There was a time in my life when I played with acting. Not professionally but I came close to chasing that at one point, I had met with an agent and she seemed to like me but I had no money for the all important headshots so I never followed up.
However there was one amateur stage production of ‘Pool’s Paradise,’ an English farce, the summer after I graduated from High School and that was a load of fun. When I got out of the US Navy and attended community college here in San Diego I took as an elective an introduction to acting course. That was a great class and I met one of my best friends there. When the end of the semester came around and it was times for finals the member of that class released their governors and people who throughout the course had seemed of modest or little talent suddenly in their monologues found reserves of talent that left the rest of us dumb struck with the suddenly powerful performances. It was during those finals that I had the best experience on a stage.
We had to perform two monologues, one comedic and one dramatic. The less said about my comedic monologue the better but for my dramatic performance I selected a scene from Schaffer’s Amadeus. The film had been released earlier in the semester and quickly became one of my favorites. In the play Salieri summons the ghosts of the future, the audience, and has several monologues pointed directly to them. The one I performed had been split into two different elements in the film where he was confessing to the priest his crime. It starts with the description of Mozart’s music on the page, in the lay Mozart’s has brought sheet compositions to Salieri in hopes of winning a commission for her husband, and transitions into Salieri’s bitter hatred of Mozart, his talent, and culminates with Salieri declaring war upon God.
While I performed the theater’s house lights were down so the class scattered among the rows remained invisible to me. I threw myself into the monologue, using a manila folder as a prop for the sheet music that Salieri was commenting on. When I got the declaration of war with God, I threw the folder down and growled by threats to the heavens and from the darkened theaters I heard one of my female classmates gasp. That was my proudest public performance and it is a memory I treasure.