Tale #19: Stop Burping!

Lighting Guy Steve and I have grown very close over the years. We were friends long before he was my fake fiancé. Starting with Bring It On in 2016, each teen show I directed presented him with exciting lighting challenges that allowed him to take his craft to the next level. Therefore, we would spend multiple hours together in the Verona Area High School theater during tech weeks. I would assemble random props and do small painting projects while he worked on his lighting design and light hang.

Our production of Disney’s Newsies in the Spring of 2019 was massive. We had purchased a set from Crystal Lake South High School in Illinois for $4000. It was a beautiful set complete with large, skeletal-style scaffolding units that looked like they popped right out of the Broadway production.

We moved the large set into the Verona Area High School Performing Arts Center on the evening of Good Friday. We spent all of Saturday setting it up. On Easter Sunday, Steve and I spent the day in the theater getting as much ready as we could for the first dress rehearsal on Monday. I was working on set decorations while he was working on lights.

About four years ago, I gave up soda. I had a Diet Coke addiction that was very serious. Nowadays, I use coffee as my caffeine substitute and sparkling water for my carbonation substitute. When I get nervous, anxious, or overwhelmed with anything in life, I always want to be eating or drinking something. Whatever psychology that might be I don’t know. It just is what it is. In order to not pack on thousands of pounds during extremely stressful times, you can often find me chewing gum or drinking sparkling water so I can get the calming sensation and some flavor without all of the extra calories.

When I am in show mode, I am very nervous, anxious, and overwhelmed all at once. You’d often find me laying on the floor of the Verona Area High School Performing Arts Center stage trying to calm my heart rate down.

On that Easter Sunday afternoon, I was frantically trying to assemble all of the newspaper stacks that the Newsie characters used in the show. I had gotten a beautiful, authentic design for the cover page. Therefore, I would take a stack of regular newspapers, put a copy of the authentic cover page on top, and then tape the whole thing together with packing tape so it would hold its shape. I did this over and over again for multiple hours.

Why didn’t I ask for help you may wonder? It is because I wouldn’t come up with half of my ideas until it was too close to go time and there was no one available to help me.

I probably had about seven or eight sparkling waters during the three hours I spent working on the newspaper stacks project. That is a lot of carbonation in a short amount of time. And what happens when you take in a lot of carbonation in a short amount of time? You burp.

Given my close friendship with Steve and my could-not-care-less attitude that comes after working intensely in the theater for three days in a row, I just let the burps fly. I had zero manners whatsoever on this Easter Sunday.

It got so bad that Steve actually stopped what he was working on, looked at me and said, “you have got to stop burping.”

I apologized but said I couldn’t stop. The carbonation had already taken hold of my body and it was out of my control.

Luckily by that point, we were finishing up for the afternoon because we both had to go to our respective Easter dinners with our families. I’m sure Steve was quite ready to be done with me and my burping. Little did we know, both of our families had chosen to go to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse for Easter dinner. Our families were sat three tables apart.

I made sure I did not burp at all during dinner.