The King and Ass

Posted by E

Monday, January 5, 2009

After reading some of the previous stories I've written, you might think that there's not a whole lot to do in Stumblebum. While that has certainly changed in the years since I left, back in the salad days of my youth Stumblebum presented little more than a barren wasteland of dull activity. What entertainment we had was largely created by ourselves for our own amusement.

That's not to say that there was absolutely nothing going on in our beloved town. One of the few activities afforded to us Stumblebummians was the local community theater; a ragtag bunch of individuals all with varying degrees of talent coming together to provide a dim glow of entertainment in our otherwise humdrum existences.

I first became involved with the Stumblebum Community Theater in 1987, after witnessing their grand production of "The Homecoming", a riveting tale of something or other that involved two old ladies at some point. The mark the production left was indelible, if only for the thrill of possible involvement.

As soon as their next audition came up I went and gave it my all, trying out for a role in "Cheaper by the Dozen", the heartwarming tale of a reckless man who fathers twelve children, only to die of a heart attack at a young age and leave his wife stuck with the bills.

Fortunately for the theater-going world, my all was pretty much crap, and I ended up in a role with an overwhelming two lines. Two lines, I might proudly add, that I never once forgot. (Not even to this day.)

Line 1: The babies are upstairs.
Line 2: Yeah.

Go ahead, try and tell me that my skills are anything less than amazing. That's right, I remember ALL of my lines from a play I was in twenty something years ago.

Impressive memorizational skills aside, it was in this first play that I learned an important lesson about myself. Namely, I hate being on stage. Truly, truly hate it. I am an awkward and socially inept person to begin with, and these faults are only magnified when I mousily attempt to pretend to be something I'm not.

The sad fact of life is that I'm a crap actor. No two ways about it.

But though I readily acknowledged my complete lack of ability, I still found myself infatuated with the minor celebrity afforded to a community actor. Because of this I made two more stage appearances before giving up the ghost and moving backstage to the lighting department, where I ultimately excelled with our troupe.

But it wasn't just my awkwardness that caused my eventual retirement, it was due more to a fantabulous trainwreck known to most of the world as "The King and I".

As with most of my tales of Stumblebum, this one begins with Terry and I.

Audition time for "The King and I" was drawing near and the two of us had decided that the time was ripe for us to launch a multi-pronged attack on the community theater world. We had both acted in plays previously, but never before had the stage been cursed with both of our presences at the same time.

We figured that working together on this production would be a great way to pass some time and maybe even cause a little mischief. Little did we know that we would ultimately be responsible for the death of legitimate theater in Stumblebum. Realizing ahead of time that King was a musical, we decided it would be in our best interest to prepare a number for our audition.

Our choice for most appropriate song to audition with was, of course, "Sit on my Face" by Monty Python. It was chosen with the intent to offend the adults and make the children question its meaning. True to our expectations, the music director was none too impressed by the Pythonian ode to oral sex and we were greeted with a terse "Thank you" after only the first few measures of the song.

After being whisked away from the stage, we were lead to a basement room for the dance portion of our audition.

There are simply no words to describe my complete lack of dancing ability. My father once opined that "Heittenflauggens are born without rhythm", a truism that I've never forgotten. I've always noted with glee that dancing, for me, comes in two varieties; I either move my arms or I move my legs. I absolutely cannot do both at once. It's very robotic when you see it in person. Terry fared no better and our audition soon devolved into little more than slam dancing and prancing about.

You would think after a shameful display of non-talent such as Terry and I had just defecated into the troupe that we would have no chance at netting roles. However, Stumblebum is a tiny town and they were desperate for any warm bodies they could find to flesh out their cast.

This lead to our casting in FOUR different roles.

That's right, they had the forethought to not only cast Terry and I in multiple parts, but to ensure that every single time one of us was on stage, the other was as well.

It's worth noting at this point that we truly did not begin this endeavor with the intent of desecrating the fine work of Rodgers and Hammerstein. That we ended up doing so was beyond our control.

Ultimately two things occurred which pulled the audience out of their rapturous repose, dragging them kicking and screaming from the fanciful world they were visiting.

The first would nowadays be termed a "wardrobe malfunction".

Every night of that abominable play Terry and I had to cake on the makeup. We were playing sailors, buddhist monks, theatrical actors and Burmese guards. Rule number one of casting people from Siam: Pick people who are not pasty white.

