Before Meth: Fired From My Senior Year High School Musical

Slammed: a Memoir — Chapter 2 Part 2

I parked out back by the loading dock of Billings Studio Theater and sprang from my car.

I bounded through the back door of the theater where 10 years before I’d played a monkey complaining about the rain. The same theater where I played an orphan in London, Pooh Bear in Hundred Acre Wood, a Lost Boy in Neverland, the youngest of Joseph’s brothers in Egypt, and the boy next door in St. Louis.

That very afternoon I would be playing the Emcee in a 1930s Berlin Cabaret.

I sped through the scene shop with its everlasting scents of paint and sawdust, down the hallway stairs, and into the men’s dressing room. I imagine all community theater dressing rooms share the scents of old fabric, the clay-and-crayon of half-used foundations, and the sharp sting of astringent skin cleansers.

I painted my face with the slapdash of a teenager who’s only ever worn makeup onstage. I made my face paler, overly rouged my cheeks, and gave my mouth a cupid’s bow of red lipstick. The pièce de résistance: a pair of glued-on dancing eyelashes.

After putting on my tux shirt, pants, jewel red vest with matching bow tie and jacket, I had become an 18-year-old homage to Joel Grey.

The image complete, I bounded back out the stage door and high tailed it to the gymnasium of Rocky Mountain College, not 500 feet away, where the Billings Central class of ’97 would be graduating that evening and where graduation rehearsal was about to begin.

In order to rehearse for graduation and make curtain for the 3 o’clock matinee, I needed to get into costume early. So, there I was, taking my alphabetical place to rehearse the processional in full drag.

Yet, aside from a few eye rolls and shaking of heads, along with a bit of ribbing from my female friends (“Honestly, John, your lashes are prettier than mine.” “Why thank you!” flutter flutter flutter) none of the students or even the adults paid it any mind.

By this point, this was who I was. Not so much the full drag part, but that I was a performer. Growing up I had what I guess was a normal amount of struggle as an adolescent trying to come to terms with his sexuality in the ’90s. Yet, as far as my high school experience overall, right up to graduation, I had a pretty decent go of it. I had firmly accepted myself as gay and, though I wasn’t officially out of the closet, enough of my friends knew, which meant everybody knew. And it wasn’t a big deal.

Like a line from A Chorus Line, “Who wants to admit you had a happy childhood?”

I’m not sure how I lucked out — and at a private Catholic school at that. I didn’t receive the kind of bullying that has injured and traumatized so many queer people growing up. Perhaps I was being bullied but was too dense and/or hyper to realize. Perhaps I was fortunate to be a part of a decent class who either considered me a friend or otherwise didn’t give enough of a shit about me to care.

But mostly, I think, it had to do with theater. I was always doing theater, often doing two, even three productions at the same time. I didn’t care about high school politics or being popular. I was already popular with my fellow misfits, eccentrics, and overdramatic weirdos at our never-ending rehearsals and performances.

It wasn’t just young high school theater geeks either. It was doctors and stay-at-home moms, paralegals and box store managers, small business owners and 9-to-5 grunts, all exploring theater with as much excitement and innocence as I had when I donned my monkey suit.

And of course we had our veterans. Those who lived almost entirely for their Community Theater lives. Character actors and reliable standbys. Staples who were known in the Billings theater community by their first names. That cabal of actors — and over-actors — who could always be counted on to show up in every local production.

Like Harold.

Harold was nothing if not a character man, a ready Le Fou or Sancho. He was short and round with a smaller head usually covered by various chapeaux. His eyes could twinkle and his face shine, yet they often revealed how tired he was. Tired, I would later glean, from having to hold up a comedic mask to make his eccentric otherness more palatable for our Montanan society. He, like so many of his ilk, lived in a subspace of queerness: never really out, existing through a matrix of interconnected closets.

“You know, I divorced my first wife for chewing ice,” he once remarked to me as I crunched away next to him, a habit I picked up from my dad.

Harold was the go to director for the spring musical at Central High. My Junior year he decided the show would be Little Shop of Horrors, which was awesome!

It seemed obvious to me — and to anyone with eyes and ears — that I, clearly, was going to play Seymour. I basically was a 17-year-old Rick Moranis and I could sing the shit out of the role.

But, no.

He cast Rob, a senior, who was a tall, blond, gorgeous blue-eyed jock about as far away from Rick Moranis as you can possibly get. Rob had dabbled in theater, playing Jesus in an all Billings High School production of Godspell, hitting the white savoir nail a bit on the head. But it was always extracurricular for him, a hobby, whereas for me, it was my life!

I sucked it up, swallowed my hurt pride, played my ensemble part, and looked forward to next year.

As the calendar flipped to my Senior year, I had been hoping for a show like You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown or even The Wizard of Oz. It seemed obvious that he would choose a show with a lead like Seymour, like Charlie Brown or the Scarecrow, something that would play to my strengths.

Then Harold announces his choice.

Oliver!

Fucking Oliver!

Don’t get me wrong, I actually like Oliver! I had been an orphan in 5th grade singing “food, glorious food” seven years earlier at BST.

But for a high school production? I mean, child abuse, human trafficking, spousal abuse, murder? Oliver Twist wasn’t exactly Dickens’ version of Live Laugh Love.

“I want you to play Fagin,” Harold told me. Fagin was the old adult leader of the child gang of pickpockets, normally played by an aging character man in his 50s and 60s. “You know, the show’s really about Fagin,” he attempted to reassure me.

