Men and Musicals

     I’ll be honest, I never really enjoyed the whole Disney “High School Musical” scene. The athlete-turned-thespian drama always seemed really tacky, and the plot line was ridiculous. However, not in a million years would I have guessed that my last couple of years of high school turned out to be, in one way or another, strangely similar to this tweenage movie series.
     To clear things up, my experience was most certainly not anything identical to the movies; I was definitely not the school’s star athlete, I can’t exactly sing or dance, nor did I have a beautiful girlfriend who’s going to Stanford and also happens to share similar interests with me. As spectacular of a life as that would be, it didn't really happen, and probably never will. Don’t pity me though. My non-fantasy high school extracurriculars and/or love life were in fact just peachy.
     Now for the weird part. After two years of playing football and realizing that having to stand out in the Texas heat without reward isn’t fun, I quit. The next year, I took Theatre I just to get my fine arts credit over with, but guess who ended up liking this whole deal? I then proceeded to try out for the musical my senior year, and with no past experience managed to get the role in which I was interested. Don’t call me Troy Bolton, but I’m starting to feel for that slightly effeminate heterosexual.
     I don’t want to come off as pretentious, but it just struck me how this fiasco fell into place. Football just wasn’t my scene; I found myself sitting on the sidelines, well, just not wanting to play. But this whole inner-thespian thing I found somewhere in myself was quite a pleasant surprise.
     Playing my character in the musical, “Good News!,” was entertainment in itself; being Beef Saunders just never got old. It was strange at first though, because the character was described as the “hulking brute of the football team,” and if you know me, I’m really no brute.
     However, becoming Beef was interesting; I had to turn my voice into that of a creatine-raging fullback, but at first it just sounded like a pirate with emphysema-not really one of Beef’s character traits. Also important was my “jock-walk,” which is basically walking like you have weights tied to your neck and a balloon in your chest.
     All of this may sound silly, but honestly the whole situation depends on the perspective you take on things when judging what’s cool and what you think you might be interested in. So if this anecdote was completely senseless to you, at least take these three things:
     1. Men in musicals are not fruitcakes.
     2. Zac Efron may not be as much of a tool as we think he is.
     3. And lastly, if there’s something you really want to get involved in, just do it, no matter what other people or things may dictate to you. Go Frogs.