Yes, there is a deliberate "Lost Memory" theme here. I wiped out most of my blogs in 2019, and lost a few that I particularly enjoyed, like the time I rode the new principal into the gym on the back of my motorcycle. I can't find that one, but frankly, that story's been told. Memories are great I just don't need to repeat the same ones. Time to really dig for stuff. It is not all going to be funny, or interesting, but it's honest and authentic.
When I was still part time theatre/part time language arts, there was a full time theatre teacher, and a lang arts teacher who was our TD. So in total there were five adults on the musical for a few years. There had not been a teacher performance at a cabaret thus far, and the TD and I decided there should be. If we could rope the other three into it, we could Do A Thing and It Would Be Fun. We immediately went to Breakfast Club, as our tribe is wont to do, but didn't want to do Breakfast Club. So, we were ruminating ideas, and I toddled across the hall to the TD's room and her class was watching Chicago. We were "meeting" to talk about a cabaret idea that all five of us could do without just rehashing The Breakfast Club. We were determined that it be all of us or none of us.
I have no idea what our ideas were, but none of them were sticking. We sat in her room staring at the floor and thinking with the movie playing, and "Cell Block Tango" came on. I looked at the screen and said "Why can't we do that?"
This person and I are work wives, and we fire off of each other frighteningly well. We can both recite the movie Real Genius from memory, and last year I received a tote bag in the mail from an unknown address that has " The Wanda Trussler School of Beauty" emblazoned on it. I used it to schlep my Moira Rose costume to my new building for our first cabaret. "Unknown" is funny. I knew who it was. My sister is the only other person I know who can quote that movie.
So I had barely finished "...that?" when she looked up at me and knew exactly what I meant.
Why can't we "Breakfast Club", Chicago?
The boys were on board, so the costuming and choreography began. S and I came up to my house to work once or twice, and I squirted an anarchy symbol on a black tank top with dish soap, bleaching it into the fabric for all eternity. We kept the choreo to the minimum due to my general lack of skill, and each of us wrote our own reason for being in detention, and rehearsed it to the song. I have no memory of each of our tag words that replaced "Pop", "Cicero", etc, but I do remember that I was the innocent one. We decided that since I was the most obvious "criminal" in the group ( punk rock kid) that I should actually be innocent. I also remember that S did the sprinkler dance with a side pony tail, and I can't watch Napoleon Dynamite without seeing her. The guys were variations of jocks/marching band/letter sweaters, pretty goody goody, and she was a nerd. Not stereotypes, we just returned to our previous incarnations, which were...stereotypes. It's high school, whatreyagonna do? Of the five of us, I was the only hooligan. They had all been excellent students.
Until the night that we performed, the kids had never seen us outside of our usual "performance" duties: J conducting choir, D heading marching band, JK doing curtain speeches, S on a ladder--according to student lore, she fell off of a 12' ladder once and simply "bounced"-- and me waving my arms and doing whatever it is that I do.
I managed to execute the minimal choreo in my Dr.Martens, and I only remember the looks on the kids' faces. Of course it helped that we had talent, but they didn't care. This memory does not make me feel warm and fuzzy like the Beasties, or my bike in the gym. It was a start to something, I think, that was all. We did not make a tradition of doing every cabaret for the 15 years I was there, by any stretch, but when S was a part of the ones we did do (we sang "Suddenly Stephanie" instead of "Suddenly Seymour" to her), they were infinitely more fun. As a techie, she relished any opportunity to perform and was quite good at it. To this day my husband says "Stephanie is so funny." She and I performed Parallel Lives as a fundraiser to send kids to NYC, and she couldn't even go on the trip; she was pregnant. Was that the first time? I feel like she was always pregnant. We changed the photos on our ID badges to Lenny and Carl from The Simpsons. She made kids read the opening of Beowulf in the original Old English. I can still text her and say "My mother does the same thing with my underwear," and she will reply "Your mother puts license plates in your underwear? How do you sit?"
I did not see this turn coming, this is clearly a love letter.
It makes me miss that person, who I've clearly named here and with whom I am still in touch, but it's different. We don't work together, we haven't for years. She has young kids, mine are adults. We live an hour away from one another. Yet we exchange Schitt's Creek memes, and occasional photos of her ever growing children. There are threats to get drinks, but there are soccer practices, then Covid, then soccer practice, then family vacations, then ceramics classes...
"I never had friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?" ---Stephen King.
Scene.
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