SOS - Arsenic, Old Lace and a centerfold

This Sunday Soap Opera involves theater and errr... a certain type of magazine. Please go visit other Soap Operas at Brillig and Walking Kateastrophe's.

I was in many theatrical productions throughout middle and high school. A favorite role was as one of the murderous spinsters in Arsenic and Old Lace. Every year the senior class at my high school put on a production in the fall and that year it was this classic from the 1940's. This particular play was a terrific choice since it allowed the football team to put in a collective cameo during the curtain call as the "victims" from the basement.

In one scene my "nephew" goes to lift up a bench seat to find a "body" inside the bench. The guy in the bench was dumped in there during an earlier scene and had to lay in there until the lights went down because of how the set was constructed. Normally the nephew would open the bench and peer down very closely into the open space then stand by the bench for me to join him. I was also to peer in closely and comment that he wasn't one of the homeless men we had "helped" (by murdering).

During the Saturday night performance, the nephew goes to the bench, lifts up the seat and sticks his head into it. Then he bolted across the stage, completely changing how the scene had been blocked. I tottered over (remember I was playing an old woman and had spent a week of rehearsals walking with marbles in my shoes so I would learn the swollen foot shuffle) and lifted the seat. I stuck my head into the open space expecting to see the kid who was playing a murdered man.

Instead I was staring at the largest set of breasts I had seen in my nearly 18 years. Someone had handed the kid a nudie magazine and he held up the centerfold for both the nephew and me to stick our noses up against.

I, in turn, loudly dropped the seat and tottered (still remembered to totter!) to the nephew on the other side of the stage and we barely got through the rest of the scene in which I explain that wasn't one of the men I had "helped" and I didn't know how he got there.

Meanwhile the kid I was dating at the time (aka homeroom guy), who was also best friends with the actor playing the nephew, was backstage running the light board and laughing his head off.