There’s a danger when making choices. Simply by making the choice to get out of bed in the morning, we are taking our lives in our hands!
Maybe today is the day a bus will run me over. Maybe today is the day my house finally burns down (more on that in another blog!) Maybe today I step on a used needle and contract some disease they haven’t even heard of yet.
But we still take that risk, and choose to leave the house, with faith that we will return relatively unscathed.
All my friends made a choice to expand their minds and see a play I was performing in. It was Choose Your Adventure: The Play. The premise is the same as the Choose Your Own Adventure books you may have read as a child – the main characters come to a crossroads, and have to make a choice. However, in this instance, the audience makes the choice for them.
The play also had a few other differences from the beloved children’s series- First off, it was not suitable for children. Take into consideration my list of characters played: A siren in the mythical city of Atlantis. A dead prostitute. (She started out alive, but then was stabbed in the neck, and spent the whole scene dead.) A Nazi. An Amazon woman. Satan. And this was a comedy. There was even a (VERY historically accurate) scene where you could see how Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge with his secretary, Mary Joe Kopechne, in the car. And you could also learn how the ancient Aztecs used chocolate frosting. And yes, that is Jesus in the front row of the picture.
In true procrastinator fashion, the majority of my friends showed up on the last day at the last show. I was ready to give it my all and show them a great time, so I started getting ready for the first scene I might be in. That one wasn’t chosen, so I spent the next few scenes in my underwear, not knowing which scene would be chosen next. Then my scene got skipped again, so I put on the costume for the final scene I might be in, and started thinking about how funny it would be if all my friends showed up, and I wasn’t even in the play! And then, when it happened, it wasn’t so funny any more. Those are the chances you take when you decide to rehearse 30 possible scenarios.
Friends, that’s what you get for choosing not to decide, even though you still made a choice. And I hope they returned relatively unscathed. Time will tell on that one…
-Barb