For some reason I’ve forgotten, when I was in the 6th grade I decided that I wanted to sing “My Favorite Things” in the school talent show. I had never sung in public and don’t remember being especially interested in doing so until then. I didn’t tell anyone I was going to do this except my teacher who would accompany me on piano. And I won. I was supposed to sing in the talent show at the Mid-South Fair that fall but over the summer my teacher decided to become a missionary and moved to Taiwan. I couldn’t find someone to play piano so I didn’t get to go.
This led to me being a soloist at school and church, performing in musicals and concerts for all my teenage years. I started college majoring in music with the intent of being a professional singer. The only performance I participated in was as part of the chorus for Handel’s Messiah performed at a large venue around Christmas my freshman year. But I realized early on that there were so many people better than I was and changed majors. Aside from occasionally singing backup in some friends’ band, I was never on stage again.
Every year for the past 5 years I’ve gotten up on stage 10 different times over a weekend and introduced the 6-8 independent films the audience was going to watch at my film festival. After showing the films I got back on stage and interviewed the directors/producers/actors representing the films and solicited questions from the audience. At the end of the festival, I got up on stage and gave out the festival awards and winner’s checks to the directors/producers/actors representing the winning films. This was for a small, niche film festival in Northwest Montana.
In 4th grade I played Alice in Alice in Wonderland. It was an all boys school, and they needed someone who was small, which I was – very, and who could remember all the lines.
In 5th grade I played John in Peter Pan. I was supposed to play Michael as I was small, but he has almost no lines compared to John and the boy who started as John couldn’t remember his lines.
In 6th grade, our Peter Pan play went on “tour”. We went to other schools, children’s hospitals, etc. Halfway through the year it go a bit repetitive so the boy who played Smee and I swapped places for one show without telling the teacher what we were doing. We continued with those roles. I thin we did about 12 shows altogether.
My checkered thespian past includes a bit part in Hans Christian Anderson (“Take him away! Take the monster away! I can bear no more!”); a bit part in Bye, Bye Birdie (“What’s the story, Morning glory?”); in a children’s chorus with the Carpenters (“La la-la la la”); a bit part as a witch in Dido and Aeneas (“Ha ha ha, ha ha ha, ha ha ha-ha”); and a duet in Hair (“Sodomy…”). I was also in a circus in which we opened Act II with a rousing rendition of the Rhode Island state anthem on kazoos. That was where I learned to walk on stilts and eat fire, though not well enough to do so on stage or simultaneously.
My stage career started at the very top … and went rapidly downwards.
Aged about 6 months, I played baby Jesus in a Church Nativity play.
(Apparently I did fairly well and didn’t overact.)
When I was 12 I went for a part in our School play.
The drama teacher broke it to me gently that I wasn’t very good at acting, but then added "
Your superb memory means you will be both narrator and prompter!"
Nothing since then - but I do hanker after some one-line part in Shakespeare e.g.
I was in a student-directed one act in college. I played “Old Boy,” my costar Felix played “Old Man,” and we had a shared dream about the Venus DeMilo. Rather than enjoy the dream, Old Man and I argued the whole time and ignored the gorgeous blonde playing Venus. Felix had a kind of sissy pretentious manner of speech, and would draw out the O’s in “Old Boy.” The director teased him about it and said it sounded like he wanted to get into bed with me.
The costume designer had me wear a wife beater and boxers on stage. At one point, I got down on my knees and begged Venus to take me away. It was my Jason Alexander moment. I wasn’t nervous or self-conscious, because the stage has that affect on you. I realized I was pretending to be someone else and not the real me, and I nailed the role. Haven’t been on stage since.
I’ve been on stage many times, but the tops was the time I got shot. More precisely, the second time I got shot. We had made up a squib from a ziplock bag with fake blood. The first night, I had it in my shirt pocket, and the plan was for me to clutch my chest and break it at the key moment. It didn’t break. So the second night, I had it in my jacket pocket, slipped it into my upstage hand shortly before, and squeezed it as I clutched my chest.
It turns out that you need a lot less blood in a blood squib than you’d think. My blood covered half the stage. The last thing I saw as I was falling was it dripping off the ceiling lights. The audience went wild. The only thing not covered in blood was, amazingly, me. Sadly, we toned it down for later performances.
It was all the better in that I hadn’t even auditioned for that show, and wasn’t even in it until three weeks before. I was the lead in the show the previous semester, but it was a big inconvenience on my mom having to drive the full width of the city to pick me up on rehearsal nights, so I didn’t try out for that one to spare her that. But I was at the school late for some other club one night, and decided I’d stop in and say hi to my drama friends. Who told me that the largest part for which they didn’t have an understudy had just quit, and since I was so good at learning lines quickly, could I please take over?
What was also fun was that it was one of the very few roles I’ve found with four layers of reality. Most roles have two: The actor and the role. Some shows have a play-within-a-play, and therefore three. But I was a priest, except that that was just a cover for a member of the Mafia, except that the Mafia wasn’t actually involved, just a ploy by the sheriff and his deputy (me) to try to trick a murderer into confessing (I think one of the teachers wrote the play). The only other roles I know of with four layers of reality are a few of the parts in Man of La Mancha (actor - Cervantes - Alonzo Quijano - Don Quixote).
And to top it all off, that evening with the bloody shot was the evening of my 18th birthday.
I want to recruit you all for my community theater troupe!
