Preface To Lines: What If I Can't Remember My Lines?

I used to think I had a good memory, until I realized how fallible memory is.  But I have been able to memorize lots of things in my life, including pretty much every Elvis Costello song before 1990, & all the Smiths songs too.  & more.

But I've never had to memorize an entire play.  I knew a woman who had acted in a couple of plays with the Shakespeare At Winedale program in the 1990s - something I didn't know about until long after I'd finished school, or else I might have wanted to audition for it, & spend a summer doing.

(It's funny, at the radio station the other day, one of the kids there returned from a job fair & was complained how square everyone there was - how they were mainly hiring accountants.  But she mentioned that someone was there from the State Department & that person said, "If you work for the State Department, you will probably spend your entire career overseas."  I had never heard that before. I never went to a job fair.  I want to work for the State Department at the age of 22!)

I have had to memorize things for class before, & I have gotten extremely nervous doing so.  Here are two stories about that (both involve Shakespeare):

First story.  In 10th grade, we read Julius Caesar, & we had to come after class (I guess to spare us the embarrassment of performing for our classmates?) (or perhaps so the teacher didn't want to waste time it would take to have a class stumble through the lines) & recite three passages.  They were Caesar's "cowards die a thousand times" speech, Antony's funeral oration for Caesar, & Antony's last speech over Brutus' body.  I was able to get through the first two with no problem, but toward the end I began to comprehend the enormity of my situation: I was reciting for a grade words that I might or might not have in my head to a woman sitting very close to me who could fail me if I messed up.  It didn't help that I was looking at her & she kept writing things down that I wasn't able to read.  I naturally became very nervous.

I did my best to keep it together but no one told my leg that.  It began to tremble at the last speech ("This was the noblest Roman of them all") & I struggled through those few lines while trying to keep my body from spazzing out.

The result?  At the end the teacher, Mrs. Phillips, said to me, "I was very impressed how emotional you got at the end of the speech there.  I really felt you understood Antony's words."

Oh good lord.

Second story.  A couple of years later, in Mrs. Kilpatrick's class, I had to memorize the Malcolm & Macduff dialogue (Act 4, Scene 3).  Now I can't remember who I was, but since we had to perform this in front of the class, I wanted to make sure I did a good job, & I memorized the whole damn thing.  The thing was, I was doing it with someone else, a fellow whose name I won't mention but he was a tall, blond, good-looking & well-liked fellow who also may have been the Senior Class President.

(I have no idea whether this is true or not, since I don't really trust my memory, but I do remember looking him up a few years ago & finding a person with his name teaching at a conservative college out west.  He had apparently gone into ROTC after high school.  That did not surprise me.)

I don't recall if I were Malcolm or Macduff & none of that matters.  The other person didn't really learn his lines so I would say mine perfectly & he would need cueing from the teacher.  The point of this story is that, when we were out in the halls practicing, he said something to me that made me realize I wasn't such a mutant after all.  He said, "Dickerson, man, I really gotta take a shit right now."

I had always thought that it was something defective about my G-I tract that nervousness made me need to void my bowels.  If someone as normal & well-adjusted as the Senior Class President had the same reaction, that was a wow moment.  I didn't even mind that he fucked up the scene, which I had spent hours more time on than he did: I felt a little less alone in the world.

Oh, & yeah: people in my high school called me by my last name.  Mainly the boys did, but I didn't really talk to girls, & they most certainly didn't talk to me.  I think it's because of gym class.  We were all called by our last names in gym class.