Because of this unfortunate mistake on the part of the casting crew, Terry and I had to slather ourselves with dark grease paint every night as well as submit ourselves to a hefty spray painting of the hair, all for the sake of making us look a bit more exotic. (To this very day you can still see remnants of that damnable hair spray in the shower at my parents' house.)

After covering our bodies with copious amounts of the sticky makeup, we would have to handle several quick costume changes as our parts shifted throughout the evening. When we were guards we had to wear this adorable number involving puffy purple MC Hammer pants and an open-fronted vest that exposed my dinner plate nipples to the world at large.

Our first entrance as guards had us coming in from the rear of the house, making our way to the stage, bowing and then moving over by the king.

During one show we made our way to the front and began our bow. The bow involved us dropping to our knees and bending fully at the waist, touching our faces to the ground. At the fateful show we made our way to the stage and took our prostrate position.

No sooner had our faces hit the floor then I caught wind of a long tearing sound. I didn't have long to wonder about the noise, as my curiosity was soon answered. The cold blast of air caressed my now exposed anus and scrotum and ensured that those in the front rows of the audience were receiving a show worth far more than their initial price of entry.

I looked over at Terry, horrified, as we had to remain in this position for several seconds as the king gave a speech. I could see his face reddening with impending laughter and I simply did my best to pretend that none of this was happening. Once the anointed time came, I rose from my pornographic position and made my way offstage as quickly as possible. There was simply no way I could handle being seen by the crowd after they had become so familiar with my nether regions.

But even this tale does not hold a candle to the ultimate ruination of the play at our young hands. No, that ruin came from a scene which caused us nothing but trouble.

In "The King and I", a character named Tuptim falls in love with a man named Lun Tha. Tuptim is a slave and therefore forbidden from engaging herself with him. They make secret plans to escape Siam together. One of the dramatic highlights of the play is Tuptim being brought before the king after their plot has been discovered. Lun Tha is dead and the king prepares to unleash a beating of biblical proportions on Tuptim. He relents, though, due to the influence of the schoolteacher Anna. It is the central dramatic moment of the second act and certainly one of the heaviest emotional scenes in the overall story.

And for Terry and I that scene was a nightmare.

Our role was simple: We are the guards bringing Tuptim to the king. He flies into a rage, we throw Tuptim to the ground and hold her in place while the king prepares to open a can of whip ass. After he decides not to we lift up Tuptim and carry her back offstage.

Easy. No fuss, no muss.

But god damnit, there was a problem every single time we did the scene.

First off, heavy drama - not my thing, man. I had to do my damnedest to hold back fits of giggles every time I heard the king's over-dramatic growls of anger. Couple this with the fact that Terry had the same affliction and you can already see the genesis of disaster.

Now start to take in the various problems we had during this scene. At one rehearsal, Tuptim's wig caught when we threw her to the ground and Terry was left holding it. In another rehearsal, I took a full-on whip strike to the hand when the king cracked it. At the tech dress rehearsal the king assaulted her with Reddi-Whip.

The pattern of issues starts to make more sense now. Honestly, Terry and I dreaded this scene every single day, wondering each time if THIS would be the time that we ruined the play.

On the ill-fated evening we took to the stage and flung Tuptim to her mark. Everything was going as well as could be expected...until the line came up.

At the climax of the scene, a servant bursts onto the stage to tell the king that Tuptim's lover has been found. The line, as written is: The man, the lover, he is found, he is dead. On this particular evening, the line was spoken (with a jive accent): The man, the lover, he be found, he be dead.

And that was all she wrote, folks. I heard the ebonic intonation of the servant and immediately began falling apart. It started as a light giggle, then turned into shudders as I fought back the laughter. I looked over at my erstwhile companion and he too was on the brink of losing it. We locked eyes...and it was over. We both burst into guffaws, gasping great gulps of air as we shook with uncontrollable laughter.

There was no saving the scene. The king couldn't pretend like his guards weren't pissing themselves laughing. We leapt up, leaving Tuptim to her fate and ran off the stage, never to be seen again that evening. We couldn't even bring ourselves to come out for curtain call.

We left the theater in shame that evening and didn't dare show our faces again until absolutely necessary. We still had three more performances to get through, and though we struggled with giggles and smirks at that fateful scene, we never repeated the outburst. It certainly earned us one of our many points of infamy with the theater group.

You would think after a disastrous turn like that that they'd never have us back, but they did. I only appeared on stage one more time, though, and it was only under dire circumstances.

But that one's a story all its own.