Gravity

Or; A Very Public Dropping

I was oooooooooh, about twelve or thirteen.
I was going through a theatrical streak, holding the role of Mark Anthony in Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar' for my school's entry into the Island-wide 'Old Girls' Cup'. I made the local papers for managing to end up in casualty 45 minutes before the competition began after cutting my hand on a bouncing milk bottle...and going on to win the competition. There was a quaity photo of David Pattie lying on the floor in a ketchupped toga pretending to be dead whilst I stood over him with my 12-yr-old eyebrows frowning at my bandaged hand.
My Mum cut it out and kept it. I can only conclude that I was born with adult-sized eyebrows and I grew into them, meaning I must of been a helluva freaky-lookin' baby.

Outside of school, a couple of junior luvvies from an Island High School were having a crack at putting together a 'by kids, for kids' theatrical production company, and I was to play Little John in their own rewritten version of Robin Hood.

In their version I had a love interest...a fourteen year old girl with a name like Tabitha. When all our hilarious misunderstandings were finally ironed out, we stood together on stage and I sang a lovely, heart-warming song.

That was the plan, anyway. It was the opening night, and somehow we had managed to attract enough attention to the play to actually fill our local Winter Gardens. It was a full house.

The song was 'I want to wake up with you' by John Holt. Not the most taxing vocal challenge the world has ever seen, but I was thirteen.

I was that crucial age where Mother Nature works her testicle-specific magic, rendering thousands of pairs of childhood Y-fronts across the globe unwearable and keeping the World Boxer Shorts Industry afloat and healthy.

I was that age to the second, in fact.

I started the first verse high enough to put a pre-pubescent Aled 'We're Walking In The Air' Jones to shame (only without the good singing voice), and by the time I'd finished it my vocal chords were straining fit to snap.

I took a deep breath and relaxed. I decided not to go so high with the second verse. I launched into a performance so deep Barry White would have been proud. The difference in tone got the first waves of laughter rippling around the audience, and the first three rows that I could see were grinning hugely.

A lesser man would have faltered and run. I was different. I was not made of sterner stuff, nor was I determined to see the song through to the end because I held the firm Thespian belief that 'The Show Must Go On'. No. I was different because I had a fourteen-year-old girl called Tabitha with an iron grip around my waist which was getting tighter and tigher as the volume of laughter rose.

I finished the second verse and the laughter died down. I took as deep a breath as I could with Tabitha now digging her nails in, and headed for the tonal middle ground, hitting it with some success. A small cheer rose up from the kind of people that always cheer like that in public situations.

With the third verse finished and the final chords dying away, a deafening wave of tongue-in-cheek applause and laughter followed Tabitha and I as we walked lovingly off stage left.

Poor Tabitha tried to run but I was too heavy to be carried along with her, and her fingernails were still lodged in my green velvet costume.