Powdered Donuts, Chocolate Milk, and Public Humiliation

Hello, and welcome to Character Is Destiny, a newsletter about how everyone can use tools from the dramatist’s toolkit to live a better story!

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to record this week’s issue in my own voice, but I switched the Substack default to a male voice that should be closer to mine, if you prefer to listen.

In my sophomore year of high school I was cast as Will Parker in the musical, OKLAHOMA. Will is a cowboy, the love interest of a girl named Ado Annie, and he leads a big, rousing tap dance number in the first act called “Kansas City.”

The best part about the high school musical was that we did morning matinees during the week for area schools before the public shows on the weekend. The school shows numbered well over a thousand people in the audience, with kids packed all the way to the back row of the balcony.

The morning of the first school show I woke up sick to my stomach. I think it had something to do with the Bon Jovi concert I went to the Sunday before in Lexington, specifically the swig I took from a random a bottle offered by a complete stranger in my row. What can I say, I was sixteen years old and prone to bad decisions.

I thought food might make me feel better, so I stopped at the convenient store on the way to school and picked up a healthy breakfast. Lol, just kidding, I got a bag of powdered donuts and a pint of chocolate milk. I also bought some lemon-lime Gatorade, just in case I needed to rehydrate after the big tap number.

I didn’t feel any better post-donuts and chocolate milk. In fact, I felt worse. I warned our director, Mr. Handley, that I was feeling sick. In addition to being the speech teacher and drama director, Mr. Handley was a coach on the football team. He gave me a locker room pep talk and convinced me that I was going to be fine, I just needed to get out there and do it.

I decided to drink the Gatorade before the show, thinking that would finally do the trick. I downed the whole bottle of glowing green liquid and put on my costume.

Out in the house, the thousand plus kids took their seats. I could hear their excitement from the wings. If you’ve ever been in an auditorium full of a thousand school kids, you know that you can also smell them from the wings.

When the show started, I sat just offstage, listening to my friend Joe Reeves sing, “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” I laced up my tap shoes and came to the horrifying realization that every time I even thought about singing or saying my lines my gag reflex kicked in. But, by this point, it was too late to bail.

My cue came and I made my entrance.

Picture me at age fifteen. Tap shoes. Heavy stage makeup.

Tap… tap… tap… tap…

I greeted the character of Aunt Eller by saying, “Howdy!” And… somehow I was fine. We were off and running! I made it through the scene and crossed center stage to begin my big number. In front of me, a thousand students from schools all over the Tri-State. Behind me, a dozen high school boys in tap shoes.

The music started, “Boom chink, boom chink, boom chink…”

I sang, “I got to Kansas City on a Friday —“

And immediately started to gag.

What the audience heard was...

Boom chink…boom chink…boom chink…boom chink…

“I got to Kansas City on a Friday…HURGH!!!”

“By Saturday I learned a thing or HUURRGHH!!”

“Up til then, I…HURRGGHH!!!! HURRGGH!!!!!”

Nothing came out because every time I heaved it forward, I fought to stuff it back down my throat. After thirty-seconds, I stopped singing altogether and froze in panic.

Mr. Rath, our musical director, and another of my heroes from that era, cut off the orchestra, and turned around to look at me with the greatest wtf face of all time. There I stood, bathed in spotlight, in complete silence, a thousand students staring at me, while I lurched back and forth, huuurrrghiing, while my face turned green.

Finally, I managed to say, “Gotta go see Ado Annie!” Then I ran off the stage and promptly threw up in a garbage can in the wings, in full view of the rest of the cast who were still on stage.

It was deathly quiet, so everyone heard me heaving just out of sight. After twenty seconds or so, one of the cowboys, Willie Keith, said, “Welp, Aunt Eller. I guess we better be going too.” By this time, Mr. Handley had arrived and frantically pulled the curtain closed.

I went immediately to the doctor, and Mr. Handley went on as Will Parker for the rest of the show, reading my lines from the script. The doctor gave me some meds that killed whatever was happening in my stomach and I slept from late that afternoon until early the next morning.

I was back at it the next show and I didn’t have any problems through the rest of the weekend. The only changes we had to make were that they cut all of the blocking where I kissed Ado Annie, which I thought was more than fair.

Will Parker and Ado Annie are the comic relief in OKLAHOMA. Their whole job is to come on stage and add some fun and laughter to give us a break from the drama. But, any time I’m sitting around a campfire with a bunch of show folks and we start swapping nightmare stories, I know that one is always going to kill. It’s been a source of comic relief for me for almost forty years.

It’s easy for writers to forget the need for humor in the stories we tell. When my EXTANT season one Showrunner, Greg Walker, and I pitched our plan for season two to CBS, Greg told them we wanted to add more humor. He said, “We had a total of three jokes in season one. We’re pretty confident we can double that.” Got a big laugh in the conference room.

I was recently reminded by a producer on one of my projects of the need for some humor in the pitch as well. The show we’re working on has big drama, big emotions, and big stakes. I was jumping right into the high-concept idea and forgot that a little laughter goes a long way toward diffusing the tension. It helps to disarm your audience and open them up to everything that follows.

You see this in horror movies all the time, but it works for dramas and thrillers as well. A laugh line or visual gag is a jab that puts the audience off-balance just before you deliver the knockout punch of a good jump scare or shocking moment.

One of my favorite examples of this is in PULP FICTION. Vincent Vega has been asked by his mobster boss to take the boss’s girlfriend on a date. She accidentally overdoses from snorting heroin that she finds in Vincent’s pocket, so he takes her to the house of his dealer, Lance, looking for help. To save her life (and his, because if she dies, the boss is going to kill him), he has to give her an adrenaline shot in the heart from a comically large needle.

