I spent my first two years of college trying to keep my draft deferment and quickly figured out I could do that better as a Speech/Theater major than as a Business major. I got a small part in Taming of the Shrew (below) my junior year which earned me a tiny scholarship ($500 a semester?). In my senior year I played the idiot son John in Lion In Winter. From the review (PDF): “Mays, in an attempt to convey his awkwardness, at times overdid John’s walk.” (Reviews below).
I loved the theater crowd. It was as cliquish as any fraternity or sorority but we didn’t have to dress as nice. As much as I enjoyed it, I never developed an interest in community theater. I still have a recurring nightmare in which I have to go onstage before a huge audience but I have never been to a rehearsal. In the dream, I’m trying to figure out how I can have a script in my hand without the audience noticing. Or come up with a way to adlib through the whole thing.
“There was also no longer any sense of my moving along a timeline. Time was no longer a path with the past behind me and the future before me, as we commonly conceive of it. Instead there was a sense of an eternally unfolding present moment. Rather than time being a journey along a linear path, change appeared to be mandala-like. It seemed to be like a flower seen from above, endlessly unfolding from within, or like a kaleidoscope’s image forever rearranging itself. It struck me as highly misleading to think in terms of there being a past behind us and a future ahead of us. Instead there was only this one present moment, eternally unfolding according to its nature. I found myself in an eternal, timeless present.”