There was one place where I could forget myself and my hurt—the theater department. In high school, I became a passionate drama geek, and fell in love with technical theater—all the backstage work that makes any given show possible. When I was working behind the scenes, my newfound girth didn’t matter. My shyness didn’t matter. I could be part of something without anyone in a show’s audience knowing I was part of something.
The first show I ever worked on was Little Shop of Horrors, my freshman year. I worked in the sound booth, managing sound cues, and befriended Michael, the handsome young postgraduate student (or fifth-year senior) who manned the giant plant that comes out at the end of the show. At the end of the year, Michael would take me to his prom on a cruise around the Boston Harbor. He was so kind to me and never wanted anything from me but friendship. That was something of a revelation to me, that a young man could be kind.
As a theater geek, I learned how to build flats and paint the taut canvas to look like any backdrop or setting a show needed. I learned how to design sound effects and hang lights and endure the endless hours of a tech rehearsal. I wandered through the musty costume barn to find specific costume pieces and helped locate or create the props needed for a given show. When I was in the theater, all darkened and dusty, I was useful. I was competent. People told me to do things and I did those things. I could apply myself to the tasks at hand and forget about the boys in the woods and what they did to my body.
I got to watch plays and musicals brought to life. No matter the show, I loved the spectacle and the quirks of the actors who successfully pretended they were so much more than high school students. Our faculty members, Mrs. Ogami-Sherwood and Mr. Bateman, had big personalities and a passion for the theater. They held all of us drama geeks in their thrall. Mr. Bateman was notorious for walking around with a tumbler filled with Diet Coke and vodka. He was balding, but what hair he did have was unruly, standing on edge. He favored black turtlenecks. Shortly after I graduated in 1992, he was convicted of possessing child pornography and sending that pornography across state lines. He was sentenced to five years in prison. Mrs. Ogami-Sherwood had a thick head of long, curly hair. She was small in stature but tall in every other way. She tolerated no nonsense, and most of us were scared of her while yearning for her attention.
On show nights, I was often a stagehand. I would dress in all black and be part of the invisible machine that keeps a show running. I knew all the lines to any show I worked on, and with the other drama geeks who were as obsessed with theater as I was, we found a way to have a lot of fun and make a little magic. High school was terrible, but in the theater, we created, for one another, a place where we could fit in for a few hours at a time.