Yeah. That’s why it’s called Oliver!

And the kicker? He cast Rob’s little brother, still in grade school, as Oliver Twist.

So there it was. Oliver! was going to be my senior year musical.

I grumbled and groaned but more or less accepted this as we started rehearsals.

I wasn’t too heart broken though. Oliver! was going to be my last school production, but it wasn’t going to be my last Billings production. BST was closing their season with Cabaret and I was gunning for the Emcee. The scheduling worked out perfectly! Oliver! would rehearse in the afternoons and Cabaret would rehearse in the evenings. There was also a two week window between Oliver! closing and Cabaret opening which was buckets of time.

So when I was cast as the Emcee, my final season on stage in Billings was looking to be absolutely golden!

“You have to choose.” Harold put his script on top of the black upright piano.

I stood there, confused. It was just him and me and some scattered chairs and music stands in the band room for that afternoon’s music rehearsal. Harold let the silence stretch between us. When it was clear he wasn’t going to elaborate, “Choose?”

“Yes, choose. You have to choose. You have to. These parts,” he raised his arms and shook his head like he didn’t know how to make it any clearer, “these parts are too big for you. They’re just too big.”

Finally finding my voice, “Harold, I’ve done this before. I’ve rehearsed two shows like this before. I did the same thing last year. Steve (the director of Cabaret) knows that Oliver! comes first and is ok with…”

“No. You are not capable.” This clearly wasn’t a discussion. “These roles are too big. You will not be able to do either of these roles justice at the same time. It’s not fair to me, It’s not fair to Steve, so you have to choose.”

Before I could protest further, “If you don’t, I’ll have to fire you.”

The rest of the cast started arriving, breaking the airless silence that followed his ultimatum. We said nothing more about it, and, once rehearsal was over, I left without giving my answer.

This was nuts!

I had to choose? Between my senior year production and my final BST production?

Sure, I wasn’t all that excited about playing Fagin, but quitting the show would be the equivalent of the quarterback quitting the team before the championship game.

This wasn’t fair by a long shot. I knew I could do both of these shows. I was sure of it. So I sought counsel from my compatriots in the Billings theater community, my fellow teenage drama nerds, as well as more than a few adults who I had come to admire and respect.

Across the board, the advice was the same. “Do you think you can do both? Then tell him that. Make it his decision.”

I drove up to the Rims and parked. The Rims are large, sheer sandstone cliffs that run the length of Billings. Just west of the airport, which sits on top of the Rims, on the other side of the road, is a long stretch of cliffs that look out over a great portion of Billings.

I sat on a sandstone rock that was one of a line of rocks artificially placed as a barrier to keep cars from driving off the edge. It was warm that weekend, but the air was also fresh and crisp from recent rainfall. The surrounding hills all had a tinge of green, new spring growth that would soon become emerald making the hills more reminiscent of Ireland for, at most, a couple weeks. Then they would fade into their tans, golds and browns for the remainder of the year. The trees on the residential streets below were only beginning to bud. The lights of downtown and the oil refineries just to the east had already started to twinkle as the afternoon sun raced toward evening. Through the clear, crisp air, I saw minute details in both the Pryor Mountains and the Beartooth Mountains nearly 100 miles away.

As I sat there, I couldn’t help but feel how melodramatic it all was. Partially because I had already made my choice but still wanted to play the “scene” of “making a consequential decision.” But also because the whole situation just seemed so contrived, like an oversweet plot on an afterschool special. There was zero reason to turn my last hurrahs into a fucking Sophie’s Choice.

Feeling like the “scene” had played out, I got back in my car, confident in my decision, and was ready to let the chips fall. I typed up a letter informing Harold of my decision and made sure he received it before our next rehearsal.

As the final bell rang at the end of the day that Monday, I made my way to the cafeteria, our rehearsal space for that afternoon, and waited.

Harold walked in, not really looking at me, but not making any kind of a fuss either. He calmly put his stuff down, turned to me, and said, “I want your script and score. You’re out.”

I had been half expecting this. So, also with no real fuss, I grabbed my script and score out of my backpack, calmly put it down on the table next to him, and left.

My competitive drama partner ended up stepping into the role of Fagin, and, while I didn’t see the show myself, I was told by several people that she did a wonderful job.

Smash cut back to graduation rehearsal: We all went through the motions of walking from one spot to another, I sang through the Ave Maria (again: full drag), and then hustled back over to the theater.

Places were called and I made my way through backstage to take my place just behind the proscenium curtain. The very same place where I stood as a child, wishing I could have more time on stage, wanting to be on stage from the moment the curtain went up till curtain came down. Now there I was, about to open the show and, two hours later, I would be closing the show as well.

The lights went down, the audience quieted, the unmistakable Kander and Ebb staccato of horns and reeds began to play, and I once again stepped onto that stage, into the place where I belonged, and bid “Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome” to the ladies and gentlemen to 1930’s Berlin.

After the bows, I stripped off the Emcee, removed most of my makeup, changed back into my dress clothes, and flitted back over to the gymnasium to walk my momentous — albeit comparatively boring — graduation.

Later that summer at the BST Awards, both Harold and I were up for Best Actor in a Musical, me for Cabaret, him for the holiday show, Meet Me in St Louis.

I won.

Harold didn’t attend.

Next Chapter

Chapter Guide

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