From my standpoint, things were looking pretty good. The Puppetry Club had taken off to a group of members pretty much equal to the number of students in the fall plays every year, I was working on a grant application to get money from the school board's education foundation, contacting puppet builders about getting professional Muppet-quality puppets built just for our show, looking through which puppetry techniques beyond hand puppets were worth encourage within the club, planning a "backstage" plot for the show as well as adapting the Oklahoma! sketch from Sesame Street to stage with new characters (never seen it? Here's a comic relief break for you then: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ9g62YE1N4). I was a race car well into the Daytona 500. But with ever car race, a crash is bound to happen. It was happening on the day of our first formal meeting.
I once again messaged the Facebook group about a meeting the next day after school. The next day came and only three people showed up. We had a very dedicated young woman who cared dearly about our work and two freshmen boys who were pretty interested and had the potential. Our seniors who seemed oh so interested, and took up a good percentage of the Facebook group, failed to show up. As one of the boys told me, none of those seniors were actually interested in the club. I sank a little inside but kept up my perkiness even though I was angry as hell.
I will say one thing though if I may: if anything good came from the Puppetry Club, a lot of great ideas and characters I refuse to let be put to waste came out of my brainstorming. I now have a stable of characters I want to acquire and hone up. There's Conrad the Otter, the quintessential "Kermit-in-an-otter's-body" who gets a bit more hot-tempered, who was our mascot and would be the MC of the variety show (in actuallity hosted by me). Conrad's closest buddy was Ollie (his name is actually now Milo), an incompetent and silly monster who was always going to be a live-hand puppet. At first he started as a Fozzie-type but now as Milo the attire and humor of Weird Al Yankovic, the voice of Daffy Duck, the "lovable goof" mindset of Larry the Cucumber and general personality traits of Fozzie. Next we have Lucy, who went through the most dramatic changes. At first she was a humanoid who looked like Muppet Janice and had a thing for Conrad. Now she's Belle, a Scarlett O'Hara-like white dog that Milo has a thing for. Then there's Snook the Skunk, an adolescent-in-behavior skunk who only had his name to Karl. I'd go on about the lesser characters, but those were always really my "Fab Four".
Here was the catch: I could tell early on that these weren't guys who could really portray those characters to their potential. None of them were really actors or had the kind of personality you really need for theater. But they did have potential to be great supporting players, especially considering I needed people to handle sketches while I wrote the backstage plot and picked out some of the music (I always envisioned a finale with all the club members with puppets, our guest performers to help round out the show and our school's music chairman all around a piano singing "The Rainbow Connection" for instance. I also wanted Conrad to sing "Bein' Green" in the midst of the backstage plot, but that's for another time). I tried to schedule a repeat meeting for those who missed it but were still interested... but no one responded to my request. At last, I finally said "Screw them. I can re-build a new group in no time!" Ha-ha, what a funny thought.
It was around that Friday that I went to a rehearsal of my school's spring production of Little Shop of Horrors. The director made the gracious decision to let me perform the first Audrey II puppet. If you know the show, this is the puppet that appears in the "Grow for Me" number when Seymour discovers Audrey II feeds off blood. This new casting choice seemed to be a green light to do something I really regret: I sent out an e-mail to the cast (some adults involved with the production also received the e-mail, but I never heard any complaining) trying to encourage people to join the club. While it seemed harmless enough, I should note that one of those unreliable seniors was an Urchin in this very production of Little Shop, someone I had a huge on-and-off off-and-on crush on all through our three years we were classmates and was already on thin ice with anyway. My anger toward her not showing up to meetings overshadowed my love for her for most of that week and I don't remember exactly what I wrote in that e-mail but it was something along the lines of "... aside from an unreliable group of juniors and seniors (including someone in the cast who I won't name here), but that just comes with making a group on Facebook..." I pretty much singled her out in the e-mail without even mentioning her name. I didn't even think that I clicked the "Send e-mail" button that I'd be kicking myself in ass for it later.
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