|
|
I’m a member of a lot of different communities but, I don’t belong
to many. That’s because I’m different. I have an official diagnosis
that makes social situations especially challenging for me. It’s usually
very hard for me to belong to a community because other people don’t accept
me. I have been working hard on changing. In a lot of situations, I am behaving
just like everyone else. Most times this doesn’t seem to make a difference
because people don’t want to accept that I’ve changed and give me
a second chance to belong.
About 3 months ago, I saw an ad for an audition for the Orono Community Theater.
I’ve always wanted to be part of their plays, but I always chickened out
before the auditions. This time I didn’t. I also went to auditions by
myself. This was a big deal because usually I have at least one of my parents
with me, and at school there is always a grown up with me.
The good news is that I got into the production. The bad news was that it wasn’t
a traditional play. It was done in the style of commedia d'el arte. This means
that each of us created our own character to be part of the stage community.
Then we created a play together using all of our characters. We had to do a
lot of improvising. This was hard for me for the same reason that conversations
are hard. There are a lot of surprises and I don’t like surprises.
From the first rehearsal I attended I learned that I could be successful. The
director had us all participating from the start. His attitude and encouragement
made the difficult parts easier. I created a character named Scotty McCrabb.
Since we were doing a construction company, I decided to be a plumber. I also
took an idea from the TV show, “Whose Line Is It Anyways?” They
were successfully funny guys so I figured the idea could work for me, too. I
would only use 3 phrases, “Absolutely!”, “What are you looking
at?”, and “Get Back to Work!” all said with a Scottish accent.
As the rehearsals went on, the community of actors decided it would be better
if I only said, “Absolutely!” to everything. This made it real easy
for me to respond to any situation on stage no matter what everyone else was
doing. I even found a plaid skirt at Goodwill that I made into a kilt to wear.
Being in a play makes it easier to be different.
No one in the Orono Community Theater knew about my “official diagnosis”.
Some of the people in the group were middle school and high school kids. Some
of them were acquaintances of my mother’s and some knew my father. But,
nobody was a real friend of the family that knew everything about me. This was
good. Sunday afternoons became a time when I could be a ‘normal kid’.
Sunday mornings I’d get real nervous that something would happen and I
wouldn’t be able to go. Sometimes I’d even do stuff that made my
parents almost say that I couldn’t go. I don’t know why I did this,
it’s how my body and brain react when I get nervous about stuff. For some
reason, my parents always let me go.
The show was a success both performances. I even got invited to a cast party
at someone’s house and went by myself. I even got a ride to the cast party
by a senior high school student who was in the cast. Most kids would think that
these weren’t big deals. But, to me they were big deals because for two
months on Sunday afternoons and for one Friday night, I belonged to a community
where everyone treated me like a normal kid and I was able to act like a normal
kid on the outside and pretend to myself on the inside that I was a normal kid.
I wish that I could have this kind of experience more often. Normal kids don’t
know how easy they’ve got it. They are accepted into lots of different
communities all the time.