaring good time.
Jumping ahead to the seventh grade, when I was now in junior high, we had to pick these clubs to enroll in. Like the chess club and math club and such. We had to pick one club every quarter, I think, so we'd be in 4 clubs over the course of a school year. In eighth grade the gym teacher started a pro wrestling club where we watched wrestling, and I was all over that club like stink on a monkey.
But when seventh grade started I wasn't sure what to join, and I decided I'd just join whichever club Charity did. Well! The clubs would alternate with our homeroom-like class, where on one day we'd go to homeroom during a certain period, and the next day we'd go to our club during that same period. Charity's homeroom teacher (also our English teacher) started an acting club, and to make things easy on herself, Charity decided to join that club so she'd always be going to the same room regardless of what day it was.
An acting club didn't really appeal to me, but I didn't mind as long as Charity would be there. And our English teacher was in her first year of teaching at the school, and, apart from her rather large forehead, she was kinda hot. So spending an extra class with her didn't seem so bad. Seriously, she had a big ol' forehead. It wasn't even a forehead, it was a fivehead.
So I joined the acting club. But Charity did not get in! We had to fill out these forms listing 4 club choices, and by the time they got to Charity's list, the acting club had already filled up. So she got sent to her second choice, and I was all alone with these drama nerds.
I figured that in this "acting club", maybe we'd goof off and rehearse scenes and stuff. But, no, the teacher actually planned to have us put on a play. I don't remember the name of it, but the play was a comedy (allegedly). It was set in the 20's or 30's or something, and the plot was that this kiss-stealin' wheelin' dealin' son of a gun... we'll call him Marcus, as that was the name of the guy who got the part... was going to ask his girlfriend to marry him.
But as this was olden times when things were proper, Marcus went to an all-boys college and his girl went to a girls college. And in order for her to come over to his college, she had to be accompanied by a chaperone. Things are all set for the big visit and the proposal, but at the last second the chaperone from the girls college gets sick and can't make it. So Marcus' best friend... played by me... suggests that Marcus talk his chubby roommate into dressing up in drag so that he can pose as the chaperone.
A hilarious premise, right? Cue the laugh track. BTW, like the Paddington play, the parts were all assigned to us by the teacher. And the only fat guy in the class got assigned the part of the fat roommate, which I thought was pretty terrible.
The role of the best friend wasn't a big part, so I was pretty happy since I didn't have to do a lot. But then... disaster struck! Marcus, the actual student playing the part, got suspended or something. This was the first and only year that Marcus and I went to school together, but I'd known him for years outside of school and he was a bit of a troublemaker. Anyway, without him we suddenly didn't have a lead. And from the minute I heard that Marcus wasn't going to be in the play anymore, I had this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that the teacher would make me take the part instead. Thankfully, though, that did not occur.
No, the teacher filled the part of Marcus... the lead MALE role of the play... by playing the character herself.
It's been like 13-14 years and I still have no idea what she was thinking. Not that I wanted to do it, but wouldn't the teacher moving me over to that role and then taking my small best friend part have been a better idea? Or move me to the Marcus role, move the fat guy playing the roommate to the best friend role, and then she could play the roommate and spare a chubby seventh grader from the embarrassment of being cast as a fat guy and having to dress in drag. Or just move the fat guy to the Marcus role and keep me where I am. Anything you could come up with would be better than a grown woman taking over the lead male role in a play full of seventh graders. Seriously, what the hell?
I didn't actually realize how bad it was until we did the play and then watched the tape during the next meeting of the acting club. I was nothing special, the role of the guy in drag actually came out pretty funny, but our teacher was horrible. Her delivery was bad and she was reading from the script the whole time. And, in case you didn't catch this part before, she was a GROWN WOMAN playing THE LEAD MALE ROLE. The whole thing was a total joke. Plus, the tape was hard to watch on account of this huge glare coming off her forehead.
