I have been onstage in countless plays, and I have never in my life experienced stage-fright. Never. Oh, I felt the butterflies in the stomach, especially on opening nights, but never the debilitating, paralyzing fear of classic stage fright.

Never.

Until recently.

 During rehearsals, there was one section of the play, 1984, where I always messed up the lines. On opening night, I sat backstage waiting to go on with this one, abominable scene, and I suddenly realized that I was so nervous that the tips of my fingers were numb! At that point, I remember thinking to myself, This is ridiculous. This is a play. You’ve been in a thousand plays! It is not a life and death situation. Nobody is going to die here.

No matter how hard I worked on myself, I couldn’t calm the nerves down. I was going onstage in a few moments in front of a packed house, and I was going to make a fool out of myself. How humiliating! How ego-bashing!!!!!

I knew I needed something to get me out of that frame of mind. I needed something to give me the courage to go there and face my fear and the two hundred faces in the audience that were going to staring at me. At then, I found it. I found the thing that would get me past this irrational and completely overblown terror.

You know what it was?

Cheeseburgers.

Yup. Freaking cheeseburgers!

As I waited for my entrance in Act 3, Sc.2, I began searching for a way to relieve the gut-wrenching tension that had inexplicably overwhelmed me. I knew if I didn’t come up with something, that I would not make my entrance. Instead, I would have gone running from the backstage door of the theater, jumped into my car, and headed out for parts unknown.

Seriously.

It was then that I decided to remove myself from the present. Act 3, Sc.2 ran about ten minutes.  All I had to do was LIVE THROUGH the next ten minutes of my life! How difficult would that be? The trick was getting up enough courage to actually set foot on the stage and start the extremely difficult (for me) scene. To do that, I decided to think past the scene. 

In other words, I decided to think about something pleasant that I could do after the play was over.

You know what I thought about? I thought about going to The Main Street Pub with my wife and drinking a pint of their Certified Gold Microbrew and eating one of their bacon cheeseburgers with Jack cheese.

In doing that, I reminded myself that there was life after the curtain call, and that life was good! I suddenly realized that, even if I screwed up onstage in the next few minutes, I would still have the love of my wife, my kids, my grandkids, and my animals. And there would still be beer and cheeseburgers waiting for me along with laughter, love and good times.

That did it!

SERIOUSLY!

I calmed right down…and then I went out on stage and aced the scene!!!!! I not only aced it, but I had a ball doing it!!!!!!!!!

Mind over matter.

It’s for real.

We create our own reality.

We are our own worst enemies, and our own best friends. As Walt Kelly’s Pogo once declared in the newpaper comic strips, “We have seen the enemy, and he is us.”

posted on June 18, 2009 5:29 AM ()

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