Three Big Life Changes Part I: Drama

Wow, I'm tired. I started this blog in the summer partially as a way to get me writing every day. I had forgotten how, during the school year, I do write every day...leaving surprisingly little brain-juice for blogging.

Anyway, back to my first Big Life/Faith Crisis, part umpteenth:

When I entered the ninth grade (1990-ish), I was for the very first time in my life a non-PK. The double whammy of the economic recession and the Southern Baptist Convention's lurch to the right had left my pastor father without a ministerial appointment. Instead, he found work as custodian in the University-affiliated Baptist Church in the town we lived in. The pastor and staff joked that the church's standards were so high that even the custodian had a Master of Divinity.

Such were the thin jokes of our family's hard time.

My mother fell back on her pre-seminary teaching degrees, getting hired as an overworked English/Speech teacher in a tiny, rural school which my sister and I attended for that year. The next year, Mama switched to an even tinier school even further away, and my sister and I transferred to the large school system of the town we lived in.

Again--hard times all around. We went bankrupt. We switched rental homes several times, once because the land lord (we discovered) had been charged with some illegal something-or-other. I didn't mind that time; that house was infested with fleas. You walked across the living room and felt them biting your feet. You sat on the furniture and felt them biting your arm. You went to school or church and--ugh--found one biting you. I still have the occasional nightmare about fleas...

I also developed an intolerance of roast beef sandwiches from Arby's. At the time they advertised 5 sandwiches for $5, which was just the right price for our cash-strapped family. I think I just overloaded. I can barely stand the thought of them now.

Of course, I shouldn't overdramatize. Lots of families were much worse off than we were. We ate cheaply, but never in my memory did we have to go without food. Nor were we ever without a home, without a car, or without clothing. And--corny as it sounds--we had each other, drawing closer together as a family.

Three big factors changed my life in a big way during that time.

The first involved my going to a very large high school. I had grown up in a series of small towns and had attended a series of small schools. This high school had approximately 1200 students. Though that's still small by many standards, that number was larger than the population of the previous town we had lived in. It was immense to me, overwhelming. The first day (10th grade), I wandered from class to class, hoping I had the right schedule.

I had wanted to take Honors Biology; at the time, I had an interest in ichthyology--long story. I realized, however, that the Biology class I was in wasn't quite at the Honors level. What tipped me off: we were assigned to draw a food chain--any food chain--that included humans. One student asked, "Do we eat eagles?" Intellectual snob that I am, I asked the teacher (discretely) if this was Honors Biology. She said no, I went to the office to get added into that class and my whole course schedule changed.

I got into Honors Biology (Teri Savage as a teacher--what a hoot she was!), yes, but I also got put into a Debate class (largely because it was the only available elective for my new schedule). Debate class involved participation in the high school's speech and theatre club as well as trips to weekend speech/theatre competitions. I joined the club, went to the competitions... and began getting involved in theatre. I got cast in Oklahoma! (my first play) that year. I played cranky old farmer Andrew Carnes, who opens the second act with "The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends" (I went blank and just mouthed the words during one performance). I got to say "Hell" on stage. I made friends (!!). What a blast.

More: I discovered, at those weekend competitions, that I was terrible at debate. Just terrible. I liked writing arguments, seeing two sides of the same issue, encountering philosophy and persuasive skills--but I did not like live confrontation. I still don't. So I never did well in debate, which happened on Friday nights. I stayed at those competitions, however, through Saturday, which is when the drama competitions happened (events with names like "Dramatic Duet" or "Humorous Interpretation").

I saw two high-schoolers from another school perform a ten-minute cutting from On Golden Pond and thought: This, truly, is Art. Also: I think I can do this.

The next year my (my 11th grade) sister joined that school (as a 10th grader), and we began competing in Humorous Duet (a ten-minute cutting of How to Eat Like a Child And Other Lessons in Not Being A Grown-up by Delia Ephron). We won.

I continued to act, I got cast in shows, I had a circle of friends, I won some medals--it was like I had discovered some kind of varsity sport I was good at.

From then on, theatre was a part of my life. That was the first change.

More tomorrow,

JF