Whose Life Is It Anyway?

The thing you have to know about me

Is that I hate children

I mean, I loathe children

When you get started in theater

Everybody’s always like—

Oh, there’s this children’s theater

In wherever-the-hell

Where you can get your Equity card

As long as you spend a year

Playing Snow White

And Rumpelstiltskin

And a talking panda bear

Who teaches kids that racism is wrong

That was never for me

If I wanted to spend my life

Performing for a screaming, crying

Inattentive audience

I would have done community theater

In Louisiana

And called it a day

Instead, I joined the acting company

At the Orpheus Theater

In the fall of 1980

And what do I find out they’ve started?

An Education Alliance

Which is a fancy way of saying

We’re now going to do children’s theater

And pull in all the grant money we can

Because—and this is what nobody who does theater

Will actually admit to you—

Nobody likes doing theater for children

Nobody

I just happen to be more vocal about it

So there I am, at 10am

Doing The Tempest

For tenth graders

Two of whom were feeling each other in the back row

God bless the youth

They’re horny at 10am

Remember those days?

At night, I was in Whose Life Is It Anyway?

Which was starting to sound like the title of my autobiography

When the show was over

I told Beau, the AD

That I was no longer doing anymore bullshit education shows

Let the interns do it, I said

I’m here to do real adult theater

For real adults

Maybe I sound cruel

But you try having a spitball thrown at you

In the middle of Miranda’s soliloquy

And see how you feel

Beau released me from the Education Alliance

And that night I went out to celebrate

I had a few drinks

I brought home a gentleman

We enjoyed each other’s company

Nine months later

I left the company to join the Jumping Jackrabbits Children’s Theater in Maine

Because the pay was better

And I now had a baby to take care of

Isn’t life funny?

Sometimes it all seems

Like one big joke