The Reason I Still Go to Midsummer

On Saturday one of my kids from camp called me. He was working the lights at the Fayetteville High production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I told him two of my friends and I used to work the lights for choir productions, in exchange for a ticket to the choir trip to Silver Dollar City; we had inappropriate names we used to issue spotlight commands and color changes until a mom came on the radio and said that she, too, had a headset. I asked if he ever used a codename.

(We have assigned seating in Physics and Human Affairs, breaking everyone up into groups of four. I'm in a group with all girls. The first day I met them, I introduced myself, then asked if they wanted to use codenames. No one thought that was funny. One of them brought it up last Tuesday, and said it made her uncomfortable. Secrecy can do that, if you're not strong enough. But my middle name used to be Secrecy, until I changed it for obvious reasons.)

The best part of all Midsummer productions is the death scene. The words of the play are fantastic, and though some characters are just doubles of each other, it doesn't matter - they speak beautifully. But Act 5 is a play with a play; these really terrible actors who work during the day as weavers and joiners and all sorts of menial jobs put on a Romeo and Juliet type play called Pyramus and Thisbe. It's the funniest thing in Shakespeare. At the end, when Pyramus commits suicide, it is always hilarious. It isn't in the text - the stage direction just says, "He dies" - but every variant I've seen has a complicated and drawn out death throe, because Bottom, who plays Pyramus, is a diva.

When I was a fairy dancer in the University's version of Midsummer (way too long of a story for this post - it will come later), my group went on right after Pyramus and Thisbe ended. We used to stand in the wings and laugh so hard that we had to do breathing exercises to get back into the fairy mindset. The last performance, Christopher, who played Bottom, died for two minutes. There was no stopping him. He kept inventing ways to rekill himself - he actually went offstage and came back with extra props to use in suicide.

This is a picture of our Pyramus; the left most fairy is Titania. They're in Titania's bower, after Bottom was transformed into a donkey. Looking at the costumes, you can already tell something is wrong - we look like freaks. Yes, I have a picture of myself, but I'm saving it. You have to keep coming back if you want to see.

Last performances are always lax. You do a lot of things you've always wanted to do but were afraid to in case it would get you fired. My last high school play, I forgot many of my lines and had to reinvent new ones. We had to take a laugh break on stage. I think audiences find that more funny than anything else.

No one really messed up on Saturday. Disappointing. On my last Midsummer performance, I fell off the stage and had to get eight stitches. I still have this scar under my lip. When people ask me how it happened, I tell them I used to dance professionally.