After the Solo and Ensemble festival was over and done with (see my previous post), I had to gear up for the Drama Festival. It took place every year at Eastern New Mexico University. Our school prepared two one-act plays from our Evening of One Acts to enter for judging at the Festival. I was in one of the plays, but only had one line in it.
One thing that was usually made clear was that it was not a competition. There were no winners declared, just recognition of outstanding performances and productions. The odd thing was that most other schools only brought one production. The fact that we had two presentations didn't mean we had a superior department. It just meant that our school had enough money to enter two productions.
My father was asked to accompany us on the trip. He brought his pickup to load the set pieces and transport the students' luggage. Because he was a teacher, he had to drive one of the two vans we were taking. That left me to drive the pickup.
We left at 6am. Orld and another student got to ride with me. (We found out later this was in violation of school policy.) On the way up, the pickup kept breaking down and my Dad had to keep trying to fix it. Also, along the way, we saw a semi in front of us have a blowout and run off the left side of the highway. Orld, the other student and I pulled over to see if the driver was okay. He was, so we went back on our merry way. What was normally a 2 1/2-hour trip to Portales took us 6 hours. We were exhausted and hungry by the time we got there.
We got to see a few of the productions by the other high schools. The first thing that was apparent to me that while there were a few schools whose Drama departments were of the same caliber as us or worse, there were many others that were so much better. In particular, the schools from Albuquerque had performance levels I knew that we could not match even if we tried for a million years.
During the festival on Thursday, I was hanging out with a couple of the senior girls. One of them wanted to find something for the group to do that night. After going around to the dorms, she found that there was someplace in Clovis (where our motel was) that was having a roller disco night. (Yes, it was 1980 and there were still people in New Mexico still into disco.) She thought this sounded like fun and offered it up as something to do that night.
Some of us, including myself, chose to go to the roller disco. Others, like Orld, opted to go see a movie. We went to the roller rink. We go inside and IT'S ALL BLACK PEOPLE, like that scene in "Animal House." Keep in mind that in Artesia, there probably weren't more than eight black students in our school, and we never saw them all in the same place at the same time. This was a roller rink with at least 50 black people inside, so we didn't know what to expect.
As it turned out, it wasn't a big deal. They didn't seem to mind us being there. However, at one point, we saw a black man walk in with a white girlfriend. Nobody bothered them. The other guy who rode in the pickup with Orld and me said, "You know, I can see why a black man would want to be with a white woman, but I don't understand why a white woman would want to be with a black man." Boy, were we naive.
After the initial shock at the beginning of the evening, the only other time I got nervous was when the DJ had all the guys line up on the floor for "Ladies' Choice." I didn't know what I was going to do if one of the black girls decided to "choose" me. Fortunately, that didn't happen. However, I also didn't get "chosen" by any of the girls we had gone there with. I was a loser on both counts.
On that high note, I'm going to continue this in the next post.
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