A Midsummer Night's Dream

Last fall, the show-biz bug bit Fairy Girl. She was cast as the Princess from "The Princess in the Pea" in a Fractured Fairytales-style mishmash production at her school. After getting herself so nervous she almost threw up before the show (she had thrown up and missed her previous opportunity to debut on stage a year earlier) she calmed down enough to deliver her lines perfectly, and showed that not only does she have impressive delivery and animation for a 10-year-old who'd never acted before, she also had pretty darn good comic timing. This summer, she got into a summer theatre camp at Circle Arts Theatre, where they'll be staging a trimmed-down version of You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown this Friday. She's begun clamoring for us to take her to auditions in the area--television, movies, theatrical, it makes no difference. When she was only 3 years old or so, on a lark we submitted her photo to the folks casting for the John Lee Hancock Alamo movie, and actually got a call back. We had a scheduling conflict The Wife and I have begun some tentative searches of Austin and San Antonio talent agencies online, cautiously separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

All of which is how it came to pass that Fairy Girl found out that I did some acting in my misspent youth. My junior and senior years of high school I participated in One Act Play, once I finally built up enough nerve to walk away from Columbus High School's painfully dysfunctional football program. Of my brief theatrical career, a single VHS tape remains as evidence. Fairy Girl wanted to watch.

The quality of the 24-year-old tape left a lot to be desired. The audio track was poor to begin with, but the image has color shifted over the years and lots of distortion crept in as well. That's to be expected, since the tape hadn't played for at least 15 years. And damn, but I was skinny back then! I've never been svelt, but 60 pounds accumulated over the course of two decades make a big difference. All in all, it's hard to watch, but Fairy Girl sat through it like a trooper.

The play was a truncated version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was a wildly uneven production, but what we lacked in polish we made up for in enthusiasm. I played Lysander one of the four star-crossed lovers who suffer from an accidental application of love potion. The other roles my fading memory can recall included David Herrera as Demetrius, Danette (Glueck) Cantu as Helena, Jill Whitcomb as Hermia, Chris Novosad as Oberon, Carrie Speck as Puck, Matt Theut as Egeus, Don Koslosky as Theseus and Camille Hunt as Hippolyta. Watching the lot of perform on stage more than two decades ago, it was sobering to realized that Matt and David--both younger than I--are no longer with us. A feeble memorial to their lives, I suppose, but we were all having fun and that has to count for something.

I tried out for Midsummer Night's Dream on a whim, mainly to get out of the drudgery of cleaning the athletic field house every day (my punishment for walking off the football team a month or so before--long story for another time). I showed up for the reading oblivious to the source material and was thoroughly clueless about the importance of the Lysander role until I started highlighting my lines and realized I was in pretty much every freakin' scene (there's no Bottom or Titania in this version--the one-act plays were limited to 35 minutes or thereabouts). That got my attention real quick, I assure you. Taking on such a role was challenging for me, since my previous stage experience was limited to the Sheriff in a third-grade production of Cowboy on the Moon and one of the playing cards trying to paint white roses red in our first-grade presentation of Alice in Wonderland. Complicating matters was the fact that Whitcomb, who played my ostensible love interest, Hermia, viewed me with the contempt most civilized folk reserve for gum accidentally trodden upon. She was a fine actress, but off stage there was nothing I could say or do around her that wasn't met with a sneer or eye roll from her. I can only assume I was considered too uncouth and lowbrow for her taste--the fact that her sister, Jo Helen (who also displayed no great affection toward me), presented as a class assignment the following year a argument that people should "only buy clothes from Nieman Marcus instead of Wal Mart so they don't feel poor and dirty" goes a long way toward affirming my suspicions.

