Good morning all and Happy president’s day. I hope you are having a great Monday morning whether you have the day off or not. I personally could use a few more hours of sleep, but I think shaking off the sleep with a quick morning prompt will help. So without further ado let’s jump into it.
This was fun. Not what i expected, but fun.
Monday, February 21st: He watched the players move aggressively across the stage.
He watched the players move aggressively across the stage. The sight took him aback for a moment. He tried to remember the play. It wasn’t one he had a lot of experience with and not one he could call to mind memorized lines. He was sure the general theme was one of love and the triumph of good over evil.
On stage it looked as though good merely beat evil into submission.
He glanced around the room. It had also been a while since he had attended a high school play. His last experience with it had been when he was in high school. He remembered their drama coach, who also taught English lit, being fun to work with. It was his first experience with the fact that adults had lives outside of the roles they played in his life. In school she was known as a rather strict English teacher. She rarely consented to grade on a curve and tended to demand a lot. Her homework was never something you could skate through.
In the theater she was adamant about memorizing lines and positions, but a softer side came out as well and he learned she was once a stage actor. She left the stage to marry and became a teacher after. Until that point he had never viewed the adults around him as having lives more complex than what they showed. It had been a revelation as much as the fun he had on stage slipping into the role of another person.
The days were Mrs. Garret ran the theater program were gone and if he wasn’t mistaken, the man harshly whispering stage directions to his lumbering performers was actually the football coach. As at least half of those on stage looked to be pulled from the football team, he supposed it was appropriate.
While John was willing to concede that some people had both athletic skill as well as an artistic side, this wasn’t the overarching theme of this particular crew.
‘I think the other half of the football team is back stage,’ he thought as he watched the scenery change with speed and vigor. He suspected that as the character on stage was feigning sleep, including a deep fake snore lest the fact that he had his eyes closed and was lying in bed not provide the audience enough clues, and that the scenery was changing from the waking world to a dream state. He suspected the ay time world was supposed to drift away as the dream scape floated in.
Instead the movable walls disappeared at speed and the dreamscape arrived with a bang that sounded more like a shotgun blast.
“Wish I could sleep like that,” the man next to John muttered to the woman with him.
“Hush, Stephen, they’re…trying…I think.”
John smiled and swallowed a laugh. He was pleased that he was not the only one having some issues with the unfolding drama.
Ten til Midnight 