“A Strange Turn of Events” Part 8
My Adventures and short brush with Fame in Community Theatre continues..
My main concern during the rehearsals was getting my lines down. During my brief career as an Actor, I had several occasions where I went up on my lines – translated – going blank.
Also, I tended to mangle words when tired or rattled giving a new meaning to a line. Hey, suddenly the play could go from a Tragedy to a Comedy in no time by a garbled utterance.
So I really buckled down and hammered the lines into my head. Often I would wander the stage and say to myself “Ok, at this spot on the stage I say blah, blah, blah.” Then I’d move to another point on stage and I’d say “Now here I am supposed to say “blah, blah, blah” and so on.
I continued this practice through rehearsals and even during the run of the play. I was going to be damned sure I knew my lines – no going up on these suckers for me. But the word mangling was another story.
To give you a better of what I mean by word mangling or mispronunciation I need to flash forward to almost a year later. I was cast in a production of “Dracula” as the titular character – “The Count.”
I was very excited to play this part but I was also going through the disintegration of my marriage – so my nerves were shot and the anxiety was high.
During one rehearsal a character is supposed to turn to me and say: “So Count, are planning to stay in Carfax long?” That was my cue to say: ” It seems it is my Destiny. The walls of my castle are broken and the Shadows of my Ancestors are many – You see Gentleman I am the last of my race.”
Well, some evil SoB made a crack about my line. That humorous little joke decided to lodge itself in my medulla oblongata where it would wait patiently to emerge at the most importune time to humiliate me.
It didn’t have to wait long.
We were well into the run of Dracula and on one night in front of a packed house it decided “It’s Time!” So there I was on stage and the character turned to me and said: “So Count, are you planning to stay in Carfax long?” To which I replied “It seems it is my DENSITY! Uh ..DUH WAAHS…Of MY SOMETHING …IS …I NO…I MEAN…THEY’RE.ERRR…”
The audience erupted into peals of laughter – “HA, HA HA HA, HA!!! The rest of my speech that I spoke was so incomprehensible that to this day I don’t have a clue to what I said. But it must have been even more witless as the Audience continued to roar with laughter.
This poor Count must have turned scarlet as I felt the white pancake makeup running down my face in rivulets. “Dear God please take me now!” I muttered to myself – wishing that my vampiric powers would include the ability to magically disappear from the stage.
No such luck!
Somehow I managed not to flee the stage in embarrassment and so we able to continue with the show – once the audience had settled down. The rest of the performance featured a very deflated and chastened Count.
End of Part 8
To be continued…