I’ve performed off and on in some minor capacity or other in amateur theater of various kinds since high school,* making up for mediocre acting talent by speed and reliability in learning lines.
Highlights have included “pants parts” supporting roles in Shakespeare and being in the chorus in local pro-am opera company productions of Tosca and Madama Butterfly.
* That would have been “since grade school” if my third-grade teacher hadn’t decided to cut our class performance of two juvenile plays down to one, thus consigning to eternal oblivion my starring role as the North Wind in the second, eliminated, play.
I don’t remember anything whatsoever about that play except I was going to be the North Wind in it (does anybody have any guesses about what the play might have been?), and I STILL SORT OF RESENT THAT THEY CUT MY SHOW.
I played a Jelly Roll Morton tune called Freakish at the UCSD talent show. Nobody plays like Jelly Roll Morton played, so it wasn’t note-for-note, but I think I came very close. Though it was strictly an amateur show the stage and setting felt very professional, and it was presented in what was then the premiere venue on campus, Mandeville Auditorium. @Biffy_the_Elephant_Shrew might remember if he was there that night.
Nowadays I can hardly find middle C on a piano, having switched to guitar long ago. I can’t begin to fathom now how I did that in front of a full house of what must have been a couple of thousand people.
In the middle of a concert in 8th grade, the D string on my violin broke and I had to pretend to have the string until the show was over. Thank goodness it wasn’t my G-String.
In high school, I was the Preacher in “7 Brides for 7 Brothers”, Dr. Einstein in “Arsenic and Old Lace”, and my greatest role of all time was Durdles the Drunken Mason in “Drood”, in which I was honored to be chosen as the villain by the audience on the third night of performances, and thus had to sing my confessional solo.
I’ve always hoped somebody kept the recordings and uploaded them to YouTube, but alas, it was not to be.
Well, I once fronted a Ramones cover band for a night, on stage, in front of about 400 people.
I’ve been involved in community theatre for years. Mostly musicals. I don’t get lead roles, but I’m not relegated to the chorus. I tend to get named second-tier roles, which is fine by me. Such roles often get a song, either a solo or a duet.
But I didn’t get a song when we did Hairspray. That was okay, because I was juggling five different roles in that one: the creepy gym teacher, the hairspray company owner, the school principal, and the newscaster. That’s only four, but I had one more: the Flasher Who Lives Next Door. He’s only on stage for a few seconds, but that role was more fun than all the others combined.
My acting career is rather short-lived. In eighth grade I got to play the lead role of Ichabod Crane in a small, short production of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. And that’s it as for acting.
Music-wise, I’ve played maybe 50 shows all in all, including at a big European music festival in Hungary (Pepsi Sziget) a couple of times in one of the side tents (not the main stage.) I played in an indie rock band there in 2002/2003 and we had a few tours that took us through Paris, Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Prague, Ljubljana and a number of other cities, as well as many shows in Hungary. That was a fun time. Biggest crowd was only a couple hundred people – after I left (I returned to the US), the band went on to play much bigger crowds (as in the thousands).
This doesn’t quite fit the topic of the thread, but it’s adjacent enough that I felt it was worth posting.
I had an extremely vivid dream a few years ago where I was at an indie pro wrestling show, in a crowded auditorium with a few hundred people. Before the show started, one of the promoters picked me out of the crowd and brought me backstage. He told me that the jobber (I.e. the guy who is easily beaten in order to make his opponent look good) for the opening match wasn’t able to make it, and he asked me if I’d be willing to put on a costume and take his place. I agreed, and at the beginning of the show I came out in a superhero-ish costume with a lucha mask to the cheers of the audience, got in the ring with this big monster of a man, and spent about 30-45 seconds getting theatrically beaten and whipped around until he slammed me on the mat and pinned me. I got paid $500 afterward and went back to my seat to watch the rest of the show in moderate pain.
It was vivid enough that there’ve been several occasions where I wanted to tell the story and had to stop to ask myself “Wait, did that actually happen?”
I used to go to a lot of goth clubs back in the day. One particularly seedy one would have various contests on stage that I would often take part in. Two memorable ones were a mostly naked (strip down to underwear) twister competition that I won, and hooked up with the hot girl in 2nd (though that part was NOT on stage), and a pain tolerance competition that I also won.
There were three of us for the latter, a bare ass paddling contest. Tap out when you’ve had enough. The lady next to me said she would win because she had had 3 kids. She tapped out after the first hit. I don’t remember what happened to the other guy, but the MC ended up breaking the paddle on my ass and I was declared the winner since they couldn’t continue. Those free drinks were so delicious.
I’ve performed on stage at Radio City Music Hall. It was a fundraising dinner for my college, and they had the concert band there.
And now that I’m thinking of band in addition to acting, there was this one Christmas concert in high school (that I’m pretty sure I’ve told about before here)… We were mostly just playing the same songs we had all semester, but the director figured that if it was a Christmas concert, we ought to do at least a few Christmas songs. He picked up some arrangements for middle-school band, and decided that they were so easy, we didn’t need to even practice them at all. He would have been right… except that no middle-school band has a tuba, so I had to work from a trombone part. Not too bad, just transpose down exactly one octave, except that I was doing it real-time, with no practice. So I played all of the notes I recognized, but what the heck are all of these notes in the top half of the clef? Notes don’t belong up there! Those notes, I just sat out.
And so I discovered just what happens when the tuba only plays the bottom half of a part. That night saw the world’s first performance of the Ave Maria Polka.
… and went rapidly downwards. 
