Live free and die Bard

Seeing someone up on a stage getting whacked on the noggin with a giant foam sword sure did bring back memories.

I was shadowing a high school English teacher recently, picking up some tips to the profession, and a very useful piece of intel I gleaned is that kids like to get out of the classroom. Seems sensible enough. I like classrooms myself -- the smell of books, the crummy desks with 20-year-old “Ozzy Rulez” inscriptions in the tired wood -- but a change of scenery is nice every now and then. And when your class is reading lines from “Romeo and Juliet,” moving on down to the theater makes a lot of sense.

Most of the students in the\is teacher’s freshmen class are not thespians (although some should be). But that didn’t matter. They had copies of a play they seemed to be invested in, and they had foam swords the size of telephone poles. If you can’t have fun with those ingredients, then either you’re not trying hard enough or you’re deep at the bottom of a months-long coma. Probably from getting clocked upside the cranium.

Watching the kids prance about the stage seemed to make time fold in on itself; these kinds of moments happen in life occasionally. One minute you’re you, carrying with you the many decades of baggage that go along with that, and the next you see something that brings you back to a specific moment or era of your life. If this were a TV show or YouTube video, now would be the time when the screen gets all wavy and we flash to an actor playing 17-year-old Jeff. Since we’re working without visual effects, just picture a gangly nerd with Coke-bottle glasses and thin strings of hair-like material dangling from his head. I really should have worn more hats.

It was an era in which “Seinfeld” was still airing original episodes, people rented movies at Blockbuster and played them on their VCRs, and “facebook” meant falling asleep and drooling on your loaned copy of “Fahrenheit 451.” I was a junior and desperately in need of an identity. As a freshman I had tried playing football, but was so abysmally bad at it that’d I’d spend most of our games drinking Gatorade on the sideline and daydreaming about what changes I would make to the Batmobile. (We’ve never seen Batman driving around with rumbling bass. Add some subwoofers, holmes!)

Then a girl approached me. Many of my best and worst life decisions have been made because a girl approached me. This particular girl gave me a script she had written for the student-penned one-act play competition that was coming up; hosted over two nights, the “one-acts,” as they were known, were basically a series of vignettes that allowed the kids full creative control, which usually meant they stunk like elephant farts. The girl wanted me to fill a small part in her one-act, an old west period piece in which I’d play the saloon keeper. I accepted because she was pretty. Yes, I was quite lame.

My weakness for long eyelashes, however, ultimately resulted in a non-girl-related epiphany. To that point I’d never given a thought to performing onstage. Why would I? I was a shy kid, and shy kids, I reckoned, belonged in basements with their pizza box footrests and their endless cases of Diet Dr. Pepper. But shyness often stems from a fear of how others will judge or perceive you. When you’re pretending you’re someone else, your performance can be judged, sure, but you can’t be judged on the basis of who you are -- because who you are is nowhere in sight. That first night at the one-acts, I wasn’t Jeff Lagasse, awkward teenager with an early-onset combover. I was Nameless Saloon Keeper, a man with a drawl who poured whiskey and said things like “y’all.” As long as I was prepared and knew my lines, I could actually get up in front of crowds and feel somewhat comfortable. That was a huge revelation.

It’s hard to pinpoint why high school ranks so consistently on people’s “best of” and “worst of” lists when they look back on their lives. Maybe it has something to do with the time of life in which it occurs, or the neat four-year box it comes in, a container that makes it easy to reference. Ultimately I think it has to do with the lessons that are learned, and I’m not talking about reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. I mean life lessons, those moments when you discover the boundaries of who you are. Or, if you’re lucky, when you discover you have no boundaries at all.

Theater taught me a lot of those kinds of lessons. It also taught me smaller ones, like how skin-tight leggings on hairy male legs make them look like headless ferrets. Or how difficult it is to maintain a Southern accent for two hours without feeling the need to play a banjo. Or how you should never try to sing a high note after eating lots of cheese.

Watching the freshmen run through their lines the other day, I couldn’t help but wonder if one of them would be inspired to do a school play, maybe trade in their foam sword for a plastic one. What wonders await them: the long rehearsals, the heady sound of applause, the itch of cheap wigs manufactured during the Korean War. I hope at least one of those kids gets to experience that. And I hope the rest find their equivalent, because getting to place those high school years on your “best of” list is an accomplishment that endures even after some of the other ones have faded. Finally belching out “America the Beautiful” in its entirety feels great at the time, but man, what a fleeting victory that is.

My only regret about one-acts is that I didn’t write my own. Probably just as well, though. The whole plot would have consisted of two comic book nerds arguing over whether the Batmobile should have racing stripes.