parasitegirl | Damned fringe on top

In blogging about the past and dredging up my days in my high school drama department I knew that I was running a very real risk. Last night, and today, I am suffering the consequences. Oklahoma, Oklahoma, Oklahoma I typed and the ear worms burrowed.

I fucking hate having songs from Oklahoma stuck in my head. While I remember the process of being the assistant director to our school's production of it, I have successfully blocked most of the actual show, scenes, and songs.

I don't care if the farmer and the cowboy can be friends, if they get stuck in my head then they can both go fuck themselves. Farmer/Cowboy slash....mmmm...I'll give credit where it is due, Rebecca J, our director, was good at casting hot sporty boys.

So, this blog is brought to you by the letter Ooooooooooooooooooooklahoma.

At my school, the big musical was held first semester and the big play was second semester. Being asked to be the assistant director (based on my work students directing peers in some one-act plays my Junior/3rd year of HS) of the big musical meant that I was in a one-student independent study class with Rebecca J the first semester of my Senior (4th and final) year. Independent study with Rebecca was rather unstructured and what needed to be done depended on the schedule of show prep and performances. We also talked a lot about theories behind how to direct and guide actors, I don't remember much of it. The start of the semester was slow and our final exam was spent going out for morning buns at Ovens of Brittany bakery/cafe.

Independent study had some serious perks. I had my own desk in the drama department. Department is a fancy word for the room next to the drama room, a room that also had misc costumes, a few couches, a TV and a video collection. It had a bedazzler. I still regret not stealing that bedazzler. I had my own phone with which to place random calls to my then boyfriend...who wasn't in high school. Rebecca had given me a pile of hall passes, all pre-signed, to use at my discretion.I had my own copy code for the faculty copy machine. Rebecca was an overweight woman with a bad knee, and the drama area was in a side tower of the school up a few flights of stairs, so I was the copy-girl.

These odd perks may have been why a few younger students and some student teachers, believed me to be a student teacher assigned to the drama department.

I used those hall passes to escape study halls and the business class I had signed up for and would sleep on the drama couch. I used the phone to see if I should head over to my boyfriend's place after school, or to leave him amusing messages (his company had downsized and he was job hunting while enjoying the severance pay) And I used my copy code to...well...make copies.

Oklahoma was a behemoth of musical. I've mentioned that I never appeared in a major school production, which is true. WHo knows if the fact that I was never in a school play was due to a dearth of talent on my part, the glut of talent in the school, or politics. I can only speculate...but there was no mystery to me not being in a musical.

One of my Facebook friends, one who was actually in the background cast for Oklahoma, remembers a fine performance as a saloon girl I turned in in Guys and Dolls. He wrote on my Facebook wall about it. I had to break the news to him that his memory was going, I was in no musicals, ever...but that, yes, I was the girl who broke him of the habit of calling the females dancers "hootchie-cootchi la-la-las"

It's not that I can't sing. My singing was probably passable, but I couldn't audition to save my life. Over the years I've come to understand what my singing range is and that I can be an entertaining singer in my range. In high school I not only thought that I should be singing songs 1-2 octaves above what is realistic for me (I am firmly in the Liza Minelli/Cabaret range and seemed to think I should be singing little boy songs from Oliver) I also suffered from stage fright. Song-specific stage fright. I would get on stage, the pianist would start, and my mouth would open, only to emit a high pitched noise only certain mammals can hear. Once I got past that point, I tweaked and freaked and squeaked and poor Oliver's song sounded like the wee lad was hitting puberty and that puberty was hitting him back.

The choreography portion of the audition, or the monologue, not an issue! It didn't bloody matter by then. Week and freak...that does it. And my high school was filthy with good voices.

The auditions for Oklahoma lasted two days. We cast 67 kids, two had to drop out. We had a professional choreographer from the local theater scene (who also danced as the male lead in the ballet scene, because our female dancer was worlds more pro/talented than any male we could cast) and a set designer from the local scene.

