Uhh.. The end?

Being on stage is already seriously unnerving, but when you make a mistake, is it awful. Well, to you at least. Also whoever has the following line after you. But it really is not that big of a deal, as long as the rest of the crew does not get messed up from what you just did, and the audience does not ever really notice, because they were not the ones who have been practicing the lines and the movements on stage. When you make a mistake up there, you know it as soon as it happens, but if you are able to cover yourself up well enough, the people watching from the seats, they are not usually paying well enough attention to actually realize that you, indeed, did make a mistake. But, in another words, you carry on with the performance, and hopefully you can just forget about it. Although, when the entire cast makes a mistake at the same time, it is not as easy to hide it. Especially when everything on the stage gets knocked over, and crashes to the ground. Not something you would expect to laugh at…
My junior year, I was part of drama, and the play that we were putting on was called Phantom of the Soap Opera. I am not about to go into full detail on the entire play, because it really just is not worth it, but I can tell you that the entire show was a hot mess, and not in the good way. …not at all in the least.
We thought the play just could not get any worse when we had an actor call out at the last minute due to serious family issues. Our assistant director quickly jumped in, and slid into his place just as fast as he could. Costume changes were some of the worst part. People were antsy and very irritable backstage where it was very hot and crowded. Lines were forgotten here and there, and the wrong props seemed to pop up on stage somehow. There were many people that were in the wrong places at the wrong times. Some where even wearing the wrong clothes, and some just did not notice. The directors were not very pleased with us, because there was already so much going on, that it was hard to deal with, and the fact that we were messing everything up very badly, it just was not helping anything. Since people were already irritated and aggravated backstage, it just continued to get worse as the play went on. Every time someone forgot one of their lines, there was always someone else that was backstage that was going to remind them that they did, indeed, make a mistake. That just continued to fluster everyone even more than they already were.
As the end of the play grew near, the tension was rising to finish the play on a somewhat good note. Finally, after what seemed like forever, the last lines where said, and the crowd gave us the applause. Only after the final claps died down, did we finally believe that it was all over. …or at least we thought. As we all hurriedly ran to exit stage left, some actors and actresses bumped into each other, and something big that we could not see, since the lights were off, but multiple crashes were heard as a couple of the actors and actresses bumped into a chest that was holding a metal tray of plastic wine glasses, and everything that could have made a sound, did. Embarrassed and nervous, the entire cast began laughing hysterically to brush off the tension that seemed to heavily hang in the air over all of our heads. Talk about easing the pain of completely trashing one half of the stage at the end of the show.
But in ending it all, we had a great laugh. As we cleaned up the stage after the fact, we were all still laughing. Even though we had totally ruined the ending of the play, along with the left side of the stage, we still managed to laugh through the humiliation and embarrassment. We thought; “Well, it is over now. Nothing we can do to fix it.” …too bad it was only our second show of the weekend…

Photo by johnthurm on Foter.com