When I was twenty-two, I played Ophelia in an educational tour of Hamlet. I was the biggest, loudest Ophelia ever. I ate that doe-eyed Ophelia (the one with the wispy, blond ringlets on the cover of your high school copy of Hamlet) for breakfast. When this Ophelia went mad, she not only handed out flowers, but grabbed Claudius and bawdily kissed the hell out of that traitor.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t sing to save my life. I still remember my director’s note: ”You have three songs. You think you could find a tune in one of them!” Of course, this was the same man who use to sneak up behind me and hit me in the back of the legs with a wrapping paper tube because I habitually locked my knees. The same man who in the middle of the nunnery scene instructed Hamlet to shred his “love letters” to me in such a malicious manner that to this day if you rip paper in front of my face, I will burst into tears.
Hamlet and I did not get along. At all. I thought he was a horrible scene partner. And he thought that I was a big baby. Looking back, he was a horrible scene partner. And I was a big baby.
Our dress rehearsal was the day before Valentine’s Day. I remember this because one of Ophelia’s songs started with, “Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s Day.” That was also the day that I received from my college boyfriend, who I had left behind in Florida, a five-page letter written in a drunken rage outlining every horrible thing I had ever done to him. And, because the passions of youth are inexplicable, said boy had also pre-ordered me flowers for Valentine’s Day and my opening. These flowers arrived the same day as the dress rehearsal—the same day as the five-page letter detailing at length my greatest flaws and sins.
During that performance, I handed out his oddly-timed flowers onstage during the madness scene. I truly went mad from that special kind of hurt and rage only a twenty-two-year-old, overly-dramatic baby can produce. There was not a dry eye in the house when I was finished. For the rest of the run, I couldn’t live up to that night. My director would often note, “Do you remember the dress rehearsal? Do the madness scene like that.” I wanted to shout back, “Don’t you understand, that would kill me!”
