Tale #17: Stop Punching Each Other… There

I don’t think I will ever stage manage again in my entire life. My one and only experience stage managing has made me very gun shy about attempting it again. Last week, I talked about our run in with the fire department. That was just the least of my problems.

The year was 2016 and the show was still A Seussified Christmas Carol. A play with minimal set, simple drops, and a ton of parent volunteers should have been a great introduction into the job of stage management. However, in my four-performance run, I dealt with some very strange issues that I’m pretty sure no other stage manager has had to deal with. If they have, my condolences.

Children can have the silliest problems that they expect you to treat with the same attention and level of severity that you would if they had broken their arm. In one instance, I was talking on the headset with the Assistant Stage Manager on the other side of the stage when a child started tugging on my arm. Even though I asked them to please wait, they continually tugged and tugged and tugged until I turned and said “What? What is wrong?” She proceeded to show me a very long string that was coming out of her costume. There was no actual question about the string or a request to handle it. She just needed me to acknowledge that the string was there.

Next up: a young actor with an affinity for makeup and a distaste for pants. We had a middle-school aged boy playing one of our Cat in The Hat Narrators. Their costume included red and white striped tights, black shorts, black shirts, and the iconic hat. One afternoon before the show, this young man approached me with every piece of his costume on except the black shorts. He then proceeded to ask me if I had blush in my purse. I said, “uh no I don’t have any blush and you really need to go put your pants on.” He stood there and berated me about what kind of woman I was to not carry blush in my purse, all the while still not wearing pants.

The ultimate test of my patience came at our second performance. I was waiting at the stage manager’s desk for the kids to get settled in before the show when a young man ran up to me sobbing. All he could manage to say was “it hurts, it hurts so much.” I immediately jumped into responsible adult mode and asked, “what happened? Where does it hurt?” He was unable to answer through the tears, however, I noticed that he was clutching a very personal part of his body.

I walked him over to sit down on one of the set platforms when two more kids approached me in the same condition: sobbing and holding their groins. I had just gotten them calmed down when two more approached me.

Now, take a moment and imagine the sight of five young boys all dressed in very Seuss-inspired garb, crying and holding their crotches. I had never experienced anything so strange in my life.

After ten minutes of pleading with them to tell me what happened, one of them finally told me who the instigator was. Luckily, my friend Alex (see Tale #6) was there doing ropes for the show so I was able to have him sit with the injured kids while I went to deal with the perpetrator. He was equally as confused as I was when I first became involved in the situation. He sat with the boys as they pulled themselves together and stopped crying.

I finally tracked down the kid who had started this unfortunate trend and asked him what on earth he was thinking. He replied, “I don’t know. It was something we saw on YouTube.” Turns out, it was one of those unbelievably juvenile “YouTube challenges” he had found and gotten all of the boys to try.

I don’t know the exact specifications of this particular challenge. All I know is that they all had mutually decided to punch each other in the crotch. This is what YouTube has done to the children of our society.

While I was relieved it wasn’t just a string of unprovoked penile attacks, it was still such an absurd problem to deal with at thirty minutes to curtain.