Death Becomes Her.

I was looking through my computer the other day and found a couple of self-portraits I’d taken with my digital camera back in January when I was getting undressed after a show. I was wandering around my apartment in my underwear and stage hair and makeup, and it’s, well, amusing. I figured that I might as well share. In this first picture, me and my gigantic breasts are actually smiling and looking cute, for a change. (Good lord, are those things really that big?) In the second one, I think that I was going for sexy, but I only succeeding in looking stoned. My hair’s not really that color, but my eyes are, and that ladder in the background leads up to my bedroom. Oh, and the eyebrows? Are totally painted on.I spent most of this weekend draped over my couch, feeling like I was dying. As soon as I got home from work on Friday, I climbed upstairs and took a nap. I woke up three hours later and promptly started vomiting. I realized that I was burning up, collapsed into a heap, and didn’t move for thirty-six hours. Then, this morning, I woke up and felt like I’d never been sick at all. Weird.

Being sick for the past couple of days just kind of reinforced the loneliness I was feeling last week. I don’t have anybody here who’s close enough for me to call when I’m not feeling well and ask to bring me tylenol and juice. It’s upsetting and, frankly, kind of sad.

This Wednesday, I had a private performance of the dinner theatre I’ve been doing since last October. We just started a brand new show, and we haven’t had much time to work out the kinks yet, so the performances are still a little bit rough. In any case, the character I play in this new show is, to put it kindly, a woman of questionable morals. (To put it not so nicely, she’s super-duper easy.) During the show, I’m supposed to flirt with the male audience members and come on to each and every one of them, preferably in-front of their female partners. Of course, the private performance, as I learned only about an hour before we started, was for a women’s social club. There wasn’t even one man in the whole audience. I had to re-think the character on the fly, and in the end things turned out well enough, but I fear that the show still suffered for it.

During the show a few days previously, I experienced one of the more embarrassing things to have ever happened to me on stage. The show’s a murder mystery, and I do hope that none of you were ever planning on coming to see it because I’m about to give away most of the ending. At the very end of the show, after the audience members have submitted their guesses of the killer, I come on and make my way through the audience giving a little monologue that recaps the events of the night. At the end of the monologue, the real killer comes in and points a gun at me — I freak out and run through the room, but she shoots me and I drop dead. Well, during this performance, the room was more crowded than I was expecting, and it took me a much longer time than is normal to make my way through the audience, so when the killer “shot” me, I wasn’t yet at my mark. I heard the noise of the fake gun, and threw myself towards the spot at the back of the room. When I did that, my giant poodle skirt FLEW up and landed over my head, displaying my entire bottom to the audience. (Luckily, I was wearing underpants. On the other hand, I have cellulite and I fear that I may have scarred several of the audience members.) My sense of modesty overpowered my integrity as an actor, and even though I was supposed to be “dead,” I instinctively reached up and adjusted my clothing. The audience cracked up and I realized that I was upstaging the killer during her big moment, which is a totally shitty thing to do, so after I fixed myself, I just laid there quietly and pretended to quietly die. (Did I use “laid” correctly? I’m a huge grammar dork, but the lay/lie thing is one that I’ve never quite been able to get a handle on. I hate that.)

So, that was my embarrassing moment. It doesn’t sound quite so bad now that I wrote it out, but trust me — it was mortifying. My only consolation is that it isn’t forever preserved on video like the time that my chair broke out from under me during my high-school musical from eleventh grade. That one, I’ll never live down.