Last week I talked about some memories from early childhood through fifth grade, things that today tell me I was always meant to be in acting. One thing I need to mention, if I didn't before, was the ever-ongoing Story that pervaded life from elementary though after-college years. My sister and I used to fall asleep by improvising nightly. In the beginning it was simple things like Mario and Luigi go to the store. Then it was characters from Digimon at a summer camp with lots of drama. Later it evolved to huge plots and side plots, often combining other books' or games' plots but changing events.
The way it worked was we each decided on 5-10 characters and then became them. If the same character recurred (in middle school, it was usually Yugioh, and in high school it was Final Fantasy games' characters), usually the sister playing that one would keep them. There were some paradigm-shifting moments though when for example I would be instead be Celes and she would now be Locke for one session. And you know, I was actually really glad to learn the Brontë sisters did this, taking other peoples' characters and stories and doing what they wanted with them. To me, it contributes to my 10,000 hours needed for acting professionalism!
In the high school years especially, I would day-dream of things to happen to the characters and draw scenes from the night before. This living vicariously through people breaking bones, getting serious diseases, pregnancy, and alcohol withdrawal (and believe you me, we researched these things like real authors to make sure we knew what they could be going through) actually reminds me of Bluey now. In Bluey and basically all "play is serious business" schools of thought, kids have to play in order to understand the world around them and find their part in it. We did this too but with those kind of serious topics I mentioned above and as teenagers.
So besides The Story, our nightly escape from normal life, there's various memories from middle and high school I would like to share here. I recall our neighbor telling my mom something along the lines of, "you know your kid's an actor when you often catch them making faces in the bathroom mirror." They were talking about her daughter, who today is still in acting and was in community theatre back then too. I remember feeling jealous and thinking, "but I do that too." I was in band though and didn't feel like I could do more than one thing.
Speaking of band, or rather pit orchestra, for all the community theatre shows I ever played for, which was eight from high school to college (and two operas), I always felt "I'd rather be on the stage." I liked pit orchestra work because you had to be ready to launch into the song in a way that was different from symphonic work, where you were already going, no anticipation required. Over the course of the rehearsals and shows, I'd memorize their dialogue quickly and know where they were messing up.
As a funny side-story, in my 10th grade year, the show as Damn Yankees. There's a moment where the main character Joe gives back shoes he borrowed from another player before leaving, and the cast then sings a whole song related to this called "Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, MO." Except like 80% of the time, the kid playing Joe would just say something like, "see you guys later" and run off, leaving some other poor soul having to save the show by saying, "Oh! Uh, did you see Joe had no shoes on?" since apparently now he never borrowed them.
Then there was play-reading in English classes, such as Julius Caesar and Medea. Ugh, it would annoy me so much when reading up and down the rows of students, kids would so flatly read a statement that should have emotion in it! They were treating it like any other book. They weren't trying! I would always volunteer to read because I didn't trust other students to take it seriously haha, though this doesn't mean I was always chosen.
One silly story with reading Medea: we were reading a scene where the nurse talks about caring for Medea as a baby. Very interesting coincidentally, both me as Medea and my friend Sarah as the nurse had textbooks that were different from the rest of the class'. Ours included this line about "these old, withered breasts that fed you," while no one else's did. So it's like, as she was reading that, I followed along in mine without knowing anything was amiss, but for the rest of the class, they were wondering if Sarah made up that line, because they didn't have it. And like, they were random books passed out at the beginning of each class, so that me and her both received this "uncensored" version as we volunteered to read I thought was pretty funny.
I also have a "first foray into audiobooks" story. My friends and I decided we would record The Fellowship of the Ring as a cast on cassette tape in 7th grade. As a fun way to get into it, we started with a favorite chapter, "At the Sign of the Prancing Pony." It quickly became tiring and apparent that a lot of prep would be needed. Like Frodo sings a really long song in that chapter, and 1) I didn't have a tune for it, and 2) I'd forgotten how long that song is! So our recording ambition died somewhere in the middle of that song. Also because Frodo talks so much more in that chapter compared to the others, for my friends I think the process got tiring just because they were waiting forever for their turn to speak. I wonder if that tape exists anywhere in my parents' stuff now.
That's enough for now. I'll end next week with how I actually finally got into acting as a career choice. Thank you for reading!
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