On this blog, I make frequent mention of how I could have done things differently to avoid feeling like a total loser my entire life. I've noted how, if given the opportunity to do things over, I might have chosen a different college to go to. But the only reason I would have for not changing this course in my life is my friendship with Chud. I guess the only way I would have been able to maintain that is to start out at Eastern New Mexico University and go to another school while still keeping in contact with him. However, I don't think our relationship as adults would remain the same.
As I mentioned before, I met Chud on the first day of college classes in my Beginning Acting class. Before class started, we talked about our acting experiences and about the audition for "How the Other Half Loves" that night. We had a lot in common. The main difference was that he did not like rock music. And there was another difference I'll detail a little bit later in this post, but it wasn't anything that could keep us from being friends.
I had also seen Chud for the first time a little more than a year before at Boys State. However, he had no recollection of me.
Chud graduated from high school in Lovington, NM, about 70 miles east of Artesia. Like me, he was involved in the choir and drama club. I'm surprised that I never ran into him at the choral festivals that we went to each year. Lovington was always there. However, they never came to the Drama Festials at ENMU.
Chud was the first one of us to get cast in a major role in a mainstage production at ENMU. This set a pattern. Anytime there was a play that featured a geeky character, he was always chosen to play that part. While I do kind of feel that his presence at ENMU kept me from getting cast more often, I never blamed him for that. It would have been nice if the Theatre professors had been more equitable in their casting, but that's a subject for a different series of articles on this blog.
Chud and I were roommates for the Summer 1983 session. We didn't end up trying to kill each other before the end of the two months, but we were never roommates again after that. (Chud would be College Roommate #3. I haven't gotten to #2 yet.)
We continued our close friendship during the next two years of college. However, things changed our senior year when he got a girlfriend. Elad was a girl we had known since freshman year, but she didn't become involved in the Theatre productions until our senior year. She was a Theatre minor. I was actually a good friend of hers before she started dating Chud. We were in the Student Senate together. Their relationship started when Chud was applying her make up before a performance. She asked him out. While we would often hang out from time to time, I frequently felt like a third wheel.
As Theatre majors, we had to produce recitals as part of our requirements for our degrees. I approached him about combining our recitals into one performance. At first, he didn't want to do it. About a week later, he came back and decided it would be a good idea. We titled our recital "Monomania... and Other Things." We traded off back and forth doing scenes. Because I was working full time at a radio station with overnight shifts, I wasn't able to put much of an effort into my part of the recital. Mostly everything I had to do myself. Chud and I did a couple of scenes together, including something from "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" In the review with the professors, they felt like Chud had put a lot of effort into his part and gave him an A. However, they felt like I had slapped my recital together at the last minute and gave me a B. I had to concur. But if given the choice between having a grade A recitial or a full time job when I graduated college, I would choose the job.
Chud and I were the only two Theatre majors from our freshman class to graduate in 1986. Chud went on to do some pretty amazing things once he got out into the real world. I'll go more into detail about that on Monday.
No comments:
Post a Comment