Chid was my final college roommate at Eastern New Mexico University. We shared the residence at De Baca Hall during the Summer 1985 school session. I was first aware of him during my freshman year when he did work-study in the Theatre office. Even though he worked in the department, he was not a Theatre student.
We actually got along pretty well, but we were not friends outside the room. I actually had friends come to the room now and again and he got along well with them, too. We had more conversations together than I did with Skad.
He was about my size. He had black hair and wore glasses. He also had a thin mustache. Sadly, I don't remember his last name or where he was from. Some of the unusual things about him were that he would buy those music magazines that public pop song lyrics. Then he would write the name of the album they came from in the magazine. He also listened to the rival radio station instead of the one I worked at. He didn't do this to make me mad. He just preferred listening to it.
That's really all I recall about him. I don't want this article to end after four paragraphs, so I'm going to write about a completely different subject related to the summer session:
A lot of actors will tell stories about their experiences working with live animals. I'm not that much different. The only thing that I can guarantee about my stories is that none of the animals pooped on stage.
The first was during my sophomore year. I portrayed one of the mechanicals who perform the play within a play at the end. One of the other actors brings his dog with him. We had this little terrier mutt named McHeaver. It was Scod's dog. (Admittedly, McHeaver pooped in the Theatre, but it was in the seating area and before a rehearsal.)
The first three perfomances went off without a hitch. MacHeaver simply stood on stage and kept quiet. But on the final performance, he apparently decided he wanted a bigger part in the show. He started barking sporadically at first. A little bit later, he started punctuating the end of every spoken line with a bark. So, when Nick Bottom (played by Toilethead) says his last line, "Die! (pause) Die! (pause) Die," MacHeaver barked during each pause.
Fortunately, I was behind the set when this was going on. One of the other mechanicals was with me. (He was one of my Broadcasting professors.) We started snickering when MacHeaver began barking. As it continued, we were doing everything we could to stifle our laughter. We were both doubled up and had tears coming out of our eyes. When the play within the play was finished, someone brought MacHeaver back to us. The other guy quickly rushed the dog off stage left.
If it was hard for us to contain our laughter, it was even more difficult for everyone on stage to keep a straight face while this was going on. Some of the members of the entourage simply smiled through the scene. And I think everybody enjoyed seeing Toilethead get upstaged by a dog.
But really, while this was all going on and I was laughing, I was wondering if the audience could tell something was wrong or if they thought we had trained the dog to bark at those intervals. Certainly, anyone who had seen the prior performances knew right away that wasn't part of the show. Anyone who came in for the first time got more than they bargained for.
All six of us mechanicals performed the play at the Renaissance Festival during the Spring of 1984. We had a different dog that appeared to be a greyhound mix. He didn't act up. It almost wasn't as much fun.
In the Summer of 1985, I played a character named Dr. Glass in our production of "Carnival." The role was that of a veterinarian who carried a couple of animals around with him. One was a hen and the other was a rabbit. The script called for me to pull them out of my pockets. However, we couldn't get the pockets big enough in my jacket to fit the animals inside without suffocating them. I had to carry them on stage in my arms. That really wrecked the joke, but people still got a kick out of it.
We had the same rabbit throughout all the performances. He never game me much trouble. He was very cute and fluffy and everybody liked to pet him. However, we had to use different hens every week. The first hen was very easy to handle. She didn't put up any fight when I had to pick her up. The next week, we got this huge black chicken that looked like a rooster. We were assured it was a female, but we all had our doubts. She was tough to keep under control and kept trying to eat the rabbit when we were on stage.
The third hen was exactly like the first hen, on the outside. However, it would squawk for about a minute after I picked her up. The solution was to keep her cage in the Theatre basement. A few minutes before I went on stage, I had to go down and put my hands on her. I then had to let her get all the squawking out of her system before going back upstairs. She didn't cause any problems while on stage. I was able to get the animals back in their cages and continue with the show.
Since my stage experience outside of college was very limited, I never got to work with animals again.
No comments:
Post a Comment