I have begun to use the technique of letting something from a previous post inspire a subsequent post here on Hubba’s House.

For example, in yesterday’s ESN I mentioned the Wall High School spring play, which put me to mind of my own stint as a high school actor.

My participation in the Elm Springs School Christmas program was compulsory and enjoyable, but after leaving grade school I didn’t elect to be in any more theatrical productions.  It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that I became involved in St. Thomas More’s spring play my senior year by accident.

I have mentioned before that I went to high school in Rapid City.  To understand how I got involved in a play by accident, it might help to know that I was one of maybe two kids at the school with any rural or redneck tendencies whatsoever, and that the spring play was a social commentary embedded in a western comedy.  It was called The Death and Life of Sneaky Fitch.

In the play, Sneaky Fitch, the town fool, appears to have risen from the dead and shot the town bully.  Realizing the personal benefits of his new-found persona, he wins the heart of the prettiest saloon girl, becomes sherriff, and rides rough-shod over the town that ridiculed him, until he is exposed as a fraud and (I believe) killed more thoroughly.

Well that was all fine and dandy, but I wasn’t going to be in any spring play.  Except that the actors and managers kept asking for my assistance and possessions.  None of them, it seemed, had any cowboy attire, and they had long ago thrown away all of their toy pistols, so every Monday I showed up at school with a stagecoach load of each, until I could easily have been called the costume designer.  My supply of fishnet stockings had dwindled to the point where I couldn’t help the saloon girls much.

In addition, my familiarity with the music of Marty Robbins was proving very useful to the musical directors of the play.

So I orbited closer and closer to the thing, until one day I was in it, much to my surprise.  I don’t recall even being asked, I just joined.  I was cast as an Unimportant Townsperson.  Borrowing one of my own hats and toy guns back, I threw myself into the role, and learned to do all the things that an Unimportant Townsperson does, which include gawking, feigning interest in a scene, and lending my cowardly assent to the majority opinion.

There were three performances of the play, and I was a cheerful and cowardly Unimportant Townsperson through the first two, when something else happened.

The play had three acts, and each act began with a Nameless Unfortunate Cowboy being goaded into a gunfight with Sneaky Fitch, killed, and hauled off by the undertaker and his assistants.  The third day, Nameless Unfortunate Cowboy #3 got mono, and could not attend his own killing.  Wonder of wonders, some idiot asked me to take his place.

Of course, I was still an Unimportant Townsperson through the first two acts.  At the beginning of Act 3, I assumed my short-lived role.  I was surprisingly not nervous at all.  I managed to adopt a look of terrified fatality, crept up, fumbled the draw, went over in a pile when I was gunned down, and even threw in a few convulsions for effect.

I was on my way to being nominated for Best Supporting Actor when the undertaker showed up.  Being dead, I had my eyes closed, and I was completely unprepared when the first assistant shoved his hand into my armpit to haul me off.  I remembered with a start how ticklish I was, and involuntarily launched into a new unscripted role as Lazarus on Cocaine.  The Third Act opened with the undertaker and his assistants chasing me around, trying to peel me off the ceiling, and finally half dragging me away while I laughed hysterically.  I looked more like a madman being taken to the dungeon than a cowboy being hauled to Boot Hill.

The audience loved it.  Although I didn’t give a very authentic performance, I might have given them the most entertaining one.