OH OH OH. This just in: I remember why Charity was mad at me. It's a long story, but I briefly misplaced something that meant a lot to her. The item in question was technically both of ours, but I had possession of it and I thought I'd thrown it out by accident. But I didn't! I ended up finding it a month or so later. But when I begged for her forgiveness and agreed to audition for the school musical, I obviously didn't know I would end up finding it. Had I known, there wouldn't be much of a story here.
Anyway, getting back to my tale, you know how you might try something a time or two and suddenly your family will stick you with that label? Maybe that's just my family, I don't know. For example, I think I mentioned here once that Charity had been doing some substitute teaching a few years ago. When we got back from our honeymoon and I didn't have a job, I considered trying that too, but it turns out you have to go inside an actual school. No thanks. I’ve had enough of schools.
But I mentioned it to my parents, though, and somehow it got to an aunt of mine, who actually is a teacher. And throughout my family it quickly became "Jake is going to become a teacher". So for like a full year, I was a teacher to my family even though I had no intention of ever becoming one.
That's the kind of thing I mean. With my family it's like you start one little fire and suddenly you're an arsonist. It was the same thing with acting. Over the course of my entire life I had been in these two little plays, both of which I really had no choice but to take part in, yet I was known as an "actor" in my family for several years. "Oh, Jake's going to be an actor." "Say, is Jake doing any plays?" "Has he been in anything I might have seen?" And Charity was just as bad, always trying to get me to try out for things and stuff. There's a community theater near here that's always looking for people, and she'd cut out ads about auditions and leave them for me. It was insanity all the way around.
She's always had this habit of dragging me into things. In eighth grade she was on the quiz bowl team, which is like a knowledge competition where you compete against other schools. As it turned out, the competitions always had like 5 or 6 sports questions, and nobody on their team knew anything about sports. So Charity suggested to the quiz bowl... coach, I guess, that they add me to the team to handle the sports questions. The quiz bowl was kinda nerdy, I thought, but knowing that I'd get to be with Charity all day and that I'd get to miss school, I agreed to join. And it was actually fun.
But along those same lines, she also roped me into another acting thing while we were eighth graders. She was doing something or other... I don't remember if it involved her quiz bowl team, but it was something with the smart kids. And they were going to this school a few towns away and putting on a comedy sketch for some reason. I don't really recall the details.
But from what the teacher told me, they were doing some game show type sketch and they were one person short. They needed someone to play the host of the game show, a relatively small part. And, of course, Charity suggested me to the teacher, who remembered my critically acclaimed performance the year earlier in the acting club play. And once again I was forced into performing.
When I met with Charity and the other kids in the group, however, they told me that the teacher was way behind and that their whole "game show" sketch idea had been scrapped days earlier. One of the kids had learned some comedy sketch at summer camp or something that he'd suggested and they were going to do that instead. The problem, though, was that this sketch required one major part and several small parts, unlike the game show sketch where the parts were mostly equal. And nobody wanted to do the one major part. And they needed someone to do it. Can you see where this is going, I'm sure you can.
So I ended up doing the major role in the sketch. For this group that I wasn't even a member of. Seriously, what the hell?
The sketch, if you're curious, was about a guy (me) who goes into a hospital emergency room complaining of superficial injuries. One by one, others would enter the ER with some odd malady and sit down next to the guy (me) as they waited to be treated. For some unexplained reason, the guy (me) would begin to experience the same symptoms these other people were suffering from, and their affliction would be magically cured.
So the guy (me) would catch whatever they had, the cured person would leave, a person with a new problem would come in, rinse, repeat. The sketch ends when a female (Charity in a breakout cameo) comes in with a pillow under her stomach to simulate being pregnant, and the guy who's catching everything (me) runs out of the ER in terror.
Hilarious, right? I know. But we got through it and went home. And, thankfully, that was it for my acting career. It had been fun, sort of, but I was ready to hang it up. No more plays, no more sketches, no more nothing. I was done. Done, I say!
Until Charity made me try out for Grease, that is. Damn her soul.
But, you know, this entry is already pretty long, so why don't I save that story for another time? It won't take me three months to post it, I promise. Really. I promise. Check back in... two weeks or so. Or a month, better make a month. Two months, max.
TO BE CONTINUED...
