Seems the older I get the more foolish I get and my latest foolishness involved volunteering to be in a twenty-four hour play. I know nothing about these things so they made me a director and gave me a guy about my age with a memory about as long as an ingrown toenail to direct. We also had two young students working with us who were obviously “star struck” and in awe of the old actor and older director’s ability to remember nothing but their present location and names. I should have directed them out of the building because trying to memorize ten pages of script in twelve hours can lead to a huge headache and multiple trips to the bathroom. At first I thought this might be like one of those old movies you see (Gene Kelly, Donald O’Conner and some starlet) where it’s all about getting ready for some big production on Broadway.

You know, the lights go up and everyone knows their lines and dances like Fred Astaire? I was wrong. Four people who may have been water-boarded, had met the night before to write five plays about whatever their deranged minds could come up with after negative sleep. Some of it was pretty good, I must admit, but when we got hold of our particular script and began trying to memorize, I realized that whenever the lights went up in the theatre, no one on our “team” would be home. Still we proceeded to give it the old “college why” and began the process during breakfast, taking what they had written and, while eating sausage/cheese biscuits, putting it into some form resembling a play. We were to use cheap props (no problem there) and bring the “Greatest Show on Earth” to the Goldstein Center for the Performing Arts by eight PM that evening. Thus, the twenty-four hour play!

Sausage-cheese biscuits always bring out the primitive man in me and as I thought about how I was going to control what was sure to happen in a confined area I thought, ʺwhat would Hitchcock do? I heard he kept a dog around most of the time, but that would not have been prudent in this case. Our play involved a redneck named Bubba (played by the aging “actor”), who wanted to have his grandpa’s forty year old “cell phone” fixed.

He had a son named Skeeter (played by one of the students) who was fairly simple minded and spent a little too much time with his hands in weird places, poking around in the cell phone displays. Simple plot (you would have thought) but not when we got hold of it. I could see our Bubba was having a problem remembering his lines so I said, “If you can’t think of anything to say, just holler at ol’ Skeeter.” “Ok, he said, no problem.” It reminded me of the many times my wife had caught me doing something outside the realm of normalcy at home and I would be at a loss for words. Why I’d just holler at ol’ “Skeeter”, who would most likely be one of the dogs, she’d forget what it was she had caught me doing in the first place and we’d go on like nothing had happened.

We must have gone over that script fifty times by “show time” with Bubba hollering at Skeeter most of the day. But, as they say, “The show must go on.” The curtain opened and I’m back stage following the script. Two pages go by, no problem, three, still no problem. I’m thinking, “This guy is actually going to pull it off!” Then I hear, “SKEETER!” After that you could call it improvisation because when ol Bubba panicked the others did too and no one remembered anything!