A High School Morning When You’re a Theater Kid
It’s 6 am on a Wednesday, you’re 17 with untied sneakers and a schedule to keep. You carve a path in your dew-covered lawn as you sprint out to your beige beat-up Oldsmobile that stalls at stoplights. You’ve been up for about 10 minutes, and now it’s time to hit the road. You apply mascara in the car as you drive to the gas station, where the clerk knows your name and tells you to have a wonderful day as you rush off with your breakfast, coffee, and starbursts.
The air is orange and hazy, filled with pollution from cars, the local factory that employs half the town, and warm orange sunlight as the dawn comes over the mountains. You throw your backpack in your trunk and sip on your black lukewarm coffee as you zoom around town picking up all your friends who don’t have cars. You remind all of them to make sure they have their scripts and theater journals so that early-morning rehearsals go off without a hitch.
You arrive in the empty parking lot of the high school, covered in fast food litter, broken glass, and paintball splatter from years of teenager abuse. You arrive second only to the gym teacher who likes to do yoga on the football field at dawn. The giggles and squeaks of sneakers from your friends fill the empty high school halls as you make your way to the auditorium. As always, the theater room door is locked. But you’ve all learned to jiggle the door just right so it opens, your first lesson in freshmen theater.
Then the morning really starts. You are your thirty closest theater friends fill the auditorium and set up for the top of the show. You set props, sweep the stage, clean the dressing room, and sing songs together like a crew at sea. You’ve done this show after show, year after year. You all have bags under your eyes and stress about memorizing lines, but you love it. The energy and friendship you have with each other. The magic of the stage. What's your motivation to do this every morning? You do it for your hero.
When Your Director Finally Arrives
You’re done preparing for rehearsal, so you all sit and wait. Then you smell it. The light swirl of cherry tobacco and hear the clinking of cold iced tea in a bottle. Your director is here. She smiles warmly and greets you and the class like you haven’t seen each other in years. She is filled with excitement and love. She makes eye contact with every one of you, taking care to notice new haircuts or fancy jewelry. She makes you feel like you are the most special person in the world. She swaps her iced drink between her hands so her fingers don’t get too cold. Her huge carpet mary Poppins bag weighing down her left shoulder.
She dresses plain, like a librarian at a prestigious college. Black and brown sweaters, grey cardigans, and dress pants she bought from the thrift store fill her closet. The only color she wears comes from her fluorescent and bedazzled sets of reading glasses and purple eyeshadow.
The iced tea replaced coffee after she quit caffeine a few years ago. The cherry tobacco smell is from her father. It’s the smell of second-hand smoke, light. She has never touched the stuff but living with someone who does cover you in a smell you can’t quite cleanout. Her warm smile, friendly demeanor, bright eyes, and purple eyeshadow would never have you guess that just a few months ago her mother died of cancer, forcing her father to turn to his old addictions and come into her home. Her sister is in jail, her brother is broke, and her family is falling apart. These details slip out in conversations, her never telling the full story, only hinting at what her life is outside of the theater room. The only physical hint of the tragedy and trials she had to deal with is the bags under her eyes. But she never lets it distract her from her students, her teaching, or the stage.
Let Rehearsal Begin
She whips her hand like the fairy godmother transforming your rags in riches, and the pleasantries are over. The rehearsal has begun. She thunks her huge bag onto the front auditorium table, whipping out pens, binders, notebooks, Altoids, sewing kits, a timer, and more. You each run to position to begin whatever you are practicing that day. She smiles and projects her huge rich alto voice so it bounces off the walls “Begin!” and we do.
You know when to stop where you stand when she thunks her iced tea glass against her table like a judge with a gavel. The auditorium has a permanent tea stain in the spot she sits. She hands out notes and thunks notes with the authority of a god until we create the picture she sees in her head.
We do it again and again until our feet give out and we drip with sweat. We sing songs, dance, costume change, and act our 17-year-old hearts out until she laughs with glee. Whenever you got a scene right for the first time, she would laugh. A laugh that would fill her belly and turn her face red. It did not matter if it was drama, dance, or song, when you go it right she laughed with such glee you felt like Broadyway’s next top star. That laugh is your approval, and you crave it.
Meet my director
This was the average morning of my sophomore year through my final senior days. My director instilled a love of art, theater, and expressing yourself in me through our years together. She acted like the motherly figure I had never had. She has a 6th sense for mining students’ talents until they shone on stage like a broken glittering diamond.
She helped students on and off the stage. She used theater as a tool to teach us life lessons, and what is theater is not a way to teach lessons. Being an amazing teacher comes first to be an amazing director when it comes to community theater. At the end of the day, performance is FUN. Performance is lessons and teaching and hard work, but we do it because we love it. There are many ways to embody my director, not just by dressing like a 90’s cafe model and drinking iced tea every day, but by valuing the thing she valued.
The first way to be like my director is to find the meaning in your pieces before the execution.
While lighting, colors, costumes, and the set is vital to the success of plays. But my theater teacher always found the truest and root meaning of a scene before thinking of any of that. What are you trying to convey? Remember that when you do your scene and you are bound for success. Finding those motivations on and off stage is vital to carry on in life.
The most important Lessons
I carry the lessons my director taught me every step of the way. She taught me all the worlds a stage and you are constantly auditioning, so put your best foot forward every day. She taught me never to go anywhere without an emergency $20.00 bill in your bra. She taught me artists are the most passionate because they stare into the hardships of life and choose to create instead of cry. She taught me there were no excuses no matter what was going on in your personal life to not achieve your goals. Most importantly, she taught me that every day and every person you pass is precious, and to feel each moment, even if it hurts.
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