I know, it’s been about a week and a half since Mind Over Matt closed shop and I never reported anything about how things went from the second weekend of performances. Truth is, it all ran pretty well. I had a few word gaffes on Friday (much like the previous week), but aside from that, no harms or fouls. On second thought, scratch that: I suffered several harms that were caused by yours truly.
I told people beforehand that I performed my own stunts. That in itself doesn’t sound that impressive for a play where the only pointy objects are pencils, but I managed to embellish things enough to get a couple surprised/pained “Ooh!” sounds from the crowd. That totally made it worth the effort.
The easiest maneuver was banging my head on the drawing table. After a phone call with my boss, I’m supposed to slam my forehead down onto the table. Due to my playing soccer, I know that the sweet spot is right at the hairline. That’s the place to get the most velocity on the ball and the place where it’s gonna hurt the least, so by using that spot on a solid wood surface, the other people on stage didn’t need to peek over and see it happen. They heard it and could react accordingly.
The next move was what busted a few stitches in my khakis (a move which isn’t really in the script, either…). I’m supposed to be in a hurry to get ready for work, putting a dress shirt and pants on the couch and racing around the apartment to grab my shoes, get coffee, etc. Instead, I brought my clothes to the front of the stage and put them on as quickly as I could. During the process, I fall down. And since I’m a wild and crazy guy, I opted to start making it a bigger fall. A lot bigger.
After all, I know how to collide with something—just ask the stunt guy who complimented me on my technique (Brian’s comment about page 2). If you fall forward and stick your hands out to catch yourself, you could potentially hit the floor the wrong way and shatter your wrists. If that happens and the show must go on… no, you want to take the brunt of the blow with the outside of your shoulder.
Consequently, I started hopping a little in the legs of my khakis while pulling them up. When it was time to fall down, I leaped up and landed on my shoulder. The stage is a platform and there’s plenty of open space underneath it, so when someone of my size jumps from a vertical position and lands horizontally, it makes a big boom. It got an awesome reaction from the audience, so why not?
I found out why not on Saturday. That morning, there was a spot on my right forearm a few inches above my elbow that hurt when I poked at it—I kept poking it during the day to make sure it still hurt, of course—and I hadn’t the slightest idea how it got there. I didn’t remember banging my arm against the drawing table, the couch, someone’s face when I was running around on stage… I was at a complete loss.
So I went through my pulling on khakis routine that night, jumped up in the air as usual and landed as usual. Or at least as usual as the previous night. I guess I was just tipping over during the first weekend, which is why I wasn’t unintentionally leading with my hip instead of my shoulder. By landing that way and having my hands on my khakis, my forearm hit the floor on the same spot as it did on Friday night. “Oh, that’s where that came from…”
Naturally, I did the same thing on Sunday afternoon and landed on the same spot on my arm. I figured that three collisions with the floor would give me a nice bruise that I could take a picture of and post on here—it felt like a decent lump for the next four or five days—but the color barely changed. I think that was the worst part of bashing my forearm: no decent battle scars.
The last was what concerned me the most. At one point, I was sitting on the couch and had to get away from someone moving closer. The arm of the couch was really big and fluffy, so the only way for me to move was to kind of roll around it and onto the floor. When I stood up again after that maneuver on Sunday afternoon, my knee was… displeased. It wasn’t an excruciating pain, but it was feeling a little wobbly in a bad way.
Thankfully, after that initial “Hey, what the hell are you doing?!”, I didn’t have much trouble moving around, but I was nervous. Truth was, I had planned ahead to some degree. Backstage with all my clothes, I had a knee sleeve that could help support my leg if it was feeling too sore. It was thin enough that I could put it on under my jeans during the intermission, but since this happened during the second act… yikes.
But I felt okay after the show. It wasn’t really sore, but I thought I should ice it anyway—I had planned ahead for that, too. I wasn’t gonna bring a cooler of ice to every show, but I had a squeeze tube of Biofreeze in my bag. You put a thin layer of gel on a body part and it gets cold, so I went to the bathroom, squirted some of the goop onto my fingers and started rubbing it around on my knee. (I tried it on my forearm during intermission, but I spread it too thin to do much.)
As I finished using it and was closing up the tube, a blob dropped down onto my pants. Then two larger blobs landed on the floor. I looked at the tube and discovered that the end had busted open and its entire contents… well, I used some paper towels to get it into the trash versus seeing if it would create little spots of frost on the bathroom tile.
So the Biofreeze served its purpose, my knee started getting colder and life was good. Relatively speaking. Sure, I might have needed the next week to recover from my various ouchies, but overall, the weekend had gone well and we received nothing but positive reviews. (It’s possible that any negative reviewers were afraid to talk to us after the show, but enough people enjoyed it that I wouldn’t have minded. Much.)
And now Mind Over Matt is done. The cast is getting together this Sunday to watch a DVD of one of the performances, but after that… who knows? Maybe I’ll see some of them again; maybe not. Either way, we don’t have rehearsals during the week or shows on the weekends anymore, so I’ve got some extra time to kill… anyone need a stuntman?
