I went to the high school musical tonight. First of all, the story wasn’t that great. Basically about this guy who tries to con a town by making them buy a bunch of band instruments and uniforms and make a band out of them. The plan is to book it once he gets the cash and leave the town bandless. He knows nothing about music, by the way. Except it backfires, cause he falls in love with this girl and she falls for him and then he gets caught cause he misses the train to leave. The mayor is pissed as all hell and wants the guy tarred ad feathered, but the girl who loves him and he loves makes the town see they’ve been working together, and that’s what’s important. The town sees that and then the mayor is in the minority and the con artists and the girl kiss and all is well. Which is all a bunch of shit because no way would a whole town not be pissed about losing a ton of money without getting anything other than return other than a unified community, or whatever the girl wanted to pass it off as.

Here’s what really bothered me though. About halfway through the first act I started thinking about the people. I mean the actual people that played these parts and that I knew outside of the parts they played. This play was very old time and the girls had on these frilly dresses and the guys looked like gentlemen in suits and all and I thought about the people I knew and how they weren’t the characters they played. I thought about how they said things like “fuck” and “damn” and “I love you” and they were never perfect but that was okay. I thought about how sometimes they looked like they just rolled out of bed and walked through school in a haze and that was okay. I thought about how much I loved them and how unusual is was that they would put this much time into becoming some clichéd archetype for a few nights and it made me really sad. I didn’t want to see people act like people don’t act and how, even if people did act like that, they wouldn’t act like that. I wanted them to be them in front of hundreds of people and act how people really act and, most of all, how they really act. I think if you’re in a musical or a play, you should only be allowed to play the parts of people that are really like you, because that’s not acting, that’s real. And that’s what I want. Reality on stage. That’s what made it really hard. Not the poor story, but watching the people I know and love be people I didn’t know or love, nor would want to if I could.