♪ Ah ♪ (gentle upbeat music) (audience clapping) - Good evening.

Now, not all actors are storytellers.

Sometimes we tell stories of using other people's words and not always our own.

In the fall of my seventh grade year, I had a special visitor to our class.

She came all the way across town and was a high school English teacher.

And she came to my class to invite me, sorry, me and all the other kids in my class to audition for a new community theater troupe and their newest production of "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever."

Now, it sounded funny.

It was the story of the Herdman family.

The kids were unruly.

They were from a single-parent household.

They smoked.

They drank.

They stole.

That would be a lot of fun to do, and they would come to church too, but they only came to church for the snacks.

But by the end of the play, the community and the Herdman family all learned that the power of theater and the power of Christmas can bring everyone together.

And I thought, "Oh, that's pretty cool."

Rewind.

It two years before that audition, my mother had remarried, and she had brought my brother and I to a blended family in a small Kansas town.

It had one of everything.

It had one grocery store.

It had one high school, one combo elementary/middle school.

And it had one stoplight, but it also had one small private liberal arts college, and that's where the show was gonna be, the biggest venue in town.

So it was the early '80s, and divorce was not that common.

And it was even less common in a small town.

And you know, the only blended family that I knew was the Brady Bunch, and they were only blended because their parents died, right?

So not a lot of things for me to connect to, so I knew what the Herdman kids felt like.

And I could use this story at this moment, you know, to arrange for my plight, to let everyone know how I felt.

You know, I had prayed for alien abduction, but that didn't happen either.

I auditioned, and when I got the cast list, you would've thought that I should be overjoyed.

But, you know, I got school kid.

"Okay, great."

So I begrudgingly went to rehearsals, and then I found out I really was an important school kid 'cause I was not only a school kid, I was the school kid that gets attacked by the Herdman family.

(audience laughing) Yes, an action scene would get me seen.

(audience laughing) And when I got my blocking, you know, I didn't know what that word was at the time.

In that rehearsal, I learned that blocking is being told where you're standing.

So I found out that I was to run off stage, being pursued by the Herdmans, and before I could get off stage, the oldest Herdman girl was going to stick a big giant piggyback attack on me.

She was gonna leap from the lasts two steps of the steps, and I was gonna catch her on my back.

And we were gonna go out of the theater.

And to make it funnier, we were gonna come back, spin around while I yelled, "Help," and then run back out stage.

Now, it only took me three or four times in rehearsal to not fall to the ground by catching this, because what made this funnier was a simple fact of biology.

And I don't know if you know this, but children from the ages of six to 12, girls tend to develop a little bit quicker than boys.

And to compound that, I was a late bloomer.

I was a year ahead in school as well.

So instead of graduating from boys to men's clothes in junior high, I graduated from boys to husky at the time.

And it was well into my junior year before I even got to the sense where I started for my inseam length started catch up to my waist measurement.

And when we rehearsed, we became aware, and I became aware that one thing was happening, though.

In this scene, maybe it was my prepubescent screaming and squealing.

But one thing that was happening is that everyone was watching me.

And that had never happened to me before.

People weren't watching me because I was attempting to get attention.

They were watching me because I was doing something interesting to them.

And on opening night, the auditorium was packed.

Now I knew this would be my shot.

Someone would come and save me.

They would see me, and they would take me away.

I would do this forever.

And the actors, they got called to places.

I didn't know what that was, but I do now 'cause that night, they told me places is where you go and stand and wait for the show to start.

And it's a really important spot because then you get to stand there, and the lights dim, and then the show begins.

And I can happen to tell you that the whole show went off without a hitch.

The piggyback attack was flawlessly executed.

It was great.

Even the run back into the piggyback returns, that all went great too, even bigger laughs.

And when we came back out the door, that final exit, I was like, "Yes, this is the best feeling ever."

And I just collapsed on the floor like I'd scored a touchdown, arms outstretched and legs outstretched.

What I didn't remember was that the director, the woman playing the director of the pageant, was furiously going to pursue us because she was gonna stop this fight that we were having.

And while I was silently accomplished, laying in the floor, she burst through the door of the vestibule, stepped on my leg, and landed face-first on top of me.

(audience laughing) Luckily, this finely tuned husky build broke the fall.

My face broke the fall for the clipboard she was carrying.

But it was really in the sort of the show must go on aspect of that.

She got in, did a quick check.

"You okay?"

I said, "Yeah."

And then she went off.

I was like, "Okay."

And I didn't know quite what to think.

I almost killed our lead.

I had accomplished something great, but it was very conflicted.

I had this weird sensation.

I was devastated, almost really embarrassed, and sheepishly didn't wanna talk about the performance.

So I was like, "I don't even really wanna go back."

But I'd committed to it.

So I went back for the second closing show, You know, it's a community theater and a new troupe, so it is gonna be closing show.

And what happened, it just went great.

Went back, I got back and went into places, and something truly magical occurred that night that I was not expecting.

The company embraced me.

They embraced me for my foibles, my fun, my actions, my apologies.

There were lots of, "Ha, ha, ha, I'm so glad you didn't die out there.

Hey, let's not do that again tonight."

But they embraced me, and they enjoyed it.

And it was that moment in places, I noticed something I hadn't seen the other night 'cause I was so worried about doing my thing right and getting the laughs from me that I hadn't noticed what really happens in that moment called places.

At that moment, the actors, crew, and audience are in the same space at the same moment and the same exact time.

And in the dark, the audience sits, and everyone waits together.

And we are one in the same spot, waiting as the lights come up to open our eyes to a world of infinite possibilities on the stage and in the audience before us.

Our pasts cease to exist.

We are all one, and we are in this sort of magical suspension of disbelief in this moment.

And we share this true human connection.

And when we give ourselves over to this idea of the places moment, when those light dim, or we're about to hear something from someone, we really get the fullness of a true human emotion and the emotion of hope, hope for the present, hope for the future, devoid of everything that's happened to us in the past.

And I get that feeling every time I'm in a theater, and the lights go down.

If I'm in the audience, if I'm backstage, if I'm in the booth, if I'm working a spotlight, or if I'm in a play, or if I'm watching something, I'm watching a sporting event, every time that goes down, I'm constantly reminded that we are all together in this moment now.

Everything that's happened in the past matters not.

What only matters is what's happening in front of us, and I feel this hope of those infinite possibilities.

And I know that in that moment, all of us together, we belong right where we are.

Thank you.

Have a good evening.

(audience clapping and cheering) ♪ Ah ♪ (gentle upbeat music)