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Faired Poorly

Well, today we were meant to spend several hours running back and forth between two locations, attempting to lead unsuspecting students or shepherd them with extensive screaming into a life of assigned plays and tentative plays that tend to stay in the process of script perfection for quite a long time.

The bad news, or alternatively the good, is that we failed miserably at that. Not only did we have a play that was exactly representative of the sort of thing that the drama club did on a regular basis, but we also lacked anything that would have shown an appealing alternative.

Learning skills, becoming the characters you play for the brief moment you exit the womb-like security of the backstage (cluttered with a mysterious assortment of objects that were there before you) and take your first breath in front of an uncomfortably staring audience. Watching ideas spread like weeds across a piece of mahjong paper, sticks tossed together that end up more than a bunch of sticks tossed together, though that would be the reasonable thing to expect.

But instead of giving any sort of insight or information about the club, we paraded through the concourse in vocal bitch fights with anyone that had some form of promotion. I'm just going to be honestly hypocritical here and admit that it was fun, but what were we trying to do yelling louder than the NCC guys that have to yell requests to get the permission to do just that? Halfway through our protest against everything we realized that we had to string together some form of act or scene and get an audience, but by then we were too far into the fair. We'd missed our chance and we packed up.

Ms Koh and some of the drama guys pointed out that if any of the new students loved Drama, they'd join of their own accord. But how do they know that this Drama club's going to give them what they love, especially after that woeful play? What about students that don't yet realize the joys of swimming in the boundless lake of lines and identity theft? What's going to make them go "Hey, that's actually pretty interesting."

I'd love to "try again next year", but then it hits me like an animated anvil that I'm not going to get that chance again. But maybe I'll come back, someday, and the Drama club will be all over the concourse poking, sharing, and distributing Chupa Chups.