Friday, March 14, 2014
Hidemi’s Rambling No.508
As the school play of the drama club approached, I had prepared for my
first role vigorously. Once I remembered all the lines, acting itself
actually felt much easier than the backstage work I had done for three
years. The difficult part was timing for some action. In one scene, I
threw a bowl at the heroine but she had to show her back to me when it
happened. I sat with my back to her and couldn’t see her positions. We
made the sound of her knees tapping the stage floor a signal that she
had turned her back to me. Because the sound was so subtle, I was afraid
of missing it. Near the end of the play, an evil stepmother, who was
played by me, killed a heroine with a poker. It was a custom of the club
that the club members would visit a shrine together to pray for safety
before the play if it had a murder scene. We did that after school, with
me standing right in front of the altar because I was the murderer.
Now, I had everything ready for my first play, and the day had come.
Since it was a Japanese period play, I had borrowed kimono from my
grandmother as my costume. My role was an old woman and I drew lines on
my face and sprinkled talcum powder over my hair. While I was waiting
for the play to start in the wings, I got tensed up and my hands began
to tremble. There’s an old trick in Japanese show business, that tracing
a Chinese character that means ‘human’ on a palm with a finger three
times and pretending to swallow it removes tension when you’re nervous. I
threw myself on the trick but it didn’t work at all. Suddenly I lost
self-confidence and told one of the juniors that I was so nervous.
Although she would also appear in the play as a bit part, she was
surprisingly calm. She suggested the trick placidly and said that she
couldn’t help me because she had never been nervous in her entire life.
As I doubted if she was a human being, the play started. Following a
heroine’s monologue, the curtain was raised and I was standing in the
center of the stage. The unexpected happened: before I uttered a word,
the hall got engulfed in an explosion of laughter. The audience burst
out laughing at the scene in which a stumpy girl was standing with old
makeup. Although the play was a serious drama, my first ever appearance
was laughed away…