"...but say what you
mean."
Inspired.
That's how I feel tonight. I was fortunate enough to get to visit my friend Kelly once again this evening. We were able to talk a little bit about how she is doing, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually as well. I am very glad to say that she is doing quite well. To see her so positive and able to begin to discover the lessons that God is teaching her through this was so very ... uplifting.
A couple days ago I had made the decision to not publish the narrative I had written about my experience set painting with her a couple years ago. I just convinced myself that it wasn't good enough, that it was too ... cheesy? and that I'm just not ready to make myself that vulnerable. Tonight, though, Kelly was talking about how God has been showing her that she needs to take this time and rediscover who she is. For example, she's an artist, but she hasn't drawn and hasn't touched her camera in a long time. But when we came in tonight, she had her colored pencils and art tools scattered all around her and she was drawing. It was the first drawing she has worked on in a very long time. Somehow, after talking with her, I knew that I had to publish this. No, I am not a great writer, but I do love writing. I am a writer, though, in my own way. I loved writing this. No, it's not a masterpiece, but I'm proud of it. Though I do like feedback, I don't need it. I don't need to be validated by whether you find it worth reading or not, I just need to get back to something I love. This is what I love: English. The language itself, reading, writing, I love it all. Here is my offering, here is my worship to God.
White Teardrops
Costume on. Make-up on. Hair done. On stage. In place. Stand up straight. Don’t lock your knees. Look forward. Remember to project from your abdomen. Take a deep breath – okay, curtain up, lights up, and action.
Theater. It’s a love-hate relationship. You spend about four weeks devoting your entire life, spending every free moment of your day, in preparation for – opening night. You step out onto the stage and the adrenaline keeps your body moving and your mind focused despite the distractions: a large crowd, stage lights glaring in your eyes, the band missing a cue. Still, you keep on performing, soaking up every precious moment. Then, in a very few short days, everything is done and over with. The costumes are hung up, the dressing rooms cleaned out, and everyone goes back to normal life. All you have left are – memories.
Our college was putting on the biggest show it had ever attempted: Maury Yeston’s The Phantom. I began doing theater two years previously and had fallen in love from the very start, and from that moment on I had barely left the stage, the auditorium, the theater building. This love affair sparked many new relationships and brought me some great friends; one of them was Kelsey. I had first worked with her about a year and a half earlier and immediately had a friend-crush on her. I was determined that we would eventually be best friends. Well, so far that day had not come, so naturally, I was ecstatic to get to work with her in the following two productions and we had become – good friends. Not best friends. I auditioned for the chorus in this new, groundbreaking musical, and got in. Kelsey, on the other hand, auditioned for one of the main female roles: Carlotta. Unsure of her abilities, she was very afraid of not getting the role. I knew better, though. Somehow, I knew without a doubt she would get the part. Which is why I was thrilled to be around when she heard the news that Carlotta was hers. She…was…euphoric.
Apart from who got which roles, there was another question: How would this tiny theater program pull of this huge show set-wise? The answer? The stage-building class was going to build the mammoth set pieces and Kelsey was going to be the set-designer, painting everything from the backdrop to the front of the opera façade to Carlotta and Christine’s dressing rooms.
Poor Kelsey! Not only did she have to memorize lines and blocking and songs and dances and cues. She’d also have to paint the opera façade, the Titania set, and the two dressing rooms. Not to mention the biggest job of all: turning the blank-white back wall into the backdrop: the catacombs under the opera house, the phantom’s lair. All in one month. So after the joy of getting her part wore off, she realized that this was the biggest project she had every undertaken. It was her Everest.
She now had many months' worth of painting to do in a very short time, so she called for backup and we came running. Emily, Paul, Eric, Andrew, and I. We were it. The dream team. Not quite. Though she did and still does claim that she could never have done it without us, I question how much help we really were. Not having been trained in painting like Kelsey, we could only paint solid blocks of color that she had to completely paint over (which she claimed “added depth”). The only other help we provided was the painting the flat, cartoonish-style Titania set. One more slight problem (you always have with theater people): we like to perform.
