And now I can breathe again

For the past few weeks I've been getting my Shakespeare on.  My professor assigned us a group project called "Reader's Theater" in which we had to divide into groups, pick a scene from one of Shakespeare's plays, and then perform it for the class.  Oh yes, that's a brilliant idea.  That'll be so fun. For all of the performance majors in the class (approximately three people).  Usually, I like these kind of projects where you have to act out what you've been reading.  Watching classmates' interpretations of the text is always hilarious.  But when it comes to Shakespeare---I'd rather disapeare.  Don't get me wrong.  It's fabulous when skilled actors perform these plays, using British accents to nicely highlight the elevated, and 400-year-old language.  But when untrained, slang-speaking, 20-somethings (who are only taking the class for their major or G.E. requirements) approach this archaic blank verse and iambic pentameter.....the result is tortuous.  Listening to 20 minutes of monotonous reading from a script, when I've just gotten out of bed, is not fun. Throw in a ton of foreign students, (who despite my earnest efforts I can't understand when they're speaking regular English, let alone Shakespeare's English) and you've got yourself a hot mess. 

People, the torment doesn't end there.  Not only have I had to be an audience member to such performances, but I had to be an actor too! Ha! Anybody who's anybody knows that, I, Anne Olson, cannot act.  I learned that the hard way when I auditioned for an Oscar Mayer Wiener commercial when I was 7.  After just one line of "My bologna has a first name" I was cut short with a brutal, and dream-crushing, "Don't call us, we'll call you."  The fragile walls that housed my 7-year-old hopes of becoming a famous actress were crushed by the big, black, wrecking ball of rejection.  Okay, so that's a little over-dramatized, but you get the picture.  I don't act. Period.  Except for when my grade depends on it, as was the case today.  So, for the past few weeks I've been practicing, and practicing, and memorizing lines from Richard III.   I had all of my lines perfect when just rehearsing by myself, in front of the mirror.  However, I have a severe case of heart-beats-so-fast-whenever-I'm-in-front-of-a-large-audience-that-my-mind-turns-to-jello-itis, otherwise known as stage fright.  No matter how long or how hard I prepare for performances of any kind, when it's go-time, I completely freeze up and my mind goes blank.  So, as you can imagine, I was dreading today's performance for my English 382 class.  To make a long, meaningless story short, I luckily remembered all my lines and got them all out coherently before turning into a bright red lobster at the end of our presentation.  Of course a member of my group wanted to record the blasted thing, so sometime soon I'm sure you can all expect a video to surface on Facebook.  Until then, I can just put the whole thing behind me and pretend like it never happened.  Let's just say: I'm glad the "dog is dead" (that was one of my lines).  Performance?  What performance?