Our public school took art very seriously. Every year we had a fine arts week to exhibit the whole range of art: gallery shows, demonstrations, one act plays, music and dance recitals, bands, pottery auctions...

Our male lead, Keith, had been competing in international barbershop quartet competitions since age 4. Our female lead was an innocent and soft (dare I say virginal?) Amanda P...who some of my friends list have worked with professionally....it was that sort of school. And Rebecca was also good about colorblind casting.

The spurned Jacob was also in the cast, as Jud. And I'd like to state for the record that the fact that my father and stepfamily erupted in mad giggles during his solo had nothing to do with who he was to me...they couldn't help it and apologized to me later. There is a reason that that Jud's song is usually omitted...and no amount of holding his arms away from his body at odd angles was going to make Jacob's 2% body-fat build look bulky and imposing.

Oklahoma was not a small affair. We would be performing on the school stage two weekends in a row (3 shows a weekend?) and then dismantling the set and moving the cast/crew/orchestra (120 students total) to a nearby city to be the one high school presenting a full-production at a statewide high school drama thingy in La Crosse (the other full plays being presented by local theaters, and the other schools restricted to one-act plays).

The first thing we did with the cast, once assembled, was a night of watching the goddamned Oklahoma movie so that we could discuss what would and would not be the same in our rendition. Rebecca made me the chaperone of this event and fled the scene. Coward.

There was drama and there was drama.

I liked the cast, minus my enemy-ex-J. The leads were unfailingly sweet. Amanda talked to me about her discomfort at the idea of kissing boys in the show, she may not have ever kissed a boy, and we bonded a little. Keith (whose family also raced Corveres or however you spell them Nadar-magnets) would come over to my house on weekend when I was trying to work on my big Buick...and had failed..to save the day...and he'd talk to me about his discomfort about kissing Amanda. An elementary school friend of mine was cast in a secondary role and I knew the orchestra and back-up singers and dancers fairly well from my back-stage work and stuff.

And...thanks to Rebecca...sporty eye-candy aplenty. Them cowboys and farmers could do some tasty jumps and tricks.

Prior to the show going live, life was hectic. I had not yet discovered a love of coffee and was drinking 6-8 Dr.Peppers a day. My friend Cappy had fucked up meeting a deadline for getting me my art slides for a scholarship application and I'd punched in his mailbox after he threw me out of his flat...and so he wasn't speaking to me but was dating my best friend. Musical time overlapped with portfolio reviews and college applications. And my love life...yeah.. a barrel of monkey-men.

I don't remember much about the show itself...except my father and stepfamily unable to suppress giggles during Jud's somber song, a thing I secretly loved them for.

I do remember the cast parties. My public school was well funded thanks to the property taxes paid by the school area residents. Those houses that brought me the art-metas program that taught me how to cast my own jewelry? Well, Dean Mommy's house wasn't kicking in the big bucks, but the houses where we could have our after-show nighty 120+ cast/crew/orchestra parties were. They were SWANK.

They were, of course, dry parties. You don't need booze when you have 120 excited high schoolers in a huge house.

I remember a flirtation with one of the sporty boys the first weekend. Andy was the younger brother of one of my classmates, Nick. The first party he'd ended up giving me a nice back-massage (I was wearing a strappy flower print dress...I remember these thing)and had asked me what I was majoring in...which is when I broke the news that I was his peer, baby, not his chaperone.

The next night we'd ended up wrestling in one of the rooms. I am not using wrestling as a euphemism for making out. I mean rolling on the floor, grappling, headlocks...if you were a guy friend who went to high school with me, you remember. I liked to 'rassle boys. I haven't done it in a while, not since Travis and I tussled in New York and bruised the heck out of each other in-front of a disturbed group of party goers.

Andy and I 'rassled. I gave him a ride home (and I regret not putting any moves on him then) in which I let him drive my car (the Buffalo, a '79 Buick Le Sabre, my mahayana of love) despite him only having a learner's permit.

I should have made my move then, because the following week I was firmly told by Rebecca not to be touching young Andy or other nubile young un's. For real. I don't know if she said anything to him, but I was warned off.

