The McDade Page Places to go, People to be

Barefoot children, dirty tear-stained faces, and a girl marrying her own brother.

A sordid new soap opera, “Days of our Over-Stereotyped Incestuous Young Hillbilly Lives”?

Nope. My first play.

The year: 1987. At the ripe old age of six, I was the eldest actor in the show. The director/narrator/costume designer was my mother; the assistant director/seamstress/harried producer was our neighbor; my co-stars were my two little brothers and the neighbor’s two kids; the show was “Cinderella,” and because someone up there has it in for me… yes, somewhere in the deepest recesses of my parents’ archives, there is video footage.

I was playing the title role, cast not due to any particular talent, nor really due to nepotism, but simply because a) I was one of only two girls in the gaggle of neighborhood ruffians, and b) none of the other kids could read yet. Public service announcement: literacy pays off, kids.

My mother had the brilliant idea that our two families should have their kids rehearse a play, then videotape the final performance and send it off to our various scattered relatives as a truly meaningful and original holiday gift. She scouted a location – we would rehearse, perform, and film the performance in the neighbor’s mother’s country home. M & M’s were purchased to bribe any resistant children into becoming thespians. My mother then rented a video camcorder approximately the size and weight of Texas, and we were good to go.

The cast was as follows:
• Cinderella – me
• Evil Stepmother – voice of my mother (offscreen)
• Evil Stepsisters – my little brother Adam (age 2) and the neighbor’s son (age 3)
• Evil Stepsister’s Feet (for camera close-ups of the epic shoe “shoe doesn’t fit” scene) – my mom and the neighbor
• Fairy Godmother – neighbor’s daughter (age 4)
• Horses – Adam and the neighbor’s son
• The Prince – my little brother Jake (age 4)

The play kicked off with me sweeping the hearth, learning of the ball, being told by my sobbing evil stepsisters (some bitter dispute between the neighbor boy and my brother over M & M’s led to them bawling throughout every scene they were in) that I was not allowed to go to the ball. When they exited, I sat on a chair and cried “Now I shall never go to the ball!” with appropriate melodrama – completely upstaged by my underwear flashing the audience.

(Let’s recall that this is all caught on film. My parents threaten that when I bring home a fiancée, they will break out this VHS, and if he can watch our “Cinderella” and still want to join the family/hold my hand, he will be officially vetted.)

But then of course came the fairy godmother. In our production, however, the benevolent spirit was a petulant little girl who screamed each line at the top of her lungs. As in: “I AM YOUR FAIRY GODMOTHER! I HAVE COME TO GET YOU READY FOR THE BALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Then, completely deaf but in a beautiful dress, I went out to my carriage – a Radio Flyer wagon with puffy-paint and glitter-glue decorated cardboard cut-outs enhancing its “carriage” look. The carriage was drawn by two horses – my brother and the neighbor kid in sweatsuits, with yarn-manes and yarn-tails stapled to them, howling over some M & M injustice. Arriving at the ball, the prince (a.k.a. my other little brother, very bitter about having to be involved in this production) grabbed my hand and began yelling at me. This provided me with very little motivation to look sad when the bells began to toll and I told him, flatly, “Oh no. I must go.”

Kicking my foot furiously to make sure I left a shoe behind, I raced off. My prince/brother shouted, “Wait!” and went to pick up the shoe, then decided it hadn’t been dramatic enough, so put down the shoe, backed up, yelled “Wait!” again, and picked up the shoe for a second time as the horses wailed in the background.

In one of my all-time favorite “This American Life” episodes, Ira Glass dissects the meaning of “fiasco” – and, appropriately, uses the story of a community theater production of “Peter Pan” gone horribly wrong to illustrate just what a “fiasco” entails. My “Cinderella story” truly is more aptly dubbed a “Cinderella fiasco” – but more than two decades later, it’s interesting to note where that cast and production staff has landed.

My mother, the strung-out young director chasing young children around a makeshift set, is currently writing the final pages of her dissertation on youth theater. No joke – with four kids grown and living on their own (one of whom was not even born at the time of the now legendary ’87 off-off-off-off-off-off-off-Broadway Cinderella revival) she’s finishing up a Ph.D. in theater. My sobbing horse/step-sister brother, Adam, is pursuing an acting career in Chicago. I’m still a theater junkie, usually involved in some production and constantly trying to write the next great American play.

We all start somewhere. My first play might have been a fiasco, and could have been a one-shot-deal, a good childhood story that never led to anything… but that’s not how this tale ended. Because for some of us, theater never becomes a pumpkin – it’s always that magic carriage (or Radio Flyer wagon decorated with glittering cardboard). It’s what keeps taking us to the ball, the prince, the next happily-ever-after we share with the next audience. We get to be the fairy tale. What’s better than that?

ALL RIGHT, READERS… I SHARED MINE, YOU SHARE YOURS: What was your first play? When did the theater bug first “bite,” and was it a fantasy or a fiasco? Or both?