Danglers (Humor 1875 words) - Writers Forum

gary_wagner · 08-03-2006, 12:56 PM

Freshman year of high school is hard for both sexes, but I only know how hard it was for a just-turned fourteen-year-old boy. Full blown puberty wouldn’t hit until my sophomore year (it’s a heredity thing – I come from a long line of late bloomers) so I was still the smallest person in most of my classes at just a little over five feet tall and seventy five pounds. I was desperate for something that would let me be one of the guys, show that though I didn’t look like I should, I was really in high school.

I tried out for, and got a bit part in the all-school production of “The Mouse That Roared”, a comedy, based on the 1959 movie starring Peter Sellers, about a mythical country located in the French Alps that decided to declare war on the United States so they could collect war reparations. I was number three of the twelve soldiers of the “Duchy of Fenwick” and I had one line. Looking back, I probably got the part because I was so small, which could be used for comedic effect.

The play was directed by one of the English teachers, Mr. McSorely or Mr. Mac as he allowed us to call him. Mr. Mac was in his mid forties, had grey thinning hair, and wore big black horn-rimmed glasses. He would let us have fun during play rehearsals (to an extent), but was loud and demanding when he wanted us to crack down and get serious about what we were doing. We loved Mr. Mac and he loved what he was doing. We liked to make him smile and hated to have him yell at us.

Mrs. Carmichael, a veteran teacher just a few years away from retirement, was in charge of the set design and costumes. She wasn’t as jolly and lenient as Mr. Mac but she was all right in our books too. She dressed old-fashioned, prim and proper. She wore her snow-white hair in a bun, kept her reading glasses on a chain around her neck, and always wore a dress because she had not, and probably never would, adopt the new fashion of wearing pants as many of the younger female teachers had. She was always happy, helpful, and smiling. We never saw her laugh out loud but she would occasionally cover her mouth and giggle if something struck her funny. She was our grandma by proxy.

She had decided that we soldiers would wear costumes similar to those worn in the movie - black tights, green tunic, big wide belt, and a bright green Robin Hood type hat with a long red feather. During dress rehearsal, Mr. McSorely noticed white underwear showing through some of the tights and issued a decree in his bellowing voice, “You soldiers will not wear your white underwear under your tights. I don’t want to see one pair of underwear come opening night.”

Ahh, the literal mind of a fourteen-year-old boy. He told us to not do something so I didn’t wear my tighty-whiteys under my tights. He didn’t tell us to wear anything so I wore nothing but those black DanSkin tights. I quickly discovered that tights are designed for girls and do nothing for holding in place the extra parts that boys come with.

Opening night was the typical utter chaos of all opening nights of high school plays. The set had not been completely finished as there were still boards and screws sticking out and they were still painting some of the flats. The lights were dim behind the curtain and I tripped on a board lying in the shadows. A protruding nail caught my tights at my inner knee and caused a long run that went all the way up to my crotch.

I looked down in shocked disbelief. I quickly tracked down Mr. McSorely, showed him the run, and asked what I should do. He looked impatiently at his watch and said, “That curtain goes up in ten minutes! Find Mrs. Carmichael – she’ll know what to do, but I don’t want you out there with that big tear in your tights, so snap to it!”

I found her helping the set crew paint the bases of the rolling walls black so they wouldn’t be seen. I showed her my leg and asked her what we could do about the run. She pursed her lips and shook her head slightly. She reached out and started to lift the hem of my tunic to see how bad the damage was, but without even thinking about it my hand jerked down and pushed her hand away. She looked at me in surprise and I quickly whispered, “People can see me here”.

She nodded, picked up the bucket of paint and the brush and whispered back, “Over here”. I followed her to the back corner of the stage behind one of the side curtains.

"I’ll just put some black paint on your leg and no one will even see this run." She lifted my tunic, handed me the hem, and said, “Here, hold this up.”

She was squatting down as she said, “Now, there’s nothing to worry…” She stopped in mid-sentence and released a puff of breath in a quick exclamation of, “Oh!” I felt a breeze across bare skin where I would never have expected to feel a breeze. The blood rushed to my head so fast I thought I was going to faint from embarrassment and humiliation. I didn’t know exactly how much of me was hanging out of that ripped pair of tights, but any at all was entirely too much.

