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Played out
By briantologist | July 26, 2004
Murder Mystery Play = Over. Me = Pleased. Gradually returning to normal. Maybe. I think.
So yeah, what’s kind of crazy is not necessarily the fact that I enjoyed myself, as ultimately the whole thing was a pretty enjoyable enterprise: Nearly every night somebody brought some sort of excellent homemade food product, and toward the end there was wine at pretty much every rehearsal. Plus I found out what happens to reasonable people when they live in Tulsa for decades at a time: They clot together in little flotillas, and (okay, not surprisingly) the Arts & Humanities Council is one of them. Good people, is what I mean.
No, the semi-crazy thing is that now I kind of feel like auditioning for legitimate theater. Fortunately there’s none of that here in town, so I can start auditioning for community theater, which I understand is a punchline in and of itself, but look, ya gotta start your hobbies small. Apparently there are tryouts coming up for “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but in that I’m neither Atticus, a tall man in his 40s or 50s (two out of three! C’mon!) nor a black couple in his twenties, I may be out of the running on that one. D’oh.
In a way there’s something inherently sad about the desire to perform, as it’s a thinly veiled desperate plea for positive attention, and in a perfect world we’d all be all self-contained and happy, except that as I’m typing this I know it’s not true. That wouldn’t make a perfect world, it’d make a pretty fucking boring world, one with a lot of really boring art in it, if it even had any art to begin with.
Thank god we got that settled.
Topics: Hoo!, Thinkin'. | 5 Comments »
July 26th, 2004 at 10:48 am
Community theater is fun; I crawl up on the stage every other year or so. The best part is hanging out for several hours every night with people you otherwise wouldn’t — the semi-retired lawyer, the high school English teacher, the college student.
There’s nothing thinly veiled about the plea for positive attention. It’s pretty blatant. There’s nothing desperate about it either, because there’s a very real and present possibility that your play and/or your performance will suck ass. Community theater is like gambling with your self-esteem.
Which is fun.
July 26th, 2004 at 6:03 pm
Brianbyrne!
If anyone could play Atticus Finch, it’s you!
DO IT, seriously.
July 27th, 2004 at 12:15 am
Once several years ago in response to the question “What should we do tonight, dear?” Shaniqua replied, “Perhaps we should see some community theater.”
This remains for reasons I cannot explain, the funniest thing she has ever said to me.
Megalodon–So if you can’t be Atticus Finch, have you considered Boo Radley?
July 27th, 2004 at 8:32 am
That’s one of the funniest bits of dialogue I can imagine. Somehow it’s funnier when I imagine it happening between the two of you.
July 27th, 2004 at 1:04 pm
No really, you always have reminded me of Gregory Peck.