Actors like anyone else have their own personality quirks and may fuss at or over each other but at the same there is a camaraderie behind those footlights that makes the experience special. Just to lighten things up a bit I thought some of you might enjoy this true story about what first proved that to me.

Though I was in my middle 30's, I was as green and naive as could be when I first stepped on a summer stock stage. I was also nervous and frightened, especially about remembering my lines.

I was first cast as a "Stage Manager' in a play within the play version of Thorton Wilder's Skin of Your Teeth. My part called for me to entrance onto the stage in the middle of several scenes and fuss at the actors about some detail or other. I was supposed to move directly then to the apron's edge and "prvately" inform the audience about what I thought I was wrong. Then I exited.

The first night, upon my first entrance, I strode out in my costume (simple street clothes and open necked shirt) gesturing (as the director had wanted) with my only prop, a simple clipboard with about a dozen sheets of paper clipped onto it. I gestured too hard and the clipbpard sailed out of my hand and crashed onto the stage scattering sheets of paper in every direction.

I was in a panic. I knew that there was a lot of stage movement in this scene and all I could think of was actors slipping and falling because of those papers.

I dropped to my knees and started to crawl aroound picking them up one at a time. Almost immediately I realized that the urging voice I was hearing was the prompter. I wasn't saying anything. Then I realized I couldn't remember a single line nor make out what the prompter was saying. I just stopped in the middle of the stage and when I looked up I could see that the four other actors, on stage, each an experienced professional, were grinning at me.

Now I was both scared and angered and I sat up straight and said to them, "Well don't just stand there, say something!"

They did They went on acting, improvising as they went..

"Just like he always is, blaming it on the actors."

"He's always griping at us, picky, picky about little unimportant things."

"Serves him right."

"So true, I won't even help him clean up the mess. Who needs a stage manager anyway?"

I thought my days had ended and slumped. Then one of the actors said, "Well, I don't know what he had in mind but if I were him I would have said....." Suddenly I realized that this actor was saying my forgotten lines and solving the problem. The audience was laughing, unaware that all of this was unplanned. I was smiling but about ready to cry. I finished my housekeeping and got off stage as fast as I could.

The rest of the play that night went ok and I remembered my other lines but I later took an awful ribbing from the professional actors after the final curtain.

The best advice I got was one of the actors facetiously telling me that perhaps I should write my lines on those sheets of paper and then I could read them while I was picking them up. The director wanted to know if I planned to rewrite any more of the scenes.

The next performance, now with both my lines and clipboard very firmly in hand, I made my entrance. Immediately, as though on cue, one of the actors ad libbed aloud, " I suppose he'll throw his clipboard at us...he usually does."

I didn't yet feel like a real actor, but I did feel like a member of the company and appreciated the experience more every day. There is something special about being behind the footlights.

Stan/gramps

-- Edited by gramps3 at 23:43, 2007-07-30