And then things changed in Give me your soul

I'm one of those people who can claim that High School was a high point. In junior high I went to see a play a the local high school and I thought it was so good and decided when I went there the next year I would want to be part of that. I was in a drama class at the time but the class happened to get a new teacher the year I first got to take it and that teacher decided that a bunch of immature 12 and 13 year old kids didn't want to just run around on stage having a fun time, no, they needed to learn theatrical history and acting fundamentals and do pretty much no actual performing. So that almost ruined that for me.

My dad was thrilled that I was showing an interest in something for pretty much the first time in my life up to that point and drove me out to LA one weekend for one of these crazy agent talent searches they did back then (might still, I don't know). While waiting in line and watching other kids do their auditions (you basically just stood in front of camera, gave your name and answered some random question about yourself) I figured out what they were looking for: energy. The one thing I think anybody who know me in my younger days could say is I had abundant energy. I got picked up by an agency...I can't remember what it was called anymore but I never ended up landing any jobs and ultimately things fell apart with them over money or something. But then there was high school.

I tried out for the fall play (we had a fall play/spring musical arrangement) and didn't get in. The teacher, Mrs. Morgan, said I should make sure to try again for the musical in the spring and I said I would. When the time rolled around I remembered how bad I felt when I failed my audition and how stupid it was for me to have tried in the first place and decided not to bother. Morgan tried to pep talk me into it and, when that failed, threatened my grade in her class. I never really knew why she went through the trouble of getting me to audition...I think, back in those days, I believed she saw something in me. Now I think she probably just like to encourage people in the hopes one day someone would make it big and give a nod to her in an Oscar acceptance speech. Who knows. The only part of the audition I remember was the singing part (I had missed the actual day and so she had arranged me for to do it another time with another guy who had missed it as well) and the only reason I remember it was because they had us sing One Boy which was an odd selection since it was a girl's part.

Days later the cast list went up. I didn't go see it right away, I didn't want people to see how pathetic I look when I'm crushed. I waited until I could look at it alone and I read it from top to bottom where I was...penciled in...just my first name. I had to ask Morgan if that was me or not. The whole list was printed out from a computer and I was in pencil. It doesn't take a lot of deductive reasoning to figure out why: I didn't make the cut but she felt bad for pushing me to do it only to fail again...I would never have recovered from that. So she added me at the last second. At the time, I saw in that what I wanted to and I was happy. If she hadn't my whole experience in high school would have been vastly different. But now I was in a musical. Me, who never danced or sang and now I had to do both.

I have lots of great memories from that show: the time Morgan almost killed herself demonstrating how to jump off a platform safely, the girl I fell in love with, the friends I made but every person who has ever been in a stage production always has one memory of their first that is stronger than anything else and that, naturally, is the opening night. The energy people put off before a show is fascinating. I imagine the more experience you have the more controlled you are but this was high school and the drama room that night was a storm of frantic excitement. It was a big cast and there were more than a few first-timers aside from myself. You could tell who we were because we could not have been more at a loss for what to do. Morgan wrangles us all together and we warm up, we have a meeting, we get psyched up and then it's to the dressing rooms for make up and costumes. Getting make up done for the first time, as a guy, is always a fun experience. Eventually, I learned to do my own but back then I just had to torment some poor girl on the make up crew by being all fidgety.

Us lowly chorus members laid low in the dressing rooms for the first few bits of the show, we didn't come in until Telephone Hour and sitting in the wings would just put us in the way. Also, we'd have to be quiet and we were far too excited for that. When the time came, we waited in the wings, all the way upstage where we entered from. On my side of the stage was just Randy and I. We psyched each other up, used our nervous energy to feed our performance so that when we finally came out singing we were as loud and strong as we could be. But, man, does your heart race. You can't help it. It doesn't have to be fear...I think it's just a feeling so foreign that you really don't know what it is and most people think it's fear. If Randy hadn't been with me I might have made it into fear and maybe I would have frozen...who knows. But I didn't. It went great and it was the best feeling I've ever known. For 2 hours I got to know who I was: just some normal teenager from Sweet Apple, Ohio.