Chapter 5: High School Theatre

I had several goals in high school. Nearly all of them included scratching and clawing my way to the top of the Drama department at Eldorado High. In my freshmen year I was signed up for drama 1. This was a decision I soon came to regret. The class was taught by someone who I feel wasn’t really qualified to teach the class… That is such an understatement of how I really feel about that class, but this is not a place for me to rip on a person profession. As the story goes, I dropped out of the class after the first semester.

One year later though my choir teacher Clarissa Clark teamed up with the previously mentioned drama teacher to put on the musical Joseph and the Amazing Techni-Colored Dream Coat, which is possibly the worst musical ever written. It was fun though. I’m really stretching the definition of the word “fun” here by the way. I was cast as the Elvis impersonating Pharaoh… God, you can tell how bad this show was simply by the list of roles.

So as time went by the drama teacher began to vanish from Eldorado High. Rumors went through the school surrounding his removal, but nothing official was ever said. Nonetheless a teacher from Hoover middle school who was nothing short of great replaced him. Mr. Raison was an amazing teacher and he put on great shows. He too teamed up with Clarissa Clark to put on a musical, but this time it didn’t suck. I was cast in their rendition of Guys and Dolls as Nicely-Nicely Johnson and was able to act alongside two of my favorite people in the world Jenni Walkowiak and Jean-Louise Zancanella, who by this point was a friend and not a frienemy. I think the three of us were pretty awesome in that show, just sayin!

Guys and Dolls is what propelled me to pursue a career in musical theatre, even though at the time I didn’t realize it. I don’t think that made sense when written down, but it’s true. It was Clarissa Clark who highly encouraged me to continue pursue theatre as a career and study it in college, which was quickly approaching. I just couldn’t see how anyone could want to do theatre as something professional at that time in my life. I just saw it as this fun thing that I did on the side.

At that time, what I really wanted to do was write for films. I had been taking a film class at Eldorado High and I loved it. I had been taking private editng classes downtown at the film studios and I had also been cranking out a number of small independent films and I won’t lie, for a high school student a couple of them were really good. I had to work on a number of films for the class that essentially were dorky news shows that we so lovingly called the “Weekly Show”. I hated that show. What I really loved was directing and editing the works I had written or had a hand in writing. I also worked directly with the teacher, Kenneth Wimmer, as a mentor to the younger students and often helped the students figure out the soft ware. I was so consumed by film and it rocked. My two favorite projects were a set of music videos titled “Good Enough” and “Your Rain”.

I’ve gotten off track. The point is I liked theatre a lot in high school, but I was very focused on other things at the time. Still I guess what I’m trying to say is that if I didn’t sort of play around in theatre then I would probably still be a film major.