I’ve been involved with theater for years, but almost always on the technical side - stage crew, lights, sound, assistant stage manager, stage manager… .
About ten years ago we did Cinderella as our Christmas show, and had a really fantastic cast. I was assistant stage manager and worked a lot of special effects. During the scene where the pumpkin coach is revealed, Cinderella and her fairy godmother are in front of a black scrim while the coach is being moved into place, and I am filling the set with dry ice smoke. This involved lying on my stomach used out of the sight lines with a pair of high-pot gloves to handle the hose. When the fairy godmother waved her wand and the scrim went up - fast - the audience would gasp. It happened every show in the run. The tech director had done an incredible job on the Coach - it was beautiful - and when I later watched a video of the show I understood just how awesome that scene was.
I would lie there and hear that gasp, and then the applause, and think “This is why I do theater”.
Then I would try to fill the orchestra pit with fog. On my best night I got it all the way out to the third row, and the orchestra conductor chased me through the backstage during the intermission.
When I was at summer camp, every year we would do a talent show. My second year, I auditioned and played the Star Spangled Banner on my throat (I can’t really explain how to do it in writing, but the gist is that I close my throat and bang the resonant chambers to produce sound.); a couple of bars in, everybody was standing up, hands over their hearts, singing along. The next year, I did the same thing, and everybody was absolutely silent. The entire time. And I finished, and they were still silent, for about five seconds. Then they all stood up and roared. The sound was actually tangible, as force and not just noise.
I do management consulting so I give talks on a pretty regular basis. One of my regular clients has a corporate culture of everybody praising everybody else so much that I sometimes wonder if there’s time left to do any work. So whenever I give a talk there I get a SO, as does the speaker before me and the speaker after me. And people line up to tell me how great it was and catch me at lunch to tell me their favorite lines I’d said and all that.
I’ve received only one in my 47 years and it just happened recently. Hub was the Commander of an Army Reserve Unit and I was the Family Readiness Group Leader for several years, spanning peacetime and a 15-month deployment to Afghanistan. Hub was celebrating his retirement and in the course of the evening, one of the big honchos mentioned my contribution in the FRG. Spontaneously, 100 soldiers and their families stood up and gave me a standing “o”. I was completely flabbergasted. Being the FRG Leader is, for the most part, a thankless job. You don’t realize what an impact you may have had on people until a moment like that. It’s an awesome feeling.
