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When the Theatre is Small; the Love is Large
Finding blood in your underwear is never a good thing. It’s particularly bad if you find blood in your underwear when you’re mid-way through a particularly highly-charged, fast-paced theatre production, and you’ve found said blood in the dressing room during a quick-change.
“Ah; anal cancer. I always knew it would turn out this way,” I thought as I hiked up my other-character’s-trousers. Can’t worry about that now, though, I have another scene to do. Another twelve or so minutes of frenetic acting my sanguinary seat off in my early twenties when I still deluded myself into thinking I could make a life out of this.
But, what life anyway? I was clearly expiring of tushie-hole cancer.
Of course, I wasn’t. Unbeknownst to me, I had a polinidol cyst (colloquially known as “Jeep driver’s bottom”) on my coccyx (colloquially known as “my tailbone”). I guess it developed over many years of sitting in chairs with stupid posture because I have scoliosis and flat feet and asthma and a recessed chin and hyper-thin airway and bone-impacted wisdom teeth. (Kids; make sure all your ancestors are as un-related as possible.) And so it went that, in a particularly exciting scene, I was on the shoulders of an actor who stood tall at approximately 6'5" and he drops me, from his fully erect height, flat onto the stage, and flat on my ass…