Oh, to be young and stupid again! Well, maybe not stupid but unhindered by the knowledge that life brings.
I’m back in my hometown this week visiting my family for Thanksgiving and it’s impossible not to feel a little nostalgic. Life here for me was simpler. I don’t mean to imply that that involved sitting on the front porch drinking lemonades while the town folk strolled by on a lazy Sunday afternoon. No, it was nothing that languid; but it was simpler because in my childhood and teen years my desire to be on stage was driven by the pure joy of performing and not by the need to pay my bills.
Once you start to worry about whether or not you can perform a certain feat eight times a week, you start to shut yourself off to the freedom of being able to take a few chances, to be a little stupid and to attempt to do things simply to find out if you can. One of these liberated explorations of my limits came during my senior year in high school.
I had been cast as P.T. Barnum in Barnum. If you’re not familiar with the show it is based on the life of the great showman Phineas Taylor Barnum and his journey to becoming one half of the force behind the “Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth”. The show is usually produced using a circus motif for the sets and the action of the play – our production was to be no exception.
There’s not much call for circus abilities in Southeast Missouri, so upon being cast I wasn’t too surprised to find myself woefully inadequate for the rigors of the role. But the doltishness of youth reared its bonehead and said to me, “No problem!” I threw myself headlong into learning all I could about the talents that can be found inside the tent and by the end of the rehearsal period I was juggling like a pro, had mastered tricks on the trampoline and was walking a high wire like my feet were glued to it.
Alright, alright, so maybe that’s not quite the entire truth, but I did learn how to juggle (sort of) and I was able to bound on a trampoline from one level of the stage to another with the grace of a cat (kind of) and as far as the tightrope is concerned… well that’s another story.
I guess I should have said, “There’s no way that’s going to happen” or demanded more time for rehearsals but I was 18 and I was having a great time. I thought that if I could pull this off I would really be a hit with the ladies; because as you know, there is nothing that high school girls are more impressed with than a musical theatre-loving, tight rope-walking, ball-juggling imbecile.
The first problem was that the wire didn’t show up until about three weeks before the show was to open and although I started rehearsing in earnest, there was no one to guide me or to tell me what to do or not to do. Trial and error, or maybe I should say trial and lots of error, were my only teachers.
Next I had to negotiate the challenges of the set up. Unfortunately, there is also not much call for circus riggers in Southeast Missouri. So who knew that the width of the stage was wider than the standard width for rigging a tight rope? Or who knew about the amount of pressure needed to keep a wire taut enough for walking on? Or who knew that the standard gage of wire should have been about double of what was actually used? I sure didn’t. I just thought that I was a novice who would soon figure out the mystery of the trick through diligence.
I wasn’t trying to put undue pressure on myself but failure was not an option. I was in my senior year so this was to be my swan song. In addition, the Saturday evening performance was intended to be a celebration of the past 20 years of musicals at the school. The audience was to be populated with specially invited alumni who had participated in those shows. With all of the factors involved how could anything possibly go wrong?
Well the short version of the answer to that question is that in all four of the performances I never made it all the way across the wire. I’d make it about three-quarters of the way to the other side and start to lose my balance so I’d jump down and cross the remainder of the distance on the stage, although Saturday night was different. I really wanted to make it all the way across because of all the alumni there watching, so when I started to lose my balance, instead of jumping down, I tried to quicken my pace so that I could make it all the way across the wire. Unfortunately in my haste I misstepped and before I knew what was happening I found myself lying on the stage staring up at the lights unable to sing (did I mention I was singing this whole time) because I had gotten the breath knocked out of me. I heard a huge gasp from the audience and my humiliation was complete.
The funny part is that I actually did make it across once. During the final dress rehearsal, while the show was being taped for archival purposes, I made it from one side of the stage to the other via the tightrope. I would have liked to have done it in front of an audience but the fact remains that despite all of the odds I made it.
These days the only tightropes I find myself on are the metaphorical ones. Trying to balance a life in the theatre with paying the bills, maintaining a marriage and raising a child puts me in the center ring on a daily basis. I often times find myself reluctant to take chances or attempting to do something simply to see if a can because the risks involved in any sort of misstep seem exponentially more damaging than a fall to the stage floor.
I don’t know if I felt braver then because I was or because I hadn’t yet had to face some of life’s bigger challenges - I guess there’s no way to know. But you can’t blame a guy for feeling nostalgic about a time when he thought he could do anything no matter the odds and the worse place he’d ever find himself was on his ass with the breath knocked out of him staring up at the lights.