At the district competition, my first stage performance in front of an audience made up of people who weren't mine or my friends' parents, I was probably on the verge of barfing just like Fairy Girl. I don't remember much about the lead-up to the play, other than the fact that Sealy put on a production of Everyman that impressed the heck out of me. I do remember what happened after the curtain fell, however. I'd given it my all on stage, figuring this might well be the only time I ever play Lysander, so I might as well make it memorable. Whitcomb snarled at me afterwards, accusing me of ruining the play. A significant portion of the cast lined up behind her for their turn at denigrating me as well. "You blew it," said McDonald Ruffino, our lighting tech. "You over-acted way too much." Once all the other schools had wrapped up their shows, everyone filled the auditorium to receive individual awards and find out which play would advance to regional competition. I don't know if our teacher/director Charlotte Tilotta was aware of the backstage drama going on--if she was, she didn't let on. All I know is that I wanted to curl up and disappear. My humiliation grew as they went through the Honorable Mentions, then the All-Star Cast. Lots of actors and actresses from Columbus as well as other schools were raking in the awards, but we wouldn't advance because I'd ruined it for everyone. Then they announced overall best actor, and it took me a minute to realize they were mispronouncing my name. I'd like to say that I went from abject misery to elation in the space of a heartbeat, but in truth I was too much in shock to really feel much of anything. Later on, Ruffino was the only person to apologize for jumping on me earlier. That was a classy gesture on his part, but then again, he and his family have always been classy people.

At regional, we advanced again. I was named best actor again. The wheels came off during the state semifinals, though. My timing was off, my delivery was off. I wasn't feeling it, as the cliche goes. I can't presume to speak for others in the cast, but it felt like the entire rhythm of the show was out of sync. In the end, our production was named Alternate to State, and our great run ended. I was named to the All-Star Cast. Everyone was disappointed, but proud of what we'd accomplished. The next year, we undertook an ambitious production of MacBeth, sticking with the Shakespeare theme. David Hererra got the showcase role of MacBeth, Danette Glueck was Lady MacBeth, Glen Harper was MacDuff and Bobby Horecka was Malcolm. I played three roles--Banquo, the drunken porter and one other which I no longer remember. The production was spectacular (for a pre-Glee era 3A high school effort). Tilotta spent probably the entire budget on elaborate costume rentals. There were sound and lighting effects. The finale, when a dying MacBeth descends into unambiguous madness, was enhanced with MacBeth's enemies--both living and dead--returning to deliver key, portentious lines from earlier in the play. It was breathtaking (relatively speaking). At district competition, after we finished, actors from rival schools lined up to congratulate us and say they were in competition for second place. Were we overconfident? Maybe, but with good reason. It all came crashing down when the sole judge, a drama prof from Sam Houston State, castigated us for not being just like the Orson Welles' version of MacBeth, because that was the only good version. We did not advance. Tilotta, in a fit of emotion, packed up all the costumes and shipped them off the next morning. We never had a public performance of the play. Our family and friends never got to see what we'd spent three months perfecting. We didn't even have a video copy of a dress rehearsal, because Principal Simmons (who delighted in meddling and exerting his power where he had no business) forbade Tilotta to video any rehearsals because "It would make the students self-conscious and they wouldn't be any good." All these years later, it still makes me sad. A lot of students worked hard to make that play the best it could be. They deserved better.

My own acting skills were enough to earn me try-out invitations for theatrical scholarships at a few universities in state. Those same skills were not enough to actually win me any scholarships. I learned quickly in the one acting class I took in college that there are talented people out there that I'm not worthy to do line readings with, much less act. But my stage experience did lead me to a deep appreciation of Shakespeare on both stage and screen (Ian McKellen's version of Richard III is inspired) and the hard work real actors do to make it seem so effortless.

So Fairy Girl has my whole-hearted backing. As long as acting is an interest to her, we'll gladly shuttle her to local theatre programs. If her interest holds, then by golly we'll consider shuttling her to the occasional TV commercial audition in San Antonio, or indy film casting call in Austin. And when it comes time for her to go to college, I know some folks in the Texas State Department of Theatre and Dance, so she'll get a fair shot to impress the folks there with her talents. What she does with those opportunities is up to her.

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