Since
I was young, people have told me I had a good reading voice. Not deep or
soothing like James Earl Jones, Morgan Freeman, or Christopher Lee, but I
frequently landed the part of the narrator in church or school productions. I
got to know the second chapter of the Book of Luke extremely well. One notable narrating
role I had was for the 6th grade play, The Nutcracker. I was the
nutcracker. No, there were no tights involved, nor was there any ballet or any
type of dancing for this guy. Get that
image out of your heads. Besides, back then I was a scrawny 98-pound weakling
with thick glasses and dark, wavy hair. I was simply the voice that told the
story while other students awkwardly pranced about to excerpts of Tchaikovsky’s
masterpiece and parents videotaped the low-budget performance. Perhaps the most
amusing part of these narrating roles, though, was that I was always appointed
to these parts; I never auditioned or sought them out due to my natural
introverted tendencies. However, despite my quiet nature, I guess others,
namely teachers, saw something in the way I could tell a story.
The
first “major” role I landed, though, was that of the narrator in my first grade
class’s production of Where the Wild
Things Are. I must stress that this role was unexpected and the cause of
great stress to this shy first grader. Mrs. Latch had written an adaptation of
my favorite story and cast parts for the 20 or so of us. I remember
anticipating the casting call at the end of one day. I wanted to be a wild
thing—a cool part but one that also could be done as part of a group…without a
spotlight! My buddy Jeremy was cast as Max, and Jill was to be Max’s mother.
Those were the only solo speaking parts that I remembered from the book, so my
timid self felt safe. That was until Mrs. Latch had cast all the other students
as monsters, bushes, trees, vines, and the rest of the Max’s made-up world. I
alone remained without a part. Panic hit me in the face. Having to speak would
have been horrible for the emotional six-year-old me, but being left out of the
cast entirely was worse than being picked last for kickball at recess. My face
flushed, and I could feel the red rise in my cheeks, tears peeking at the
surface. Then gray-haired, good-natured Mrs. Latch, larger than life itself, smiled
softly and pulled me aside. She handed me what appeared to be a ream of paper,
although in reality it was only about six or seven pages of hand-written
material.
“I
want you to be the narrator,” she said, an unnerving twinkle dancing in her eye.
I
probably gasped, blinked, blanked, or something along those lines. That meant I
had to talk. In front of people. Lots of people!
Needless
to say, I didn’t want to do it. But because this reserved people-pleaser
couldn’t speak up for himself, I ended up nodding my head. We practiced. And
practiced. The others danced around, and I stood alone behind a podium. I
stuttered, stammered, and stumbled my way through it, but after hours of
practice (mostly with Mom), I got to a point where I had the whole thing
memorized. I said it as I went to sleep, wishing that I, too, had my own wolf
suit—not that I would ever have dared tell my mother I would eat her up.
And
when the performance night came, and I saw that all my friends (except Jeremy)
were wearing tights—yes, even the wild things—I was relieved that I was not one
of them. I just wore a white dress shirt and a maroon vest with some Sunday
slacks, garb I was already resigned to donning once a week. One more time
wasn’t too bad. Plus, if I forgot what I was doing, before, during, or after
the wild rumpus, the podium hid my papers. But I didn’t even have to use them
once.
I
remember starting a little shakily, but then, as I got into the performance, I
noticed the crowd watching me, hanging on to what I was saying—parents and
siblings alike—and I thought to myself, “Hey, I’m pretty good at this narrating
stuff,” and the rest of the words flowed out of my first grade mouth like the
ocean that Max sailed through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost
over a year, or at least until the performance ended.
Being
a narrator gave me the confidence I needed to volunteer to read aloud in class
or raise my hand when I knew an answer. Following the play, it seemed like
whenever we did a readers’ theater in school or when we read verses in Sunday school,
I always got the longer parts. Narrating Where
the Wild Things Are was a gateway experience which started me on the path
of oral performance and public speaking and brought me to where I am now—still
a bit introverted and shy, but ready to present to a crowd, give a speech to a
large congregation, or even teach a room full of junior high wild things
voluntarily. On occasion I even get invited to do a poetry reading or perform “The
Tell-tale Heart” on Halloween for other classes. I guess once a narrator…
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