"Like Being At Summer Camp"

For the past few weeks I have been practicing a play with a group of non-professional actors. We are all members of Perry United Methodist Church. We are in the trenches trying to remember our lines and trying to halfway bring the characters to life. My fellow thespians are being much more successful in doing this than I.

What this experience has reminded me of is church camp. The kind of church camp I went to when I was a young teenager living in Clinton, South Carolina. The church offered a trip to Camp Ridgecrest each year and I usually went. Each year the kids who went were a different group with some dropping out for various reasons and others adding on. I don't remember being that close to some of the people before church camp, but afterwards I always was. We had shared an experience and it bonded us together.

Of course I always fell in love during that one week period. There was usually some girl from Savannah or Augusta or Greenville who stole my heart. I would meet her, fall head over heels, swear this was the real thing, and come home and pine away for a month or more. Then it was over. Until the next year.

Somehow being in a circumstance under pressure - like church camp or a play - does bring you closer together. You are sharing experiences in a compressed time frame. With the play we are sharing fear and it is making us good close friends. The woman who is playing my wife in the play told me the other day that she guessed she was going to have to learn her lines and mine too so she could help me if I went totally blank. Now that is a friend, or a woman who doesn't want anyone to think she doesn't know her lines.

The director of the play told me she is praying for "perfect execution." I think that means she is going to shoot me if I don't learn my lines. Today she also brought me banana bread to eat before we started. I think I saw "bribe" written all over it.

Like camp, I am sure things with this play will turn out alright. We will give our two performances next week and then it will all be over. We will leave being close friends and maybe the friendships will last. Since we all live in he same town I think maybe they might.

After a few days I think I will probably look back on this as a fun experience. I don't think the memory will fade to the extent that I will ever consider doing this again. My wife says she will "perfectly execute" me if I even think about it. She is tired of cueing me on lines over and over again.

Yes when the spotlight goes out after the final scene my acting career will be over. And like all those summer camps it will become part of my memory. Just another experience to chalk up. I don't sky dive. I don't go snorkeling. I just run the risks of being an amateur actor in a church production. That is scary enough for me.

 

 

 

 

 

©2006 Jackie K. Cooper

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