May 6, 2025 Theatre
We all have our humiliations. That’s something I tell myself after I trip over nothing on the sidewalk and drop all my shopping. To be embarrassed is to be alive.
But you know that one memory that has the ability to wake you up in a cold sweat 20, 30 years after the fact? This is mine.
I was 16 years old. Never had a boyfriend. Never had a girlfriend. The closest I had come to romance was being catfished on Bebo by someone pretending to be Pete Wentz.
I was desperate to fall in love. Something had to change — I needed to be making moves. Big moves. One day, I saw an ad in the paper that just screamed ‘game changer!’: auditions for Chicago, the coolest, sexiest musical on the block. If I was in Chicago I could finally show everyone that I was cool, sexy and dateable. If I wanted to make a big move, this was surely it. What bigger moves are there than Fosse?
I spent weeks preparing, stretching and practising for the audition. I did the dances from the movie alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones, just in case they came up in the audition. (They didn’t.) Finally, the big day came. I walked into a room filled with beautiful women. The organisers handed me a form saying that I was fine wearing nipple tassels on stage. I 100% was not, but I signed the form anyway.
After an agonising 20-minute wait, my name was called. Shaking, I went into the audition room, hit my mark and sang my little heart out. The director cut me off after the first chorus. He leaned back in his chair and said the devastating words, “I’m sorry, you’re just too Sound of Music.”
Ah yes, The Sound of Music. A musical about the sexiest of subjects: nuns, children and Hitler’s 1938 annexation of Austria.
In the moment, I was entirely professional. I said, “Thank you so much for that feedback. I will work on changing my entire personality and vibe.”
I trudged out of the room, heart in my shoes. I was heartbroken.
What made the humiliation worse was that my friend Lizzie also auditioned for the show — and she got in! It wasn’t my age. It was something specific about me. I wasn’t sexy, I wasn’t cool, I would never fall in love — I might as well just commit to becoming a full-time recluse.
But the story doesn’t end there. Oh no. Close to opening night, I got a phone call from the organisers and they asked me to be… an usher. Because I’m an idiot, and also really wanted to make some new friends, I said yes.
From the very first night, I knew I’d made the wrong decision. It was agony. I had to escort people to their seats, sit through the show that rejected me, and then, while the cast and crew went out for drinks, clean up trash in the auditorium, alone. I didn’t even make any friends. The other usher didn’t like me, saying I lacked tenacity when it came to upselling people on programmes. She was right, but it didn’t make it hurt less. I only ever talked to one member of the cast, this guy Chris, who pointed out some rubbish I had missed.
After a painful week of performances, I finally made it to the closing night. I dutifully showed people to their seats and tried my best to enthuse about the overpriced programmes. The show was over at last, the theatre had emptied out, and I was sent in to do my trash run. Suddenly, all the lights went out. “Well, that’s just great.” But then, the orchestra started to play and a spotlight appeared on stage.
Chris, from the chorus, walked out wearing a tuxedo. Now, Chris was really cool — so cool he would go on to play Kenickie in Grease the following year.
I stood, mouth agape, exactly where I was in the middle of the aisle.
Chris opened his mouth and began to sing: ‘L’ is for the way you look at me… He starts walking up the aisle, towards me. ‘O’ is for the only one I see.
I didn’t know what to do. Should I put down my trash? I had no idea that he even knew who I was.
‘V’ is very, very extraordinary… He got down on one knee. ‘E’ is even more than anyone that you adore—
At that moment, I realised there was a woman sitting behind me. And that I — holding my giant bag of trash — was standing directly between a man who was proposing and the woman he was proposing to.
As subtly as I could, I backed away. But it’s hard to be subtle when you are carrying what feels like the world’s largest bag of rubbish. The glass bottles clashed and clanged.
The woman said, Yes.
The rest of the cast and crew came out from behind the curtains. They were all crying, opening bottles of champagne. They had, of course, been watching the whole time.
There were still a number of bottles and cans underneath people’s seats, but I left them. I didn’t want to interrupt the festivities more than I already had. I dumped my trash bag and boosted it out the door to my dad, who was waiting in the car park to drive me and my shame home.
The memory is still excruciating. It still has the power to make me cringe. I don’t know if the couple remember me, if I’m a quirky part of their engagement story or a detail they omit in the retelling. I’m not sure which is worse.
The happy ending of this story is that I did eventually get a boyfriend! Three years later, but still, it happened. And now, many years later, I want to wish the happy couple the best, apologise profusely, and say this never would have happened if I had been cast in the show.