They draw a target on Mia’s breastplate and Lance counts down as Vincent gets ready to deliver a hard stab to the heart. The count draws out, Tarantino milking the tension for all it’s worth. Before he gets to one, Tarantino cuts away to a shot of Lance’s wife, Trudy, whose face and body are covered in piercings. Trudy is positively giddy with anticipation. In both screenings I saw on opening day, the audiences busted out laughing. At that exact moment, Lance says, “ONE!” Vincent slams the needle into Mia’s chest and both audiences screamed!

We need comic relief in real life, just like writers need it in their stories, but for different reasons.

Laughter has all kinds of health benefits, short and long term. In the short term, it causes physical changes in the body. It fires up then cools down your stress response and lowers your cortisol levels. It can raise and then lower your heart rate and blood pressure. Long term, it improves your immune system and boosts your mood.

If you laughed at my Oklahoma debacle, you just experienced some of this in real time.

But, there’s a deeper human need for laughter in our lives.

My Uncle Doug loved music. By the time he passed away in December of 2023, he’d amassed a collection of thousands of albums, CD’s, and cassettes. If you stopped by his house at any time of day, he’d offer you a cold Yoo Hoo from the mini-fridge and put on a recent purchase at an appropriate volume, which was very loud.

When he died, the family put together a playlist of some of his favorite tunes for the services. At the funeral home, his pastor, Darryl, gave a beautiful speech about his life, and asked the assembled mourners to sit for a few minutes in quiet reflection while we listened to some music. The funeral director, John, pressed play on the playlist and “Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road” came over the speakers at an appropriate volume for a funeral home, which was very quiet.

Sitting there in the front row, next to his brothers, my dad and Uncle Dan, it just seemed wrong. I knew what he would say if he was there. I hesitated for a moment, but as Elton was making his way through the first verse, I couldn’t take it anymore. I yelled, “Turn it up!”

The whole family burst out laughing, because we were all thinking the same thing. John cranked up the volume and Elton sang Uncle Dougie into the mystery at the volume he would have preferred.

It’s one of the things I love about my family. We can always find the humor, even in the hardest moments. A few years ago, my great-aunt’s husband passed away in his sleep. They were both in their eighties, she was one of the sweetest little ladies you'd ever want to meet. When the police came, she told them, “I promise, I didn’t kill him.”

That story was told again and again in the days that followed, turning tears of sadness into tears of laughter, then back again. The laughter didn’t make any of us less sad. It just made the weight of it all a little more bearable.

Just like it’s easy for writers to forget to add humor, it’s easy for us to go through life and forget to laugh. We get bogged down in our struggles. We get weighed down by worry. Stopping to watch a comedy or going out to see stand-up or an improv show seems silly. It seems counterintuitive, but it’s actually the thing that could make our present situation feel less like a slog.

Don’t take my word for it. Take Shakespeare’s. He thought it was important enough that he added a drunken porter to MacBeth.

In the interest of further lowering your cortisol, here are two of my favorite live theater disaster stories, both of them involving the end of WEST SIDE STORY.

If you’ve never seen it, in the finale, Tony, a member of the Jets gang, is standing in the street calling out for Maria. Chino, a member of the rival Sharks gang, steps out of the shadows, and shoots him. Tony collapses, and bleeds out as members of the two gangs and the cops show up. Maria arrives, cradles him, and he dies in her arms.

I heard a story that, in the climactic moment of one production, Chino stepped out of the shadows with the gun and pulled the trigger, but — the gun didn’t fire. Thinking quickly, the actor playing Chino yelled, “POISON BOOT,” ran over, and kicked Tony in the shin. The actor playing Tony was shellshocked for a moment, then awkwardly collapsed and died of boot poisoning and the show went on.

In another story, the gunshot goes off as planned. Maria races over to Tony, he dies in her arms. She stands up, shaking with anger. Here, she’s supposed to pick up the gun and wave it around. “How many bullets are left in this gun, Chino? Enough for you? And you?” Eventually, she’s overcome with grief and drops the gun. The Jets step forward to carry Tony’s body out. Part of him slumps down, and a Shark steps forward to help. The two gangs carry him out as the cops arrest Chino for murder.

In one now legendary production, Maria picked up the gun and waved it around. “How many bullets are left in this gun, Chino?” She swung the gun over toward Chino. “Enough for y—” BANG! An extra blank in the gun went off! Again, the actor playing Chino, thinking quickly, improvised. He clutched his side and dropped dead.

The rest of the company was forced to commit to the new ending. The cops arrested MARIA for murder, and solemnly led her offstage while the rest of the cast followed.

I have heard (and told) that last story dozens of times and it never fails to improve my immune system, aka make me laugh my ass off.

Show folk, do you have (or know) an on-stage nightmare story?

For one day, pay attention. How many times did you laugh? Who and what made you laugh? Like me and Greg Walker, can you confidently double that tomorrow?

I think the hardest I’ve ever laughed in my life was when I saw THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG on tour in LA. If you need a suggestion, take 10 minutes and watch the opening scene!

Any elementary school teachers out there (or do any of you know an elementary school teacher), specifically 2nd-5th grade? If so, would you be willing to give me 15-20 minutes of your time for some feedback on a project I’m working on to teach kids about stories? Comment or drop me a line:

mickeyfisher2012@gmail.com

Check out the Beatitudes for Creativity poster at this link!

If you know someone who would enjoy this newsletter, please share it with them!

If you want to go a step further to support it, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Weekly articles are free but a paid subscription will immediately unlock an article about How I Sold My First Two TV Shows. (And What I’m Doing Differently Today)

Share