So to the tunes of Jason Mraz, Michael Buble, and the soundtracks of Wicked, Footloose, and Hairspray, we danced and sang our way through painting the set pieces and backdrop. The first weekend we spent painting we were in the theater from 2:00 in the afternoon on Friday until midnight the following Saturday night. No sleep. Only a little McDonald’s and “Without Love” to keep up moving. So it continued for the next two, three, four weekends. We laughed and cried together. We poured out our hearts into paint trays and splattered it unto wooden frames. Then the song “Footloose” would come on, and we’d drop paintbrush and pencil and run to center stage and dance it out. And that was life. We’d go to bed exhausted Saturday night and wake up Sunday morning in time to go to church together. We’d pick shows like Hairspray and Beauty and the Beast and decide whom of us and our friends would play which roles. We’d outline, mix, paint, rinse, and repeat. Kelsey was the driving force in us all. She had heart and she had a love for the job that was contagious.
Time was winding down. We only had about a week and a half to go and we still weren’t finished. Even after an ungodly amount of hours spent on it, the back wall wasn’t done. Being the phantom’s lair, it was supposed to be complete with cracking columns and rows of skulls lining the outer walls by now. This particular task was even bigger than anyone had anticipated. After rehearsal one evening, the director pulled Kelsey aside and confronted her about it. I don’t remember exactly what he said; maybe I’ve pushed it out of my mind. It was too painful to hear those words spoken. Especially to someone running on so little sleep and such enormous amounts of stress. So Kelsey cried. We held her. We encouraged her. We loved her. Began painting again.
Thursday was upon us. It was the morning of opening night. After leaving class at 11:00am, I ran into Emily and Paul. Last we knew, the back wall still wasn’t finished, and we were all overcome with curiosity to see how it was progressing. We walked into the backstage area. Opening the door sent in a draft that stirred up the comforting smell of sawdust and paint. It was like coming home. We walked out onto the stage and there was Kelsey’s iPod hooked up to the speakers playing “I’m Yours” and the lights were on. There were various trays and cans of paint and paintbrushes scattered around. Then we saw it. The backdrop was finished. It was one of the most delicate and intricate pieces of work I had ever seen. The vast columns complete with meticulous cracks and fissures. Very cunningly, in the place of the rows of skulls, there was a single red candle sitting atop a single skull, lit. There were a few sets of these on each side going back. The flame from the candle glared and illuminated the wall behind it and the blood red wax dripped and reflected the light so that I had to do a double-take to make sure it wasn’t real. Where was Kelsey? It was then that we noticed her in the back corner of the stage. She was lying on the floor asleep with paintbrush in hand.
Opening night came and all were in awe of the set pieces and backdrop. I heard previously that throughout her many productions, Kelsey had never received flowers back stage before, like many other performers had. I decided to make it my job to present her with this sort of “right-of-passage.” I ran to the store in the middle of the day, and immediately found what I was looking for. I got back in time to arrive at the theater before most of the others, but not Kelsey. I presented her with the over-sized vase overflowing with red roses and daisies and in return received the biggest hug from one of the best people I knew. After all we had been through that month, I finally had the best friend I had wanted for the last year and a half. Kelsey.
The weekend of production flew by in a whirlwind of excitement and near exhaustion. Our crew spent every evening after the shows together at our favorite restaurant: the all-American Denny’s. The food wasn’t great, but what did that matter when we were together? There was something in the atmosphere that drew us in and made us burst out in song (luckily there were so many of us that they had to stick us in the back room – away from the other customers). It was so relieving to finally be done with all of the rehearsals and painting, the painting and rehearsals. We were in the midst of enjoying the spoils of all the sleepless nights we had put in. Then came Sunday.
