LOST MY PANTS IN WONDERLAND

So, as some of you have come to understand, I am a theater brat and in my high school days I was very involved in my school's theater program. Now I can tell you a lot of stories about high school theater, but we'll stick with This is a Scare for now, so in our department we put on two shows every year and for my sophomore year our teacher chose for our spring play Alice in Wonderland of wonders. I'm pretty sure you're familiar with the story. I audition, of course, and I get the part about Tweedledum and old Gryphon, I wanted Queen of Hearts, but my teacher was a mentally unstable vengeful woman who didn't really like me, so what can you do?

Also, there were no two people in our department who looked anything alike, so we had to look for the opposite effect with the Tweedles, a tall, thin boy and a short, round girl, so, as is usual in the theater of the high school, we had no budget, so we had to design and make our own costumes. Now the Tweedle concept we came up with was kind. cute, we had propeller hats, black shirts, but then we made these big, baggy hula-hoop

pants

that were held up over our shoulders with ribbon suspenders. The other costume I used was for the Gryphon, which was basically just a peach colored tracksuit sparsely covered in feathers to look like an old bald gryphon like I said, no budget now chronologically in the play, the tweedle scene comes first and in that scene we recited the walrus and the carpenter, the way we played was he and I were constantly fighting for the center of attention pushing and shoving.

We got a lot of choreographed physical humor stuff out of the way and immediately afterwards we had a battle with dusters and bucket helmets and once all that was done, we would run off the stage and go change into the mock turtle and the Gryphon. The scene is pretty simple, so after weeks of rehearsals we finally opened to the public. The first three nights struggle with a problem. They are great. They are wonderful. Nothing bad happens, but on the fourth night things didn't go as planned. To me the Tweedle scene appears and we start with all our Walrus and the carpenters felt that now one of the things that we had choreographed was that Tweedledee would stand next to me and open his arms very quickly and punch me in the stomach. but on this fourth night he hit so hard that my two flimsy ribbon suspenders broke, of course my

pants

fell off immediately.

I picked them up as quickly as I could, but the audience had already seen it and they were all laughing, now don't do it. I jumped to conclusions, no one actually saw my underwear because I was wearing the Griffin pants underneath, but also keep in mind that the Griffin pants were peach colored, so in that fleeting moment when my pants were down, the audience thought that I couldn't see anything but skin and I'll tell you how I know that in a minute I looked to Wheedle Deep for help. He is staring at me. Alice is dumbfounded.

I'm panicking inside my head. I was terrible at improvising back then. I did not know what to say. I don't know what to do to cover this up, so I continued with the poem holding my pants for dear life. I think at one point Alice secretly tried to fix it on stage with some safety pins, but the pants were beyond repair and my hands were full because here's a little wisdom about life, you need two hands to hold a pair of pants. hula-hoop, so I basically continued the rest of the scene, including the duster battle without the use of my hands, which apparently turned out to be very funny because the audience was dying anyway.

I got off stage in one piece, we finished the show, nothing else happens and then it was always our tradition to go out into the lobby in costume and talk to the audience as they left, so I'm standing in the lobby in my Gryphon costume talking with people, which was nice because I felt like I was in disguise, like no one knew I was Tweedledum, no one will know the disgrace I've brought to my family, but I guess because in disguise this old man didn't care to say in front of I think my favorite part was when we got to see the hiney girls yeah, creepy, really creepy moral of the story, don't use ribbons to hold up your pants, what kind of moral is that?