Were/are you into drama at school? Perhaps you were a bit of a luvy like Pretend Girlfriend Boy, or did you just do it for a bit of a laugh? Were your school's plays infamously awful? Do you have any stories of things going wrong? Or do you just think school plays are stupid and these kids should stop ponsing around and get out onto the football field?

-- Tim (tim@newmail.net), April 09, 2000

Answers

I did it for the endless card games we got to play in the changing room during performances; a good thing because every part I had was the size of an electron. Apart from the lead role in "Little Red Riding Hood In Latin" (which no one understood except the scream), I amassed a total of twenty one lines in four performances. 19 in "Everyman", 1 in "Tartuffe" ("Nor I!"), 1 in "Oliver!" ("A wallet fat.") and a whopping zero in "The Boyfriend". The most lucid memory I have was at the end of "Oliver!": we'd all left stage and were desperately getting out of our horrible brown waistcoats and short trousers, when this bloke burst into the changing room and yelled, "Back on stage!"

-- Zed (zed@swansongs.net), April 10, 2000.

You may have past seen me as chorus member #56 in "Annie Get Your Gun" two years ago, though I doubt it as I am only 5' 1" and was standing behind some sort of gigantress amazon girl for the chorus scenes in the first act.

This year was better, I played Ursula in "Bye Bye Birdie", and I got the best line in the entire musical: "We're gonna have an orgy!" Wonder what the nuns thought about that! =)

-- Lauren (benten@primary.net), April 10, 2000.

In fourth grade I was in our class's attempt at doing the story of the animals who were going to Bremen to be musicians, and the exact name of that escapes me at this point. In high school I was never an actor in any of the theatrical stuff; not enough balls, I guess. However, I was on the stage crew my junior and senior years, and that experience was rewarding. (We performed "Bye Bye Birdie" and "The Wizard of Oz", respectively. Oddly enough [or maybe not], I eventually went out and bought the original Broadway cast soundtrack of BBB, just because I liked the music so much. Then I realized I liked *our* cast singing it better than the Broadway cast. Go figure.)

To whoever got to do the orgy line in "Bye Bye Birdie": I remember that line, I loved it! Then again, I got a rather embarrassing nickname as a result of that scene with Spanish Rose in the back room of the bar with the Shriners, but we won't go into that right now.

-- Le Tim Des Etats-Unis (mediabrat@hotmail.com), April 28, 2000.