Sunday afternoon was our final show, it was all over. Everything we had been working towards and had put our blood, sweat, and tears into for the past month was – gone. Over. Done. We were told by administration that we had to restore the auditorium to the precise condition it was in before we invaded it many weeks previous. There was one question lingering in all of our minds that until this point we had pushed away every time it crept up. Who was going to paint over the back wall? When? Due to prior experiences, we all knew this was inevitable, but none of us wanted to even think about it. The answer came on us unaware: there was going to be an admissions event in the auditorium the following day. We were to paint over as much of the wall as we could with what white paint we had left and maintenance would finish it the next morning before the event took place.
Kelsey broke down. Of course she broke down. She had put her whole life, her everything into making that smelly white wall the breathtaking piece of art it had become. I know, I was there to witness it along with Andrew, and Paul, and Emily, and Eric. In a moment of clarity, Kelsey knew what she had to do. She looked up with resolution in her eyes and said that she must be the one to paint over it. To see anyone else do it would be to subconsciously set that person against her in her mind forever.
Much of the cast had already left to go to the cast party and only a few stayed behind. I found Kelsey standing in a group with the director, who was delegating the last jobs to those left. Her head was in her hands and her shoulders were trembling. I ran up to her, pulled her to me, and embraced her. The others left and we few remained. Kelsey, Eric, Andrew, and I. The opera façade and dressing rooms had been diminished down to pieces of scrap wood thrown into a pile. The stage was bare. We tried to talk Kelsey out of her decision, maybe there was another way, they could just pull the mid-stage curtain. It was no good. There was no other way. It was an agonizing leap she had to take.
To make our small provision of white paint spread farther, we silently mixed some water into the tray. Music no longer floated through the air enlivening us now, there was only tension. We carried the two laden trays out to the stage and scrounged up four rollers. Kelsey was determined to make the first strike.
So there I was before the wall, reluctantly holding the paint roller in my hand. I was looking for the last time upon the one thing that had drawn us all together. The one thing that had brought us all serendipitously together in what seemed like a mere moment of closeness, love, joy, and unity. Kelsey entered my line of vision, disrupting the perfect view of beauty. With tears streaming down her face and her whole body now trembling, she began to nervously pace back and forth in front of the wall; the paint roller she had gripped in her hand leaving a trail of white teardrops where she walked. In one quick motion, her roller hit the wall and flew across it. Defeated, we silently joined her in her sin. The sin of destroying something with so much aesthetic beauty and personal meaning to all of us. The thinned white paint splattered on our faces, in our hair, on our clothes, and on the floor. We covered as much of the wall as our amount of watered-down paint allowed, which was only about five or six feet up the twenty-foot wall. We left one of the skull-based candles in a bubble of its own surrounded by a cloud of white.
Later on that night, at the cast party, we laughed and joked, and danced around. Everything in us was trying to push out the memory of what we had just done. The awful thing we had just done. Our very clothes and faces and hair were still covered in the white splattered evidence.
About a week later I found myself in the auditorium again, filming for a video class. The mid-stage curtain was drawn concealing the back wall. My curiosity got the better of me. I mounted the stage and walked up to the middle of the curtain. My fingers reluctantly searched for the opening and found it. I pulled back on one side to see what lay hidden behind. I wasn’t surprised in the least to find the back wall just as we had left it: half done. The skull candle was still in its protective bubble surrounded by a cloud of white.
They hadn’t finished the back wall and ended up drawing the curtain.
Notes: the above account is (to the best of my memory) almost wholly true. I would clarify this one point, however: although Kelly (aka "Kelsey") and I are good friends, we did not become nor are we particular "best friends." I know I am not her best friend (I know who is) and she knows she's not mine. That was a slight exaggeration added for dramatic effect - as if the 100% true version of this story needed any... Other than that, being written several months after the event, several details were inserted where I didn't remember exactly - but filled in as close to the truth as possible.
Other than Kelly = Kelsey, you should also know: Emily = Elizabeth, Paul = David, Andrew = Marc, and Eric = Kyle. Why the name changes? Mostly just an attempt to objectify myself from the story whilst re-writing and editing.
Candle/Skull on back wall
Titania Set
Part of the back wall
