Happy Birthday, Jerry Nosewater!

Today is October 28th, 2005. Tonight I celebrate a very important anniversary. It was exactly ten years ago that my first play, The Cruise of a Lifetime, premiered.

I remember inviting people I admired to come and see it. Teachers, friends, family. Being so close to Halloween, I was up against the big costume parties, but that didn't dampen things.

I remember how it all came about, too. I was a junior in my high school's advanced theatre class, Children's Theatre, and I said, "You know, it's great that we do children's theatre, but that's not the end all be all of theatre. We should do other shows, too. An evening of one acts. A murder mystery dinner theatre." If I'd have known my words would have such a profound effect, I would have told everyone to pay me a thousand dollars. Ah well, hindsight....

As high school students we embarked on the difficult task of finding a script that was neither too "adult" nor too "dumb". We could find neither. So when our teacher suggested maybe we scrap the idea, I foolishly said, "I can write something better than any of these." That was dumb.

I spent the summer before my senior year writing, in pencil, an entire script. It had to have a lot of characters to give the most opportunities to the people in my class. It had to be funny. And it had to, by my own standards, have at least enough male characters so that I could play one. Check, check, and check.

For a high school senior's first attempt at playwriting, it wasn't too bad. Being at that rebellious age, though, I tried to push whatever limits I could. There was lots of innuendo, scantily clad girls, and just stupid inside jokes. The class loved it!

Rehearsals were at times glorious and other times terrible. I was not (am not) a very good director and I lacked the experience to do a lot of what I wanted. And the cast, myself included, wasn't all the great. But it was happening. It was MY play. MY baby. And it was going to be performed.

On the morning of Saturday, October 28th, 1995, I woke up early and went to the grocery store. I remember vividly that I was driving my Dodge Caravelle (yes, it was actually a car) down Coliseum Blvd. and listening to a Simon & Garfunkel tape. I bought a cake. I think it was a thank you cake or something.

I got to the theatre, which wasn't really a theatre but my high school cafeteria and I couldn't believe what I saw. I must have been oblivious to the idea that in the theatre, you GET THINGS DONE! I remember I had gone to the football game the night before and left a bunch of other people to set up the "stage" and the "theatre" for use the next day. I really had no idea what they were going to do. But what I saw took my breath away! It was great! There were curtains and decorations and I think there were even centerpieces on all the tables. Who had gone through all this trouble for my silly little play?

I carried a giant tray of ham from someone's car to the kitchen. It was so heavy, I remember that when I set it down my arms involuntarily floated above my head for about two minutes.

The show finally started seating and, in a somewhat anticlimactic fashion, I didn't recognize anybody waiting to get in. The preshow went on way too long. My brother joined me onstage to pretend to play the piano. My friends Kevin and Ciara, who had both graduated, both came to see the show. The show went off without much of a hitch (except the small issue of someone spilling fake champagne on the brand new piano and my choir teacher rushing up to the stage to wipe it off during the crucial murder scene). It was the greatest party I ever threw!

My friend Matt PeCongE (yes, he spelled it with three capital letters) played the now legendary Jerry Nosewater, P.I. He was phenomenal! This guy had every comic trick up his sleeve and knew just how to work a crowd and the material to milk every last laugh out of them.

*For the record, Jerry Nosewater got his name from my brother, who during the summer while I was writing the play proclaimed that the hot sauce on his chicken wings were making his "nose water". It made me laugh and the name stuck. I'm not sure where "Jerry" came from...maybe a tribute to Seinfeld.

I went on to write three more Nosewater Mysteries, all of which were performed at Millikin University. I asked some guy in one of my acting classes if he'd like to audition for the role of Nosewater. I don't know what possessed me to ask him except that I must have thought he was funny. I don't know what possessed him to audition except that maybe he wasn't getting cast in anything else, either. And so, the man who is now my best friend, Paul Lichy, became the definitive Jerry Nosewater. And I always played, including in high school, Glodys Sloshburn.

*How Glodys Sloshburn got his peculiar name is fresh in my mind, but probably not all that interesting. During the summer of '95, my friends Curtis, Chris, and I were in "The Music Man". On our way into rehearsals each day we'd listen to a Monty Python tape I had and tried to quote it constantly. We couldn't say "Captain Gladys Stotepamphlet" with any degree of speed or accuracy, so her name became "Glodys". Then Chris played a character in the "Shipoopi" scene who would walk over to the player piano on stage and begin to play after "Tommy" would shout his line, "Start 'er up, Mr. Washburn." We imagined Chris's character, who did the actual "starting 'er up" must have been named Mr. Sloshburn. So, he became Glodys Sloshburn. I have since assumed the monniker and that is why this blog is the "Glodys Gazette".

I went back recently and watched a tape of that performance on October 28th, 1995. It saddened me that it wasn't as amazing as I had once thought it to be. But what it sparked--ten years of me continuously writing, acting, and directing my own works--IS amazing and that is why, in my own little way, I celebrate Jerry Nosewater's birthday every October 28th.

Ten years. Thank you to everyone who has ever encouraged me with kind words or by buying tickets or in whatever way. Thanks especially to the cast from that night 10 years ago and to Paul who carried on the Nosewater torch so long afterwards.

This is only the beginning.