The Tale of the Outraged Director

Hiya, guys! It's been a while! I hope everything is going great with everybody! Spiffy even! :o)
I wasn't really certain what to blog about, or even if I was going to, until my new pal Val kinda screamed, BLOG! at me via the Twitterwaves! Buckle up, kiddies! For those of you that have read the bloggage before, as always, it's gonna be a bumpy ride with plenty of rib crackin' fun!
I figure I shall tell you a tale. A tale of my youth when I was just a silly young thing about 700 or so...wait...that wasn't me. That was Anya(gotta love the Buffy references)! Where was I? Ah, yes! I was somewhere around the ripe old age of 16. Usually, when my stories begin with my age, you can about bet that it's going to be about a theatrical experience. Well, guess what? This one's no different. This one may not be so much theatrical as the events surrounding the theatrics. You've heard the story of THE ALABAMA DENNY'S. You've heard the tale of THE DRUNKEN ACTRESS OF LES MIS, but for your reading pleasure, or demise, not sure which yet, you shall hear, THE TALE OF THE OUTRAGED DIRECTOR. As I was saying, I was 16. Everyone caught up now? Good.
Sixteen was a pretty fun age for me. I'd spent a month during the summer with a friend of mine in California, and hi-jinks always ensued when we were together. Still do. After I had to come back to Georgia, I was kinda down. I always hate to leave LA. Anyway, I came back and was working at a local bookstore at the time. I'd been employed there since the previous year and I'd asked the owner if there was anyway I could take my month off. He was always real good to work with me about things like that. I'll never find another manager like him. I'd had to have a certain type of schedule to fit around my acting. Anyway, I started back at work and then the next week it was auditions galore. A friend of mine and I, yet another one I tended to get into trouble with, were audition partners.
For those of you unfamiliar with theater audition etiquette, I shall take a moment to fill you in. In a cold reading, which is typically the first step in an open audition, you sit in this circle of people, some of whom you've never worked with before, and read these parts, yielding expressive voices, when you've only had about three minutes to review the character you're reading for. After separating the sheep from the goats, so to speak, the director decides who he'd like to audition.
My friend Chris and I used to feed off of one another's acting. We'd been improv partners for probably close to six years by that point in time, and it was automatic for me to say something, being completely dramatic, and for him to just pick up another character part in tandem with my own. We could keep up a good ruse for HOURS! Naturally, he's going to be the person I pick to audition with for the couple audition section, right?
I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me back up. The second step is a solo audition. Since I did musical theater, this typically called for a spoken monologue and a solo song choice. Well, I, being the Buffy obssessed individual that I was at the time, chose to do Buffy's "Men With Your Sales" monologue from RESTLESS. I had absolutely no idea that the director, a very handsome gay male, absolutely loved Buffy. I mean, LOVED Buffy.
I began delivering the monologue and I hear this...ya know...I'm not real sure what you'd call it. It was a cross between a squeal and a shriek. A very disturbing sound. He'd recognized it automatically. Well, I was so stunned by his outburst, and yes, I KNOW a trained thespian is supposed to be able to continue no matter what happens, but you didn't hear this sound! Chris, being the awesome friend that he was, yells at me from somewhere offstage, "I SHOWED UP EARLY SO I GOT TO BE COWBOY GUY!" which got an eyeroll from me, but it made me able to find my place and attempt to take back over.
I was planning on taking back over anyway, until the director shouted at Chris, "Shut up, you oversized government experiment! You're ruining the best piece of pop culture in any world that's ever been created!" and yes, he was talking about Riley, but it left Chris stunned.
The director composed himself from his mental breakdown and said, in a very calm and serene voice, from the yell that had rang through the theater, "Continue, Miss Holmes." So I began again, making it all the way through the short monologue and into my song, FULL OF GRACE. Buffy nut. Remember?
I basically knew I had the part in the bag if the awe in the director's eye was anything to go off of. Any part I wanted for that matter. Chris auditioned, and the director loved him too, so we'd both made it through to the team audition. Most of the time, during a team audition, you typically drag someone to the audition that isn't planning on having a part in the play. It's hard to audition with another actor because you have to worry about one overshadowing the other, and then the director doesn't see the potential in the other person. Chris and I balance pretty well, so it wasn't really a problem.
We did an excerpt from a Rowan Atkinson skit called FATAL BEATINGS in which a teacher is explaining to a very upset father that his son has been beaten to death by said teacher. Very funny skit! After that came the duo song number and we performed PAST THE POINT OF NO RETURN from PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. We both got the parts we wanted and all was hugs and puppies...except for this one minor problem. This girl that the cast began calling Margoat behind her back.
The girl's hair might have been bleached blonde, but her brain was the real deal. I mean this girl could tell you anything about what color clashed with what, but ask her the capital of Georgia, her home state, and you'll wait a year before she comes up with Buckhead...and no that isn't right. She makes a grape look intelligent. Margoat, bless her heart, had a penchant for wearing white. All white. No one ever knew why. We'd finally had it with her one day. She thought she knew better than any of the other cast members what we were doing wrong with our parts if we had any issues.
Chris and I, the troublemakers of the group, devised a scheme to shut Margoat up. We'd put our heads together and decided that the next rehearsal, when Margoat came in wearing her signature whiteness, that we, along with three other cast mates, would bring our supersoakers...filled with purple grape juice as a manner of payback, so we went into the costume room two days later. There's no modesty in theater, you all change together. Hence the reason we were all in the room waitng for her.
There were somewhere around 8 excited cast members in the room, 5 of us with SupersoakerXP water guns filled with grapey goodness. It was dark on stage as there were no stage lights on, meaning the costume room offstage was dark as well. The door opened, and Chris yelled, "NOW!" We fired before the lights even came on, only seing the outline of our outraged target.
After emptying our guns all over the figure in the door, Tyler, another Supersoaker wielder, realized that the screams and shouts were coming from a very feminine sounding man. Chris flipped the light switch on and saw a now purple clad, irate director standing before him. It turned out Greg, director man, had somewhere he had to be and was about to call everyone to let them know we weren't rehearsing.
It just so happened that since he was going somewhere special, he'd felt the need to buy a brand new Ralph Lauren Polo baby blue linen suit. Parts of it were still blue, but I really don't think he appreciated the tye-dyed effect we'd given the ensemble. That could have been him pointing at the door and saying, "Go." in a deathly cold voice after yelling at the entire room for 15 minutes tipping me off though. Sigh. Guess we'll never know if he was really angry.
Rehearsal resumed the next week, and the incident was never spoken of again. The production was a success, and Greg stopped directing right after that...wonder why? Hmmm.
Till next time, guys! :o)