You Can’t Zoom This Shit Up

PLEASE do not make me make a show over Zoom. PLEASE I AM BEGGING YOU. I do not want to.

It’s okay if YOU make a show over Zoom, but please don’t make ME make a show over Zoom. I am proud of you for creating! Yay! You did it! But I cannot do it. P L E A S E. Don’t make me do it.

At this point you are probably saying, “Hannah who is forcing you to make a show on Zoom? Are you okay? Blink twice if you need help.”

The answer is: no one. No one is forcing me to make a Zoom show thank you very much. I am just warning you all that I don’t want to.

Zoom makes me sad. It makes me miss being in a room full of theater kids doing dumb shit. Those are the only rooms I have felt comfortable in.

At five or 6 years old, I was thrown into a theater camp because, according to any educational professional I had ever come in contact with I was “a nice kid but painfully shy” and I “rarely interacted in group activities.” [To be fair, this evaluation continued throughout my elementary school education, but I digress]. My parents decided that sending me to theater camp was the best solution. It would draw me out of my shell a little bit and I would learn to speak up and then we could move on with our lives and I could go play soccer or something instead.

Clearly, it stuck.

I vaguely remember some of the warm ups we did—only because I remember someone making a joke about being a “square” and I didn’t know what being a square meant and I was embarrassed. I remember that we did the story of King Midas. I don’t know who I played. I just remember thinking, “Okay, I like it here.”

I hated soccer. I hated basketball. I hated swimming. I hated tennis. I hated golf (YES I PLAYED GOLF OKAY.) I hated dance because I wasn’t good at it and apparently “dancers do not have tummies” but I certainly did.

But I kept doing theater. I did theater in middle school. I did theater in high school. I studied it in college. I did it whenever I could.

When I was in fourth grade, every class was required to do one act of the infamous “Fourth Grade Operetta,” a blasphemous creation made by our elementary school music teacher, Mrs. Princehorn, who was obsessed with the frenchhorn and, rumor had it, had a collection of several of the same exact wig stuffed in one of the closets of her classroom. Every year the focus of the Operetta was a different composer. I was over the moon to learn that we, the fourth grade class of 2004, would be recounting the tale of Ludwig von Beethoven. I knew who Beethoven was! I even knew how to play Ode to Joy on the piano! (I still do and to this day it is the only song I remember how to play on the piano.) It was also known to be the best of the Operettas. Why? I could not tell you. It was just one of those rumors that stuck because one time a 10 year old who had learned what confidence was had said it.

The very competitive audition process went something like this:

1) Do you want a singing role?

2) Do you want to play Beethoven? (This is a singing role. IN FACT, this role has TWO MORE lines than every other role. It is a BIG deal.)

3) Are you just being in this Operetta because it is part of your curriculum and therefore you are required to?

Depending on how you answered, your name was placed into a certain bowl. There were no official auditions. The rest was up to chance.

I decided that I was fit for the role of Beethoven and therefore volunteered to put my name in the Beethoven Bowl. I don’t know what convinced me. Maybe it was the fact that I had been taking after-school voice lessons and I thought my rendition of “I Know You” from Sleeping Beauty had gone over quite well in the winter concert. Maybe I had a brief moment of confidence. Maybe I felt like I had to because I knew Ode to Joy. We will never know.

The selection process was confusing to say the least. Mrs. Princehorn was known for her eccentrics, and not for doing things in an organized fashion. In fact, I would describe her energy as purely chaotic.

So all of our names were in bowls, but there we also cards on the floor with characters and depending on our answer to the aforementioned questions, we had to pick up cards from certain piles. Non-singing roles went first, then singing roles, then the leftover singing roles were mixed in with the Beethoven card. In the end it was me and one other student. Beethoven still hadn’t been picked. My name was called before their’s. Heart pounding, I walked up to the two remaining cards and flipped one over. I got Beethoven. Me. I was going to play the lead in the Fourth Grade Operetta.

Despite having done literally nothing to earn this role, I was instantly filled with pride. I was going to work hard. I was going to shine on that auditorium stage.

There were four fourth grade classes. Each class performed one act, which represented a different period of Beethoven’s life. There were four different Beethovens and four different casts of characters in Beethoven’s Life. My class, Ms. Lamintina’s class, were the fourth act, which meant we played the final moments of Beethoven’s life. This meant, yes, I, as Beethoven, had a death scene.

