Saturday Morning Memories: Time to Confess (Or: Grovel, Grovel, *FLASH*)

So my high school reunion is next week.  Allegedly we graduated ten years ago . . . I say allegedly because if I didn't know better I'd say it was only three months ago.  Seriously.  Where does the time go?

Anyway.  Obviously such a milestone has had me remembering a lot of things from back in the day.  And then yesterday a couple of songs from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat popped up on itunes, and that totally threw me back because we did Joseph my senior year, and then that randomly had me remembering a brief, slightly cryptic reference to our production in a blog post a couple of years ago and never followed up on the story. (okay, it was really cryptic.  Like, only about three people would have known what it referred to then and even now if you go and read it first you won't get it.  So sue me.)

Anyway.  Since the events I'm about to describe will have taken place ELEVEN (holy crap!) years ago this November, I'm pretty sure it's finally safe to come forward.  Lol . . . ish.

So like I said, we did Joseph my senior year.  And being a slightly overachieving high schooler trying to do everything, I couldn't be in the production because fall is color guard season . . . and that just wouldn't work. :-(  But by the time tech rehearsals come around marching competitions are pretty much over so a bunch of us came over to be on the tech crew.  We spent the first rehearsal watching the cast learn the choreography for the last number (and learning it better than some of the cast, as evidenced by when we jumped up and did the whole song with them standing in the aisles and not missing a beat) and getting music stuck in our heads that wouldn't ever come out.  Seriously.  I can still sing those songs word for word even now.

Moving on.  Eventually we got our assignments, booth, stage crew, and the elite quintet that chose to call themselves the Glitter Girls.  I was one of the Glitter Girls.  In case you couldn't tell. :-)  One could argue that we were just the extra tech crew that had to be stuck somewhere and made to feel useful . . . but I'm pretty sure we had the most fun.

Anyway.  There were a couple of spots in the show where our drama teacher wanted sparkles falling on the cast.  And in order to make that happen the five of us - me, Ashli, my best friend Kim, and two girls Ashli's age - climbed up to the top of the auditorium where the pulleys for the curtains and lights are and spent the entire show hanging out and watching the show from the most unique spot in the house.  Except it wasn't technically in the house, since "the house" refers to where the audience sits . . . but you know what I mean.  And we had these big bags of sparkly confetti to scatter, like, twice during the show and the rest of the time we just sat and watched and talked all we wanted because, dude, we were something like 100 feet above the stage, who's going to hear us?

The show was a blast, as such things generally are, and we were careful to save some confetti for closing night curtain call.  We seriously underestimated just how much the phrase "a little goes a long way" applied to this confetti though.  The plan had been to start with just a little bit of glitter falling as curtain call started and when they got to the very last bow to just dump everything we had left.  Which is what we did.  And came back down to reports that confetti was so thick that people in the cast couldn't even see the audience through it all.  Now that, I seriously wish I could have seen from the audience.  (and this is the part where I lament the fact that youtube wasn't around ten years ago, because if it had you know there would be footage of that floating around online.)

But the best part of closing night (and the part that involves confession) actually has nothing to do with glitter.  Now this may come as a bit of a shock, but the story of Joseph involves a pretty significant number of male characters.  Like many drama programs, we did not have enough guys willing to get involved in drama, so while this Jacob did have 12 sons . . . he had something like 3 dozen daughters.  Not quite biblically accurate, but it made for a great chorus.  And some of Joseph's brothers also had to double as Potiphar, Pharaoh, and others.  (I wonder if anyone in the audience noticed that only ten brothers originally showed up to buy food from Joseph . . . the eleventh sneaked in as soon as he was changed out of his pharaoh costume, lol.)

Anyway.  So when we get to the number Who's the Thief there's quite the deliciously low note that the guys hit at the very end.  A note that only a couple of guys in our cast hit.  A note that made every girl in the cast and crew melt.  Every time. A note that caused the girls running the sound board to bump up those couple of guys' mikes just a little bit each night right then so we could all hear it a little better.  And on one of those not-closing nights as we Glitter Girls were up in the rafters talking about how the audience was sure to notice some really odd drips as we all melted in to puddles of bass-noted bliss it occurs to us - there are some rather good looking guys in this cast.  And they spend the entire prior number (Grovel, Grovel) on their knees and bowing down before Joseph.  Only, in the name of propriety - since this was a high school production and all - they're facing the audience as they bow down "to Joseph."  But of course, being so high above the stage we have quite the . . . ummmmmmmm . . . nice, shall we say, view of . . . ummmmmmmmm . . . all the action.

(translation: it was a great view of some cute guys and their cute butts.)

Now that part occurred to us the first time we were up there watching.  What occurred to us toward the end was . . . why keep this pleasant view all to ourselves?????

So on closing night, just as Grovel, Grovel was beginning, Kim handed me one of those one-time use cameras.  You see, due to a fortuitous stroke of luck, my spot was right above one the cutest (and lowest note hitting) guys, in perfect position to capture the perfect picture.

(and for those of you rolling your eyes and saying "SURE, it was LUCK!!" it really was.  We decided where we needed to be to cover the entire stage and picked our spots before we'd seen the show from this perspective.  Because you did not want to be moving around more than you had to up there - crazy high, and you had to step/climb over all the ropes and stuff from the curtain pulley system.  We got our glitter, got up, got to our spots, and pretty much stayed there until the show was over.  In order to avoid splatting.  We couldn't have fallen through the slats down to the stage, but even just tripping and face planting onto the metal slats we were walking on would NOT have been pleasant.)

ANYWAY.  So it's closing night and Kim hands me her camera.  And I aim it straight down . . . and snap a picture.

This is the part where I mention that none of us thought to consider how it's pretty much pitch black up where we were because the only light came from the stage lights well below us.  Or the fact that even though those lights were really bright, they weren't bright enough to prevent the camera from using its flash.  Or just how bright a flash is in almost-pitch-blackness.  Or how far away we really were from the stage.

Yeah.  The flash went off.  We were blinded.  I almost dropped the camera.  And we spent the next several minutes giggling, part out of amusement, part out of shock and panic.  And trying to shush each other.  And talking about how bad it would have been if I'd actually dropped the camera - how crazy would that have been for the audience, for a camera to randomly come falling from the sky and shatter on the stage? (assuming, of course, it did not hit the actor we'd been trying to take a picture of . . . I would still be feeling guilty if that had happened!!)

But we got through the rest of the show and blinded the cast with glitter and went back down - totally sure that everyone had seen the flash and we were going to be in soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much trouble.  Of course, the range of that cheap camera's flash was nowhere near the distance between where we were and where people could see anything, so no one had a clue what we'd gotten up to.  Which was rather a relief.  We asked a couple of techies who were in the booth, they said they saw nothing, and we never spoke of it again.  Except to each other.  The phrase "grovel, grovel, *FLASH*" is still an inside joke that Kim and I will exchange occasionally.  :-)



I wonder if that low-noted cute-butted boy is going to be there next week . . . because oh yeah, he was in my class. :-D


P. ost  S. cript
This is the part where I lament the lack of youtube ten years ago again.  Because there would totally be a video of our production here.  Oh well.  I've been watching the rhythmic gymnastics.  It is seriously AMAZING . . . and not that different from color guard.  I soooo could have been an Olympian, dangit!