"You know that he's too young for you."

" He's nearly my age!"

"And...you date boys your own age?"

"...."

Let's give it up to Rebecca for making me feel like a Cougar at the ripe age of 17!

Onward to La Crosse!

I brought my graduation year yearbook to Japan to use when I taught high school. It was quite a hit, still is. Guys I date sometimes have questions about American high school years, the same way I have questions about the role that love hotels played in their high school days. I have been consulting the yearbook as I find, and am friended by, more of the past on facebook.

When Facebook tells me that I might know someone, sometimes it is a thing of joy, other times I wave my middle finger at the screen and say "Why, yes, I Doooo know them...aaaaassshoole" and then there are the names that send me to the yearbook.

I've been joking about a trip to Great America with one guy I hung out with, Mike, and my yearbook confirms that Mike, his brother, and I did indeed ride the Shockwave 8 times.

Another entry in my yearbook, this one from a boy named Sheehy, ends:

P.S. Only you and I will ever know what really happened in la Crosse.

But, I am totally gonna let you know.

La Crosse was the last show. We were there for one night in a large hotel full of high school students from all over the state, four to a room. Yeah. Hijinks. We struck the set, piled it into a moving truck (it was multi-leveled, complex, and professionally huuuuge) and we got into our buses. The stage was rebuilt, the strobe light warnings posted (yeah) and some strobe issues fixed (or not, I can't remember) and Oooooooooklahoma!

As you can imagine, 120 kids, many of whom were now allowed to shave the beards they grew to look burly, all finished with a show and still on a performance high....? I remember being asked by multiple cast members if I was a chaperone that night. I told them all bets were off. I was taking no responsibility for NOBODY.

I was in a room with three band girls, but they went to sleep early. I left my room to see what was up in the other rooms. Stupidity, poker (money and other), screaming in the parking lot, bands of off-the-leash thespians, impromptu dance parties, shaved faces and heads...

I found Sheehy, a guy who I knew from my time with a Unitarian Youth group. My experience was that if you take field trips with the Unitarian Youth group they will ask you, nicely, not to share sleeping bags with members of the opposite sex, or same sex if you swing that way, because they can't ignore that. My freshman year, my My-Age-Unitarian-boyfriend, Doug, and I would fumble silly, virginally, in the woods on Unitarian trips and then sleep near each other, maybe holding hands, in the communal sleeping room.

Sheehy's bedmate had fled the scene, out being stupid, so we decided to climb into bed, fully dressed, to cuddle up, chat, and sleep a bit together. It was comfortable/romantic/friendly, but not sexual, if you can imagine that.

I remember us snuggled under the covers as a band of idiots passed outside the door, and backed up. "Sheehy is in there..with ROBARTS!" was proclaimed. We could hear the whooping, sniggering and high-fiving...they jokingly pounded on the door as if they wanted in. We curled tighter together, laughing at the idea of what we were doing being sordid in the way they implied. Silly boys, my wild reputation was based on pure speculation. Hell, ask Rebecca, it wasn't like I was screwing any of my classmates!

The next morning Rebecca was PISSED. Over morning coffee she bitched to me about various stupid shit the other students had pulled the night before. I decided to cover my ass, with disclosure honesty, and told her that I had spent the night in Sheehy's bed.

She looked at me like my brain had fallen out.

"Oh, Kayt, I know I don't have to worry about what you do."

And, while she was right...and while there was something complementary about being treated as someone outside my peer group, as someone beyond the worries held by teachers herding students...there was still that awkward sensation of being called an other. It wasn't a unique moment in high school. I was used to distancing myself from core parts of my identity. Older friends who would bitch about younger people, but assure me that I wasn't included in their blanket statements, because they didn't think of me that way...or guys bitching about girls, but ushering me in as being more like one of the guys...and now,as much as I should have been another young one of her brood to fuss over, and worry about, and be happy or disappointed by...I wasn't. I was reliable, mature, and too old for my kind.

Go, Underaged Cougars, rah! rah! Rah!