She didn’t look up and she didn’t say a word. She dipped her brush in the paint and wiped it on my leg from knee to upper thigh. She dipped the brush again and I squinted my eyes closed from the touch of the wet brush across nether regions. Now I knew the extent of the damage. The palm tree was safely covered, but the coconuts were hanging free. She pulled the hem out of my hand, my tunic fell back down, and she silently walked away.

My mind raced in horrified panic. She saw me. Not only did she see me, she painted me. This had all the earmarks of a nightmare but I knew I was awake. Then my panic increased when I thought ahead to the play. I was supposed to be pushed to the ground in my first on-stage scene. I couldn’t go out there like I was – black paint or no black paint. I had danglers! I briefly considered running out the back door, finding a passing freight train, and riding it to a faraway place where I could spend the rest of my life in secrecy. But, what about the play? The show must go on.

I ran to the cafeteria where we had put on our stage makeup and left our street clothes in little neatly folded stacks (the girls) and heaps (the boys). I spotted two safety pins on a table and grabbed them. I thought about it a few seconds and realized that pins alone wouldn’t be enough to keep me from exposing myself on stage when I took my fall. A piece of black cloth was what I needed to put inside my tights to cover the hole. I was scurrying around knowing that the curtain went up in less than ten minutes and my entrance followed just a few minutes after that.

I spotted a pair of shoes on the floor with black socks draped over them. I didn’t know whose they were and I didn’t care. It’s not like they would ever want them back after the way I was planning to wear them. I grabbed a sock and took off for the boys bathroom to close the hole and banish the danglers.

I put the pins and socks on one of the sinks, pulled my tights down around my knees, raised my tunic up, and tucked the hem under my chin to keep it out of the way. In hindsight it probably would have been a better idea to take the tights off and fix them in a more controlled manner rather than standing there bare-assed with my tunic under my chin, fumbling with a sock and safety pins between my knees; but a beet-red-faced fourteen-year-old threatened with the possibility of indecent exposure in front of his classmate cast members and an audience full of parents and friends doesn’t always think logically and rationally.

I managed to get the sock fastened to the back waist-band of the tights and was still fumbling to fasten it to the front when the door of the bathroom opened, and Mr. Mac walked in. He stopped in mid-stride with one foot still off the ground. He squinted his eyes when he saw my look of a deer caught in the headlights, looked down and saw the stripe of paint running up my leg and over the danglers, and burst into uproarious laughter.

He stepped closer, took the pin from my hand, and started to fasten the sock to the front for me. He was still laughing and his hand was unsteady. The pin popped loose and he accidentally stabbed me with it in the side of my leg. In an involuntary reaction, I jerked my leg up and my knee caught him right in the chin. It knocked him off balance for a moment but it didn’t knock him over. He stopped laughing and looked up at me in stunned surprise.

I was appalled. As bad as things were, I had just made them worse by smacking the director in the chin with my knee. I expected him to yell at me but instead he started to chuckle, then laugh, and then launched into one of the loudest guffaws of laughter I had ever heard. It was infectious and I started laughing along with him. He was able to get the second pin fastened and I dropped my tunic, as if I had any dignity left. He grabbed a couple of paper towels out of the dispenser, wiped his eyes, and blew his nose. He was still chuckling when he left the bathroom.

I pulled my tights up and arranged my danglers in my makeshift thong. Not satisfied with just bending over and looking between my legs to check for escapees, I climbed up on the sink on my knees, lifted my tunic, and checked things out in the mirror. Satisfied that the black paint was hiding the white skin below the run and that everything would stay in place, I hopped down and ran backstage to wait for my entrance.

Mr. McSorely and I never said a word to each other about the incident, but every once in a while when he caught my eye he would chuckle and I would grin. However, through mutual unspoken agreement, Mrs. Carmichael and I never made eye contact for the remainder of that school year. She unexpectedly announced her early retirement just before the end of school and I’ve always wondered if the black tights, black paint incident had anything at all to do with it.