Right in the Tiara

In honor of the high school play this weekend, which I was so sad I didn't get home to see, I decided to recount a moment from one of my high school plays that always makes me chuckle when I think about it.

When I was a senior we did the play The Curious Savage, which was about a woman who was committed by her children when she was reluctant to inform them what her monetary decisions were going to be after she died. (She was sitting on a boatload of money and the kids didn't know where it was and were greedy little things and wanted it.) The play was set in the mental institution in which the children placed Mrs. Savage.

In this play I played a woman in the institution. Her name was Fairy May and she wanted nothing more than to be loved and be beautiful. I got to wear outlandish outfits and be needy and lovable. I loved playing Fairy.

There was a scene in the play where Mrs. Savage finds her daughter's picture in the newspaper. Her daughter, Lily, marries serially and Mrs. Savage finds this distasteful. In the picture in the paper Lily is even wearing a tiara, although she is not royalty. So much so that she rips Lily's picture out of the paper, tacks it on the dartboard, and throws a dart at it, hitting Lily "Right in the tiara!" The rest of us applauded her efforts.

Obviously, we didn't have newspaper paper with "Lily's" picture on it. So Mary, who played Mrs. Savage, would pull out whatever picture was in the newspaper on stage and use that to throw the dart at it. The dartboard was at the back of the stage so no one in the audience could see the picture anyway.

Well, one night the picture Mary pulled out was of some male basketball player dunking on the basket.

Mary, like normal, ripped out the picture and tacked it to the dartboard. She stepped back and threw the dart at the picture.

And hit the player in a more delicate place than the tiara. (Oh, the jokes I could make about family jewels!)

Even though the audience couldn't see what was going on on stage, there were five of us up there who were high schoolers and understandably found what just transpired hilarious. None of us broke out in wild laughter, and Mary took a deep breath and delivered her line with much glee.

"Right in the tiara!" she exclaimed.

And we all clapped.