#My Love Story#
When I was in the 11th grade, I had not acted in several years. I had always enjoyed being on stage, but as I grew older, my appearances in front of audiences veered more and more towards the purely musical. As time went on, I simply didn’t have time to both act and play music, so I stuck to the instrumental side of things.
Then, early in the fall semester of my junior year, I saw a poster in the lobby of my high school for that year’s musical. We did one every year, and I always checked it out, but none had really excited me enough to go back into acting.
Well, that is, until now.
There, on a piece of printer paper taped to the painted cinder block wall of the lobby, was a poster for Spamalot.
I immediately signed up for auditions. Give me an opportunity where I am actually encouraged to quote Monty Python and I’ll be there faster than an African OR European Swallow.
Auditions went well, and I was cast as King Arthur! Needless to say, I was thrilled, but I was also a little apprehensive: Who would play the Lady of the Lake? In “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” the Lady of the Lake simply gives Arthur his sword off-screen, and that’s that. In the play, however, she is a full character, and is in fact the love interest of King Arthur.
I was terrified. I had never kissed a girl before.
I checked the list, and my jaw hit the floor: they had cast my long-time crush as the Lady of the Lake. In the back of my head, I was thinking that maybe my performance on stage would be enough to impress her and get her attention, but now we were going to do it together? And I’d have to kiss her? I couldn’t decide if I was overjoyed or wanted the earth to just swallow me whole.
As we went into rehearsals and started to spend time together, we both realized that we got along rather well. We were both a little shy (odd, I know, seeing as we were playing major roles), and looking back that was probably just because we both had feelings for each other, but we opened up, and by the week of opening night, we were getting along swimmingly.
Opening night came, and I was (obviously) incredibly nervous. We had done stage kisses before, but tonight, I was going to go for the real thing. In front of everyone. The first act came and went, and the show was going great. I was still nervous, but going through the motions with my lines and songs helped me calm down. Finally, in the penultimate scene, just before going into the finale, it was time. King Arthur asks the Lady of the Lake to marry him, and when she says yes, they kiss and walk off stage together. I mustered up all the confidence the performance had given me, and went in for the kiss.
To my surprise, so did she.
As we walked off stage together, we both realized what had just happened, and what this meant. The final number went off without a hitch, and after curtain call, I asked her out. She said yes, and we were together for close to three years. Unfortunately, due to some pretty serious distance in college, we grew apart, but I will always remember her as my first love, and my “plot-of-a-young-adult-novel-come-true” story of getting together.