The tale of Petunia’s very first dress
The road to the high school musical is fraught with danger and excitement.
Participating in school plays was my escape from toiling in the potato fields. It was a way for me to envision the vast world that I suspected must exist beyond the mountains that surrounded our valley where I wouldn’t have to shovel sheep shit, hoe weeds, and move miles and miles of sprinkler pipe.
But first and foremost, it was a somewhat socially acceptable reason to avoid being on the football team.
Thus, in my junior year, I was cast as the lead character in our production of Where’s Charlie, a musical version of the play Charlie’s Aunt. The play is set in the 1890s when a young man needs a chaperone to date a girl. The chaperone aunt doesn’t arrive, so I must play the aunt to act as my own chaperone. Slapstick hijinks ensue.
Since mine was a small high school of only 150 students, we did not have much of a budget for theater. We didn’t even have an auditorium, only a stage at the end of the gymnasium. We did not have a costume department, so my mother, who just so happened to be the Ward Relief Society president, made the dress I would wear in the play. Imagine that. My very religious Mormon mother made my first dress! But it was for school, so it must be okay.
In this play, I was essentially playing two different characters — the young man and the chaperone aunt. The script required that I make 15 costume changes in and out of that dress. The director assigned one of the other cast members to be a dresser for me so that when I would come off stage, he would be holding the dress out for me, and I could just step into it. Then, while he fastened the back of my dress, I grabbed the wig and bonnet and tied them on my head. After much rehearsal, we figured that I got in and out of that dress about 180 times. Thank goodness that glitter was not involved! Eventually, we were able to make a full costume change in 45 seconds. A skill that, later in life, I may or may not have found to be quite handy. Only my husband knows for sure.
I was very nervous on opening night because this was my first time in a leading role. I was waiting in the wings for my cue in the first scene. Just as they delivered the line for my entrance onto the stage, my nerves got the better of me, and I felt a deep rumbling in my stomach. I began to wretch. You know, just like when you meet a guy in a dark alley and dive in to tickle his gizzard, and he hasn’t cleaned himself properly for weeks! Or so I’ve heard, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. I struggled to subdue this vomitous urge. I began to hurl. In desperation, I grabbed a vase that was a prop for the following scene and my dinner made an encore presentation into it. How very undignified for a princess in training. Late for my entrance, I finally stumbled out onto the stage and delivered my lines. All the while feeling very queasy and as if I might do an additional “technicolor yawn” on stage.
When that scene was finished, as I stepped off stage, the drama teacher rushed up to me in a panic and asked if I could continue. I said I think so. She told me to soldier on and that if I felt like I was going to spew chunks again, to just turn and walk off stage. They would close the curtain and call it a scene change. We resumed. But the vase containing my barf remained onstage, and every time I passed by it and caught a whiff of its contents, I very nearly tossed my cookies again.
By the end of the third scene, someone had procured a bottle of paregoric, which any mother worth her cookies kept in their medicine cabinets to settle upset stomachs. I hastily grabbed the bottle and took a huge swig directly from the bottle, probably at least four or five doses worth of the nasty stuff. Now, for those of you who are unfamiliar, paregoric is an opium-based medicine, unregulated at that time.
I began to feel some relief. After the next scene, I still felt a little queasy, so I took another gulp of the poppy potion. By the second act, I began to feel much better. In fact, quite giddy. Who knew that an overdose of this dreamer’s delight could cause you to get high?
By the end of the third act, I had forgotten all about the vase and the smelly chunks it contained. I was higher than the proverbial kite. Miraculously, we all made it through to the curtain call. We received a standing ovation. Afterward, castmates regaled me with stories of my theatrical antics. Apparently, I was able to stay on script, but with much added silliness. The next night, without me being high, we did not get a standing-O! WELL, SHIT!
This story leaves us with several important questions:
1. What kind of zippers or buttons must I have to be able to change dresses in 45 seconds?
2. Are all the quick dress changes why I can’t decide what to wear?
3. How much slower would the changes have been if breasticles had been involved?
4. How can I acquire someone to be my dresser these days, and would I need to “put out”?
5. So, was it the dress or the narcotics that caused me to like drag?
6. Should I carry Narcan in my purse?
These and other eternal questions will be answered in future chapters of The Perils of Petunia Pap Smear.
