High school, okay man that’s stretching back a ways.
Okay so once upon a time I was in a production of Peter Pan where I played Hook’s first mate and we were the two gayest pirates to ever grace the stage at a children’s theatre. But, um, that’s really not important to the story.
Anyway this was kind of an old theatre and if I’m being totally honest with you it was falling the fuck apart. Now, most theatres have this hallway that runs end to end behind the stage (called the ‘crossover’) so that actors can exit on one side and enter again from the other. This theatre had that, but the door was old and rusty and gross and sometimes it would just get stuck shut, and I shit you not, there was no budging that thing without a battering ram or like a fucking siege engine or some shit.
So there’s this girl named Christina playing Tinker Bell and we have her in the pretty classic Disney getup–big blonde bun perched on top of her head, short little green dress, you know the look. And she has this exit where she has to dash off stage left and then enter again from stage right really fucking fast, so basically she’ll just walk off, run down the crossover and come back in. In theory. You can see where this is going, I’m sure.
One night Chris goes to make her exit and the crossover door is fucking stuck. She doesn’t have time to bang on it and get someone to open it or anything and she’s gotta fucking be there for her entrance because there are lights and music and shit because she’s a damn fairy and if she doesn’t appear it’ll look super fucking stupid. So she just bolts the fuck outside and starts sprinting like a cheetah around the back of the building. But this is in January, okay, and she’s in this green mini-dress and little slippers with no traction and she hits a patch of ice halfway across the parking lot and just goes fucking flying and just eats shit. But here’s the thing, guys–actors are metal as hell. The show must go the fun on, blood and broken bones be damned. (Really. The stories I could tell.)
So she scrambles off the ground and runs as fast as she fucking can and flings the loading dock door open and like crashes onstage just in the nick of time. But because she didn’t stop to see what the damage was, she didn’t realize her knees were like fucking shredded from wiping out in the parking lot and she’s bleeding fucking everywhere. Now, this is a kids’ show and some of these little fuckers are sitting like a foot from the stage so this is problem. They’re gasping and pointing and she does her bit and Hook and I kind of cut the scene short and usher her off before the kids start crying. We’re scrambling around in the wings trying to find a first aid kit and we finally lay hands on one and Hook is like trying to wipe the blood off Tinker Bell’s knees and she’s trying not to fucking cry and I’m digging through the box looking for fucking band aids. I finally find some and I’m like, “Oh, perfect, they’re green, it’ll just look like part of her costume, fuckin’ A, that’s grand.”
She grits her teeth, I slap like fucking eight band-aids on each of her knees and Hook hauls her out of her chair and shoves her onstage and we high-five like hell yeah, crisis averted. But then the lights go out for a scene change and we realize that because this is a fucking kids’ theatre, the fucking band-aids glow in the fucking dark. So you can just see these two like weird glowing green spots that are Christina’s knees as she runs around onstage and Hook and I are both like What the fuck? What is that? Oh no. But then thank God one of the Lost Boys has the presence of mind to just yell, “Look, Tink has a friend!” And for the rest of the show every time there was a blackout Chris ran back and forth across the stage and her knees were ‘fairies’ and the kids fucking loved it.
And that is the story of the time Tinker Bell wiped the fuck out and glow-in-the-dark band-aids became an last-minute special effect.
I love theatre, guys.
Beautiful.
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