Choir & Musicals

When I got to high school, my interest turned to choir because there were always more girls than guys and being a normal teen-aged guy, that appealed to me.

While I was in high school, our music department put on 2 musicals. The first was Brigadoon. It was a musical about a Scottish town that only appeared once every hundred years for one day only. I got to play a shopkeeper/dancer. My mom had to sew my costume.

A kilt with tartan shoulder thing. (OK I’ll save you a trip to Google. It’s called a Fly Plaid). I didn’t have any speaking lines, and my dancing consisted of doing one of those high stepping sword dances. Very simplistic. I think I was one of 8 doing the dance and I was in the back row. My mom had to search all over Victoria for a pair of ballet slippers that would fit me.  I wasn’t a big fan of dancing. Either in the musicals, or at “sock hops". I felt dorky, and I was very shy about asking girls to dance. At least in the musicals, the director would set up the pairings.

I guess the musical were done every other year. Brigadoon was my sophomore year, and Oklahoma was my senior year.

Oklahoma was much easier for my mom, because all the costumes were boots, hats, jeans and cowboy shirts for the guys. I think some of the guys with speaking parts got to wear over-alls. The musical was about a girl named Laurey, and her two suitors, cowboy Curley, and farmhand Judd. I don’t remember if Joyce was in either musical. Again in this musical, I was a back-ground player/singer. Most of us just roamed around the stage talking to other back-grounders. We had to make sure we didn’t upstage the lead players. I remember a lot more of the music from Oklahoma than I do from Brigadoon.