You're In Love (with Theater, of course)

For those of you unacquainted with high school theater, allow me to introduce you. You see posters around town. When you get old enough, you audition, and if you get in, your schedule magically transforms into a wondrous blend of glitter, feathers, and Stockholm Syndrome. Two or three months later, out of the screaming blue nowhere, the show... Closes! Closes! Suddenly, your life is empty... Empty... Empty... And ooh, the next show. Anyway, theater will change the way you look at the world. You'll know as soon as someone mentions some inauspicious word (such as "beginning" or "stars") and you burst into song.

How do we love thee, drama? Let me count the ways...

You tap dance nervously in long lines.

You can track your lipstick addiction back to the very first time you looked in a mirror and saw you in your stage makeup- an actress. AN ACTRESS. SQUEAL.

You sometimes privately refer to Mountain Dew as "sleep in a can."

Whenever something breaks you assure people that if you only had some gaffer tape, you could definitely fix it.

"What happens at cast parties/ in the props loft/ up the catwalks/ at strike set STAYS THERE!"

Acting is not the only skill you picked up. You also learned to build virtually anything out of wood, hang lighting equipment, tap dance, work with every personality type, speak stage shorthand as a second language, sew, and sleep standing up.

Sometimes when you burst into song a random, a few of your friends will pop out of nowhere and proceed to harmonize.

Did I mention, your friends are the greatest people in the world.

A normal teacher mentions that there are five minutes left of class, and without even thinking you holler "THANK YOU FIVE MINUTES!"

You would probably worry more about what people think you if you had  time for things like thinking.

You look at other people's activity schedules, laugh hysterically for about thirty seconds, and then cry.

You will defend your opinions concerning movies, music, and culture to the death.

You can sleep anywhere. Chairs. Tables. Floors. 

When you're in rehearsal, you feel like a piece that just locked into place.

Since freshman year, your makeup has grown from a basic kit into several bags.

The inside jokes are precious.

Like privacy. Privacy is a joke.

When people ask you if you work, you say yes, but you don't get paid.

You save set pieces.

You save scripts.

You save memories. Each show is unique.

You never forget.