Let me paint you a picture of what Hannah Baker looked like at age 10. I don’t believe I hit four feet until I was 11 or 12. So at a solid 3’ 11”, I was what you would call “stout.” I had been growing out my bangs, but one evening I had decided to see what it would look like if I chopped off just a teensy bit of my hair. This resulted in a tiny little sprout that shot out of the middle of my hairline like a newly trimmed blade of grass greeting the day. I inexplicably wore a lot of linen year round. It was my thing. I was pretty sure I was going to be a pop star one day, but also would have settled for an archaeologist because that would have been pretty cool too. (Spoiler alert: I achieved neither of these goals.)

So this 10 year old me was stuffed into the makeshift 19th century Viennese garb that only a room parent could muster up, which included tight trousers, a ruffled shirt, and a white wig. I think colonial man and world renowned composer somehow got conflated into one lumpy 10 year old girl. And as you can imagine, I looked great.

Now, I clearly had the toughest role of any of the Beethovens. I had to DIE on stage. In this, my first lead role, I was to be tasked with such an emotional, gut-wrenching moment? Was I up to it? I had to be. I had no choice. The people were counting on me.

The day before the performance, we finally got to rehearse on the big auditorium stage. Now this auditorium stage would eventually be the place I performed 90% of my theater for the next 8 years, but this was the first time I got to perform on it. It was special because normally this space was reserved for middle schoolers and high schoolers. But here I was, a fourth grader, and the lead in The Operetta, preparing to perform on the University School of Nashville’s auditiorium stage. I couldn’t wait until I got to grace it once again in all my future leading roles. (Spoiler alert: I think I had maybe one significant role in the eight years that followed.) But here I was, ready to rehearse my big moment.

I can tell you this: Dress rehearsal did not go well. I had my moment, and I gracefully passed—beautifully, arms crossed against my chest and everything because that IS how people die always. But then I had to lay on the musty, paisley chaise lounge for what felt like forever until the act ended. I was so close to feigning dead for the whole act, but I couldn’t help it. The must in the chaise lounge was tickling my nose. I tried everything I could to avoid it but it couldn’t be stopped. I sneezed as dead Beethoven. THE HORROR. THE EMBARRASSMENT. I had ruined my moment, and subsequently Justin Maffett’s who was trying to sing a loving tribute to me, his Dead Uncle/Father Beethoven.

Now, luckily this was just the dress rehearsal, but I was wracked with nerves for the performance. How could I successfully make everyone believe I was actually dead if I sneezed post-mortem. How would I move my parents to tears with my performance? What would the rest of the elementary school think? Hannah Baker that lame fourth grader who can’t even lay still for 5 minutes. (As someone who now teaches primarily elementary aged students, I can tell you this: there is not a single one of them that can sit still for 5 minutes. This is an impossible task to give to a child.)

The performance began and I agonized through the first three acts. And then, it was our turn. Everything was going well. I remembered my lines. I sang b e a utifully. Had I forced my after-school voice teacher to help me? Yes. Was I in a group class when I had done this? Absolutely.

Finally, my moment came. It was time for me to peacefully pass on. I laid down on the couch, crossed my arms, and closed my eyes. I nearly held my breath as Justin sang to me about how much he would miss me, his dear uncle/father. And just like that, it was all over. I had done it. SUCCESS.

If you know anything about Beethoven’s death, which why would you, you know he was essentially drunk for the last several months of his life, as this was his prescribed medication. 10 year-old Hannah did not know this, nor would it have ever been shared with her by Mrs. Princehorn. So my portrayal of his death was very somber, very aware, and very stoic. Stories say that on the day of his death, a large clap of thunder was heard and lightening struck. Beethoven sat up in his bed shook his fist at the heavens and then died. Some say that he said “Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est" ("Applaud, my friends, the comedy is over").

I did none of these in my death scene and all I am saying is, I was denied this very dramatic moment and I will never forgive Mrs. Princehorn for that.

I asked my parents if they remembered this performance. They remember very little of it. To be fair, they have seen so many of my performances at this point, it would be unfair of me to expect them to remember them all. They certainly remember the two hour version of Peter Pan where I played Michael Darling when I was 13. And they remember Noises Off and Rumors, both of which helped me discover I was better suited for comedy. And they remember The Laramie Project, the first show I ever directed. So I guess I can forgive them for forgetting the Fourth Grade Operetta, even though I did have an emotional death scene.

I miss being in rooms where this sort of stuff happens. A fourth grader playing Beethoven is inherently funny and I long for the day that those sorts of experiences can resume. I am not saying that this cannot happen via Zoom or Facetime or GoogleHangs. I am just saying it is not the same. So, please, do not make me play dying Beethoven over Zoom.