70's The Girl Who Stole the Show
In seventh grade I walked into the high school auditorium and stole something that wasn’t meant for me.
The director of the senior play cast me as Tootie in
Meet Me in St. Louis. I was thirteen, dropped into a room full of seventeen‑ and eighteen‑year‑olds who’d been waiting four years for this shot.
Every single girl in my seventh‑grade class hated me.
Or really, it was middle school hate, which is just “I wish it were me” dressed up as gossip and eye‑rolls. I always had a command of a room without trying, and nothing makes a teenage girl madder than another girl who doesn’t even seem to be trying.
Those seniors hated me too.
My big moment as Tootie was supposed to be a little gag: I had to sneak out from behind a couch, crawl, and bite a guy in the ankle. I went extra. I didn’t just nibble; I
attacked that ankle like it owed me money. The audience lost it. That was what stole the show.
There’s a photo of that exact moment in the yearbook—me mid‑crawl, teeth in somebody’s leg. That didn’t help the stink eye situation. It just proved to everyone that the seventh‑grader had walked in and taken their scene.
I loved my mother so much for that whole era. She saw in me a need, a desire to get it all out, and instead of tamping it down, she got behind the wheel. There was no fancy theater in our little village. If I was going to be onstage, it meant Battle Creek.
My mother drove me from our no‑frills village to Battle Creek, night after night, in a car that always smelled like Aqua Net and coffee. She didn’t say much, but she kept turning the key.
To this day it’s a family joke: the smell and sight of that red can of extra‑heavy‑duty Aqua Net. You could knock on wood with that bouffant and it wasn’t going to crack. That was my mother—lacquered hair, quiet hands on the wheel, getting me where I needed to go.
When I was younger, I was a ham and I knew it, ever since I read that ASS at the table and the stick fell on into the orchestra pit and half the theater tried not to choke. I loved learning lines. I was quick and fast with them. I loved the dance. I felt like I had gossamer wings as I glided along in a waltz or would shine while tap dancing. Stage lights, applause, the hush before a cue—my body understood that language like it was born to it.
By nineteen, I was back on that Battle Creek stage again, only this time it wasn’t
Meet Me in St. Louis. It was
Gypsy.
Then came
the part.
The one damned part that ruined it all.
I got cast as Electra, one of the main characters in
Gypsy.
This was the show. They built a catwalk over the orchestra pit so we could really strut our stuff.
My costume was on the skimpy side—for Battle Creek family theater. Rhinestones, fishnets, not much fabric. To me it was just another dance costume. To a small town in the 70s, it read: sex.
We hit that number: “You Gotta Get a Gimmick.”
My hamminess got the best of me. I was singing at the top of my voice:
“You can sacrifice your sacro working in the back row,
but you gotta get a gimmick if you wanna get ahead!”
I belted that one out with far too much confidence for a village girl. I worked that catwalk like it was built for me. Strut, wink, bump, grind—PG‑13, but the suggestion was there. I was selling it.
And then—no.
NO. NOOOoooooooo
This can’t be happening.
I fell into the orchestra pit.
One second I was Electra, queen of the catwalk. The next I was gone, straight down, legs and feathers and sheet music. The musicians stopped playing, mouths open.
I got up, brushed myself off, told them to continue, and hopped back up on that stage like nothing had happened. Finished the number. If you’re going to die, you die in character.
What I didn’t know, to add a good thick layer of humiliation, was that ? was in the audience. He’d brought a friend who took pictures.
He was furious.
Furious about the costume. Furious about the dance. Furious about the way it suggested sexuality—even if it wasn’t full‑blown gyrating, just a young woman inhabiting her own body on a stage. He’d spend the rest of his life in smokey rooms where women and money and innuendo were thick as chalk dust, but in that moment all he could see was “his” girl on a catwalk in too little fabric. I was his, even before I officially was.
I did win an Eppy for that performance—community‑theater glory. A little trophy for falling into the pit and climbing back out like it was all part of the show.
But that was the last time I really chased theater.
Goodbye stage. I traded one kind of spotlight for another.
JAM will be along shortly, you can bet on that
