An account

I am in an open-air theatre play and I know there are bullies in the audience from when I went to public school. I have to be dressed as an antebellum Southern belle and skip in, climbing up a hill near a pier, and then somehow blithely run down the rickety steps onto the pier where a handsome gentleman is waiting, without getting my shoes caught in the boards. We have not had a dress rehearsal (think of this as the classic Exam Nightmare for actors). It is the Fringe, and the whole cast keeps saying that as one might say, "Meh - it is only a rental car." I have: the dress, my hat, my hair to keep done up, an umbrella, and a Bo-Peep cane to keep track of while skipping down those stairs! The audience is filling up with rampantly patriotic Americans and I am not even confident I know all the words to their national anthem! I am in the dressing room trying to get my hat and hair on straight, let alone prepare for the scene, when a bell rings and someone cues me to just go. I do, grasping my hat, umbrella and cane, and I discover I have to jump over a bunch of nets to get to the performance space. A bunch of animated Disney characters pop up in my path, so I improvise: "Oh, hello, little piggy! Is not it a fine day?" and such, in a comically exaggerated Southern drawl. I come to a net attached to a rope at the end of which is the American flag. I try to cross it, and get my shoe caught in it. The audience is getting restless and I have to go now! I rip the shoe out. A tough-looking female Homeland Security officer follows me and gives me a hard time: But this is broken, madam, we cannot fix it, it is the flag, madam, someone is going to have to pay for that, etc., as long as I do not move out of her sight. I have to go. I just run. I get to the pier, and there is my leading man, but the lights are blinding me and I cannot see him to playfully poke him with my cane and then act all nonchalant as the opening gag. The music for "My Old Kentucky Home" is playing and I am supposed to sing along. I do not know the second line, so it comes out, "...and the caissons go rolling along." Then it turns into that song about the flag, not America the Beautiful but the other one that they sang very frequently after 9/11, the one the heavy lady is famous for - Kate Somebody. I do not know it! I wake up trying to remember it. It is been 25 minutes with this iPad beside my pillow and I still cannot. I know one trigger is that I saw the musical "The Parade" the other day - the one about <PERSON>. I thought I might play <PERSON> in the future. My coloring often gets me cast as Jewish, Italian, Greek or Middle Eastern women.