It's funny how listening to the on again, off again sound of rain falling on the house puts me in the mood to sit back in my office chair, upholstered by yours truly in the army olive drab WWII U.S. Army surplus wool blanket, and think back in retrospect to those days in high school when I performed in various school plays and musicals. Rainy weather also puts me in the mood to lean forward in said chair and scroll through the social network of choice to see who else has so little to do this holiday season that they are also signed into the network.
And last, but not least, rainy weather puts me in the mood to write.
So, combine old high school memories, seeing friends from the high school years on line, and the rain induced urge to write, and you have this latest story.
Those friends from high school will take note that I avoided using the phrase "old high school friends". You're welcome.
(Rain also has a more, shall we say, physical affect on me, but fortunately I took care of that shortly after dinner).
I briefly chatted with one member of our high school theatrical clan this evening and the memory of a specific play popped into my head. Memories, for me anyway, come up in clusters, like a key word search engine. First there's the play, then the funny stories or pranks that occurred in that play's rehearsal or performance. Then the memory jumps to a vacation years later.
As I have stated in a past blog, allow me to 'splain myself.
The person whose digital persona that graced my laptop screen this evening portrayed Mrs. Frank in the play "The Diary of Anne Frank". I (as many of my friends will hopefully remember) played Peter Van Daan, the character of a 16 year old boy who was also hiding with his family in the multi-level building during the Nazi occupation of Holland.
The scene we performed that comes to my mind out of the entire production is a scene in which the entire cast is gathered around the kitchen table to celebrate the New Year holiday. Anyone who either acted in this play or has seen the old movie of the production will remember that someone brings in a cake and sets it on the table. One of the characters (I don't recall which one) verbalizes they remember each year how the character that baked the cake would write on the icing of the cake "Peace in 19... blank blank" (whatever year that was being celebrated). "Peace in 1942, Peace in 1943", et cetera.
So the character quoting their line reads out loud what is purported to be on this cake, with its white icing, sitting on the set's kitchen table: "Peace in 1944".
Only it didn't really read "Peace in 1944".
It read "Piss in 1944".
There was always someone on the stage crew who apparently felt we actors needed to repeatedly test our ability to stay in character regardless of the form of distraction. Sometimes they felt that these "tests" should take place in a real performance.
Fortunately, handwritten red icing on an 8 inch diameter white cake can't easily be read by audience members sitting several yards away in a huge high school auditorium, most of whom are at eye level with the floor of the stage. There was, I'm sure, a lot of lip biting going on during that scene by most of us surrounding that table. The audience probably thought we were accurately depicting the emotions of those characters, locked away for years, hiding from the evil oppressors, wondering if peace would ever come.
Nope, we were just a small troupe of high school actors valiantly maintaining control and trying not to...peace on ourselves in laughter.
As for the vacation part of the memory, this little stunt came back to mind while my wife and I visited the Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands a few years ago. While the multiple floors and rooms obviously differed somewhat from the set structure I recall from my Thespian days, the actual kitchen layout was exactly as it was on our high school set. The various beds and curtains set up in the museum were replicas of the ones actually used back in the 1940's, but the museum building was the actual business and home of the Franks and this museum kitchen counter was the actual counter used by the Franks and their Jewish guests who hid along with them from the German Nazis. The humanity of their plight hit me like - well, the rain currently hitting my own roof - when I saw the worn area where they must have used the kitchen knife to cut up the evening meal's meager vegetables and occasional meat that Miep would sneak into their humble hideout under the suspicious eyes of the Gestapo.
That was a very strange sensation, the hilarity of the high school play prank memories mixed in with the historic reality I was seeing and touching in front of me. The fact that a young boy, who was the same age that I was when I played his character, experienced a much different reality than I did as a young teenager, and spent what was to be his last few years sitting in this very room, eating food prepared on this very wood kitchen counter, smuggled past the tormentors who would eventually be the actors in his undoing.
Incidentally I also learned that my character's actual name was Peter van Pels. Anne apparently was known to use pseudonyms in her diary for some of the other family members that stayed in the house.
I was in one other play and a number of musicals during my high school educational experience. I have some golden memories from those productions as well. One evening I chased one of my fellow cast members of our high school production of "M*A*S*H" around the high school parking lot near the fine arts wing a few minutes before a performance while we clowned around. I think it was in retaliation for some wisecrack or prank he pulled on me. What I didn't know is that he had, just before, taken a Valium to ease his nerves a bit.
As always, I will leave out the specific name of said individual. There were a few of his lines that night that suffered a sort of dyslexia, an unfortunate side affect of the drug being pumped a bit more quickly through his veins than was originally intended by its pharmaceutical designer.
Example: Instead of hearing him speak his line "I received the call from General Hammond" it came out "I received the hall from General Cammond".
No one in the audience seemed to notice. Somewhat like no one noticed the cake inscription in our production of "Diary".
Ahhh, those high school theatrical productions. Whether or not the play prop list included any baked desserts, they always did take the cake.
