This week, I dug into my “slush pile” of books that I marked as “want to read” and found Theatre Kids by John DeVore. Being honest, it was the cover design that caught my eye. I started reading and in two solid acts with a sixish hour intermission I used for sleep, I had finished it. It brought me back to my brief “career” as a theatre kid in high school and the couple summers following before I realized I no acting ability and was an even worse playwright.
I remember I banged out a lot of scripts on surplus blue paper using a very heavy black desk manual Royal typewriter. I don’t know why this blue paper sticks in my head, but it does and there was a lot of it.
All dreck. My scripts were terrible.
I was in a few musical productions (not musicals, they were productions) but my most favorite was “Brigadoon” by Lerner and Loewe. If pressed, I could probably do the whole score and a lot of the dialog from memory, but that’s a parlour trick nobody likes to endure. I had a low voice — not quite a bass, more of a baritone — but when the director needs someone to hold a bass line, your baritone becomes a bass whether you can really do it or not. It’s high school theatre; who’s gonna know the difference.
So, my public singing career was mostly the bass line and I like to think I provided great harmony. This was before video cameras and 16mm was way too expensive for my demographic, so no evidence of my inability exists.
John’s book made me feel some kind of feelings about being on stage, behind the stage, with the theatre kids, with the theatre kids… the smells and feels that only a theatre can hold. Right now, typing this up, I can smell the makeup, the painted muslin that made up the trees of the forests in Brigadoon where Harry tripped and bashed his head… oh, I remember now my only solo line of that play… “🎶run and get ’m; run and get ’m, run ye highland men or we will never see another morning…🎶”
And, scene.
There was also Macalester College a few neighborhoods away from where I lived and went to school and they held a Scottish Fair, complete with sheep herding and caber toss. Being of the clan Maclean (Gillean) I was there every year, even living across the street above the Italian restaurant on Snelling and St. Clair (can’t remember the name) when I was going to the U of MN. I loved that quad; Mac, not the UMN. The UMN was dull.
An aside for a dad joke: Anything you can play on bagpipes, you can play on harmonica because they are basically the same instrument; a bunchof reeds attached to a big bag of air.
Well, that was unnecessary, but I’ll prove it one of these days by playing Scotland the Brave on harmonica. You don’t think you want to hear that, but you’re wrong; you do.
There’s no grand message in this Front Porch Harmonica Concert, just something that bubbled up on my brain while on a walk.
