"Do you shave your legs upward, in only one direction," I asked Erin as we watched our friend Tyler, dressed as a train conductor, battle his way heroically across the stage, fighting his way through imaginary, hurricane-forced Arctic winds while dodging an avalanched onslaught of very real cotton snowballs thrown with a school-year's worth of pent-up rage and frustration by behind-the-scenes staff members, "or," I continued, lobbing another snowball at Tyler's head, "do you shave up AND down in one continuous movement?"
Ignoring the hundreds of screaming elementary students in the audience behind us, Erin paused, her arm raised, fist clenched around another snowball. Before she launched her missile, she stared off into space, considering my question as the Sugar-Plum Fairies tiptoed out on cue to further terrorize Tyler. "I just shave UP," she admitted, suppressing a giggle as our friend Eric leaped by, narrating each movement prior to execution. "I'm leaping," he shouted before vaulting off across the stage. "Leaping!" he'd yell again. Bounce. Bounce.
"Why do you ask?" she wondered as we watched Dave, gamely trot onto the stage, clad from head to hoof in a reindeer outfit. "According to the manufacturer's directions," I informed her, as Dave lay prone on the floor, rigor-mortised legs rigidly pointing due north, "the razors were ergonomically designed to be pushed down the leg and then pulled up again in a continuous motion." Tyler was now pulling the blind, lame reindeer off the stage using his train car. I realized, in that moment, that Erin and I had inadvertently written a LOT of gratuitous violence and injury in our up-lifting holiday play. "Dave is only temporarily blinded," Erin reassured me when I whispered my concern. But we'd also cast him as an out-of-work, down-on-his-luck, missing person, uh, I mean reindeer, who gets yelled at when he's eventually discovered, when he's not pulling Santa's sleigh, he's cleaning bathrooms, and...at the triumphant end of the play, he's sent home to wash Santa's laundry.
Erin waved off my concern as she quickly researched her razor brand on her phone as Santa arrived on stage to the delight of the screaming students behind us. "By George, you're right!" Erin was heard to exclaim as Tyler balanced pulling his rail car past with his hands juggling the millions of props he needed ("A train conductor
needs a whistle and a lantern," we'd insisted, "Plus it will hide the thousands of pages of witty dialog we wrote for you!")! Dave sidled by as Santa ho-ho-ho-ed his way across the stage. "How did those two
get this job, anyway?" he asked Tyler, who glared at us before answering. "Who else is going to write and direct these things?" he muttered, before rolling his cart glumly away.
Erin and I let out sighs of relief as our actors ambled away. No one could EVER know that it is the most fun EVER writing and directing plays that force our friends into uncomfortable and humiliating situations. Alone now, we high-five-ed. "Whew! That was a close shave," Erin grinned. "I wonder," she said with a wink when we were done laughing, "if the manufacturer's technique is meant for other body parts as well." I was busy picking up the littered stage floor at this point and stuffing the cotton orbs back in their holiday box. "I don't think anyone has the snow balls necessary to test it out," I teased.
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