Too Hot! Too Hot! (Part 1)

I'm getting better at this, with the most loving of persistent nudges from a friend of mine. This is within a month of my last post, but two weeks later after my initial promised date. Ah well. It's been an interesting time of life for me. I have been working nights, and just had my shift change. I am going to school full time (and doing pretty well if I do say so myself) which includes learning Chinese. Cool stuff.

But we all know that's not why you're here. Today you get a feast.

I have a deep love for a man that I never met in mortality, because he was stone cold six feet under (or, rather, in the wall of a church) hundreds of years before I was born. We call him William Shakespeare. I've been able to be exposed to and perform a lot of his work. Most recently (hard to believe, but it was really just 4 or five months ago) I was able to put serious work into directing a play with an absolutely phenomenal woman. We'll get to her a little bit later. Together we (and I say we very loosely, I was not involved in every aspect) produced The Winter's Tale. It's kind of an obscure Shakespeare play about a jealous King who imagines that his wife is having an affair with his best friend, and starts tragically with several deaths, but ends merrily with many reunions. I got to see first hand just what has to go into a play to make it really good. Our production was top notch, if I do say so myself. Which, of course, you know, I do.

Today, I want to write a little thank you and personal, "Go you!" to each of the kids I got to work with. I totally loved them. Sometimes they drove me crazy, but they're in High School, and they kind of just do that. There were rough parts, and I wasn't always the best at managing egos, or helping them see what I saw, but I found wonderful things in every single one of them.

I'm going to do this Bill Simmons style. Bill Simmons is my favorite sports columnist, and he occasionally makes up obscure awards for sports seasons. So! Let's not make Much Ado About Nothing (ba-dum-ch!), and get rolling.

The "She Just Happened" award for most surprising performance.

One of the coolest parts of this process was getting to sit on the other side for auditions this year. I got to sit in a chair with my lap top and type away furiously as I watched kids act out their brief readings from the play. I didn't know any of them, or at least not well, so I was going into this cold. I got a lot of first impressions. Rachel came into the room and I almost instantly started to get uncomfortable. She just gushed nervous tension. She was really stiff, and was super slender and kind of awkward as a person. I couldn't get past what I saw at first when she walked in. I wholly anticipated that she would miss a word and be very flustered and not be able to go on.

I was wrong. Dead Wrong.

Rachel came in and delivered a beautiful monologue that was clear, and crisp. She had good feeling, and wasn't fidgety. She was poised. She slammed it down. Then she finished, broke character and was instantly the girl I thought I was going to see on stage again. Just a shy blonde girl whipping right out. I was struck. Over the course of the year, she continued to blow me away every time she stepped on stage, and she felt more natural off stage. She absolutely proved to me that you don't have to be a certain type of person OFF stage to be fantastic ON stage.

The Robert Horry Dagger award for most clutch performance by a role player at a crucial moment.

Robert Horry is a retired NBA player who was never the superstar on his team. He does, however, have more NBA Championship rings than Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan. He was on 7 championship teams. He earned the nickname "Big Shot Rob" for having the uncanny ability to ALWAYS hit the big shot. In fact, his Game 6 WCF winning shot was one of the reasons my favorite basketball team never reached the 2002 NBA Finals. Was he an all-star? No. But he came through when it mattered most. Seriously, you should check it out here. (Unless you're a Sacramento Kings fan like me, and then it just hurts.)

At a time when there was a pretty unhealthy amount of discord amongst our occasionally emotional and angst-ridden young cast, there was several malcontents who we usually had trouble with. One of these (who will remain nameless until I get consent from him to use his name in this space) finally stepped up at the end of Rehearsal and gave an inspired speech about unity. He identified the problem, took responsibility like a man and vowed to change. And change he did.  He absolutely swung the mood of the next rehearsal, and the next, and really the whole mood of the show. He challenged the cast to follow his lead, and they responded well. At a time when my voice, and all others were exhausted, he stepped up.

The Cindy Lou Who award for finding a small voice that was just enough.

We had another Rachel in the cast. She too was a somewhat shy, slender blonde. Both of these girls, were just darling by the way. Let no one dare mistake them for not being cute. So this younger Rachel was given a lot of the important messenger lines. Every time she walked on stage there was something super critical to the plot coming from her mouth. "Sir your son is dead!" or "You've killed a man of 4 score and 3 years! Undone! Undone!"  However, she just would NOT belt these lines out. There was feeling, there was clarity of words there was understanding, and strong character. However constantly the note of "Rachel, speak up!" was given. However, just like everyone else she came through at the right time. When I finally got to sit back an just enjoy the show, she delivered those lines loud and clear. No, that's not because she had a microphone. It's because she rose to the occasion. She is a success story.

The Dynamite  award for making something bigger than you are.

Who else could it be? There was only one 8th grade student for most of the show. That was tiny Rhys. Through the whole show he was energetic, excited to be there, and he didn't let his youth, or the fact that he probably isn't big enough to ride some of the Big Kid roller coasters make him small on the stage. He ran around, and was a vital part of the cast. 

The Brett Favre award for bringing it all, and leaving it all "on the field".

I thought about using Cal Ripkin Jr. for this one, because nothing rivals the longevity of his 2,632 career games played, and that's part of what I wanted to illustrate. However, I chose Favre because he is a more explosive personality, and that certainly applies to this friend of mine, too. This is a girl who faithfully attended every practice, and was memorized. She did her part on everything I saw. This is a girl who absolutely stands her ground, right or wrong. She fit her character to a T on this one. Emily's part required her to withstand court Lords and Guards trying to oust her from declaring bold statements to a hard-headed King, and even  go toe-to-toe with the King. She absolutely had the pipes and the heart to pull down what this role required of her. 

She was also like that off stage sometimes. Emily absolutely was fiery towards me and her fellow cast members when she felt justified in doing so. Her passion for expressing her views occasionally stirred up a fuss, but there was no doubting that she cared about what happened with the show. Without her heart in it, I'm not totally convinced that others could have been moved to rise to what they became. There's lots more good I could say about her, but for the sake of this post, I'll simply say she reminds me as a little version of me in some ways; and I like me.

The Death Crawl award for being taxed to the soul, and rising to the top.

In order to understand this next friend of mine, and how our relationship worked this year, you have to watch the clip above. If not you will not really get the magnitude of what I exacted of him. More than anyone else in this cast, and there were many that I worked hard on, I rode Cody to the limits of what he could do. I worked one on one with him from October to March continually riding him and pushing him and telling him that he had more to give. It was the truth. He always did. 

Cody and I worked on his monologue scores of times. Over and over I'd stop him and ask why he did things. I would pick at nits, I would tell him one thing, and then another, and then another, all variations on the same part of his piece. The fruit was taking 2nd place in the Shakespeare competition. He worked and worked and worked and worked. Cody was a leader among the cast, and an absolute workhorse. He certainly has some natural gifts. However, if everyone worked as hard as Cody, everyone would have a much more honed skill set. He was kind of my masterpiece that year.

The Bee Movie award for someone who made everyone laugh, but particularly me.

The honest truth of this is that my sister watches a couple movies with me simply to hear me laugh at them. She insists that it's funny, but MORE funny when watching it with me. Megan was that person in the case for me. Every stinking time she was on stage she cracked me up. There was just something about the way she delivered herself, and it always made me smile -- big time. I think she made everyone laugh, but she busted my gut every time. 

I have a handful more kids to write about, but I decided for your sake (and mine) to make this a two part thing. :) Stay tuned for Part 2.