I've been involved in theater since high school, so I have a lot of embarrassing stories. I've forgotten lines. I've missed entrances. I lost my knife during a fight scene in which I was supposed to end up accidentally falling on my own knife and dying, and ended up having to pretend to fall on my head and die from just tripping. I once dropped a tray full of filled champagne glasses that the whole cast was supposed to use to give the final toast of the play, totally destroying the end of the play. But the MOST embarrassing moment of my theatrical career was in one of the first plays I did in High School. It was the musical The Sound of Music, and I had the small but important part of Herr Zeller, a Nazi who makes his first entrance midway through the second act of the play. All was going well until the night of our first final dress rehearsal. A friend of mine told me he was going to videotape the play, and I went up to the sound booth to see the video camera. This was in the early 80's and I'd never seen a video camera before. I was fascinated! My friend intended to just point the camera at the stage and let it run, so I volunteered to run the camera for the first half of the play. I had so much fun, zooming in and out, that I became totally engrossed in the camera work. Since it was a dress rehearsal we didn't take an intermission so I became completely focused on what I was doing. Suddenly my friend said "Isn't your entrance coming up?" And I totally freaked out! I didn't have my costume or makeup on! I raced back stage and madly dressed in my tuxedo. It seemed to take forever because nobody was in the dressing room to help me. I put on my makeup as fast as possible, and painted on my little moustache, and finally made it out on stage! In this scene every single performer in the show was on stage for a big party scene, and when I got out there, everyone was in their places so I just assumed I was a few moments late. Later nobody would talk to me, they were so furious. The director was livid, but didn't want to talk about it. A little while later I got a look at the video, and to my horror I saw that the moment my entrance was supposed to happen, everyone froze. They stood there on stage,standing there uncomfortably, waiting for me to appear for a full agonizing eight minutes!! I was so embarrassed I couldn't look anyone in the eye for weeks. Nobody ever said a word about it to me, but I'm sure they thought I was the biggest dumbass in the world. |