The Cast Party
It’s not all fun and games…
Most of my other stories are funny, weird, or both.
This one is not.
During my time as a theater major, I spent a lot of social time with my fellow actors and cast members. As can be imagined, for young college-aged creative people, this included a lot of cast parties, at which there was drinking. Usually lots of drinking. Since we were young and, for the most part, charming and/or attractive people, there was a fair amount of drama, and probably a lot more drinking than was actually healthy for us. In other words, normal college things except that at least some portion of the drama involved learning lines and was done for an audience. The rest of the drama was… well, I’m not sure I’d want to see a play with that sort of drama.
During the summers, our theater department did dual matriculation — in essence, high school students were allowed to try out for productions and earn advance credit for college. That was how I got started with this theater group, as did a number of my fellow students. This could occasionally be a bit awkward, on account of having to modify our behavior due to the presence of minors. Naturally, the official people from the department administration had an official perspective, but we performers had also developed our own system. Our system, if it could even be called such, included a general warning we sometimes referred to as The Talk (“This kind of stuff happens, if it bothers you, let someone know, no one will hold it against you.”), specific warnings (“There will be alcohol at this cast party, don’t come if it bothers you, no one will hold it against you.”), and the somewhat facetiously-named Big Brothers. During my time with the theater department, the Big Brothers were Jim, a very nice guy who could do an extremely believable psycho persona; Carlos, who was well over six feet tall and the best part of four hundred pounds; and me, who can be rather intimidating to people who don’t know me. We’ve all got younger sisters, and were generally the ones that the high school girls went to when they weren’t comfortable with something and needed more than just someone to listen to them. We’d make it stop happening, or would otherwise resolve the problem, ideally but not always without violence.
Naturally, the high school boys never said anything about being uncomfortable.
One of the high school girls that year was Kate. She was thirteen or fourteen, cute, very nice, and had an unusual level of maturity for someone her age. She was also, and this needs to be said because it’s important, one of those teenage girls who develops adult physical traits very early, and so was also rather more mature physically than most people would expect. It could be hard to tell how old Kate actually was, as her youth tended to blend into her being naturally cheerful, and as I’ve said, she was unusually mature when she was being serious about things.
Kate and I were somewhat closer friends than usual between the college cast and the dual matriculation students, partly because I’d been the one to give her The Talk, but mostly because she registered to me immediately as “younger sister” whereas to her, I was “big brother.” Not that I became part of her life to any real extent, or she part of mine, but we got along well, and she knew she could come to me if there was a problem. So when the occasion of a cast party for a production we were both in came up, Kate felt no significant concerns about being around college students who’d been drinking. She knew most of them from the cast, and I’d be there as well. Plus, the party was at Jim’s house, and would include Carlos, so all three of the Big Brothers would be present.
No, we did not encourage underage drinking. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The second thing that needs to be said because it’s important is that Kate had chosen to wear tight black PVC pants to the party. How a thirteen year old had gotten them in the first place, I didn’t ask, but if you’ve ever seen a fit, attractive woman wearing such an item of clothing, I doubt it would come as a surprise to say Kate was getting an inappropriate amount of attention for a freshman in high school. Not from the guys in the cast, who all knew how old she was, but from three guys in shirts from one of the college fraternities, who apparently didn’t care. All three were friends of a friend of a friend, had invited themselves to the party, and were at least two sheets to the wind. They’d been told how old Kate was, and that she wasn’t interested in any of them, but since most of the telling was apparently coming from Kate and she was too nice to be stern, none of the three had been discouraged.
I found out about the situation because someone who had seen Kate cornered by the frat boys but who also couldn’t discourage them went looking for the Big Brothers and found me. I’d been drinking for a little while by this point, and had been briefly engaged in one of the recurring themes of parties with this theater group, which was seeing if they could get the self-confessed Scottish person drunk. It never worked, but I also wasn’t particularly sober, either. So when I heard about Kate, I instantly went all Protective Older Brother and went straight over to do something. I saw the three frat boys, I saw Kate, and I saw the look she gave me, which probably had less “Rescue me!” in it than the alcohol made me see, but was still one of relief. I went over to be Big Brother.
Most people reading this are probably familiar with the sorts of ideas that seem like a good idea when alcohol is involved. Whatever form they take, they’re something one says or does while intoxicated that common sense would probably prevent when sober. In certain contexts, those moments of bad judgment are often prefaced by phrases like “Hold my beer.”
I hadn’t been drinking beer, but I still had a “Hold my beer” moment. I decided, in the absence of good judgment and the presence of a lot of alcohol, that I needed to do something those frat boys couldn’t argue with. I didn’t want to start a fight, if only because the cops would likely be called. So the brilliant idea I had was to physically pick Kate up, throw her over my shoulder, and carry her away. I ended up going through the whole house and out onto the front porch, which of course meant that pretty much everyone in the party saw me carry Kate out the door. Lots of conversations stopped. When I got to the front porch, I set Kate down on a bench and proceeded to stand guard, as it were. Kate, for her part, recovered immediately, and was giggling before I’d even left the room she’d been cornered in.
We’d only been out there a couple minutes when Jim came out, and he was not happy. He hadn’t seen everything leading up to my hauling Kate away, and the descriptions he’d gotten from the other attendees hadn’t been particularly informative, focusing mostly on how I’d physically carried a minor through the house and outside. After a moment, Carlos joined him, and was also not happy. I could understand why. I was rather intoxicated, trying to explain through the alcohol to two angry and protective guys why I’d just apparently physically assaulted a minor in their house.
Fortunately, I was able to explain with Kate’s assistance. Jim and Carlos verified the events with witnesses, and the frat boys were gone by the time Kate and I went back inside. Of particular note was the detail that Kate and I were on the front porch. The three frat boys didn’t pass by us when they left, and I never learned what route they did take to leave, presumably in a hurry. Carlos could get very… intense when performing his role of Big Brother. We all could, but he was the biggest.
