The Tale of the Christmas Box
A LOT A LOT as an actor, you take the jobs you can get. I was very grateful to find steady work in dinner theater. I worked with two companies in particular who offered me a good part-time income. Oftentimes when I couldn’t find work with one company, the other would take me in, and vice versa. It was a very good gig. I soon realized I needed to learn two things about the art of dinner theater:
Don’t expect undivided attention. Food trumps performers. Every time.
Don’t take yourself too seriously. Dinner theater is like British pantomime - always fun, never serious.
I had trouble taking both things to heart. I always wanted undivided attention as a performer. And I wanted to become a really good one - a Meryl Streep, a Carol Burnett, or a Patti Lupone. Patti Lupone herself said that every job is a phenomenal opportunity to grow in your craft.
And during one night of a dinner theater performance, I learned a great lesson.
It was the holiday season, and every now and then you could find one or two buzzed patrons at the 8:30 PM shows of a dinner theater. My role in a spoof of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was certainly not to be taken too seriously. One night, I was on stage playing the Ghost of Christmas Present in this HUGE box with holes cut for my head and arms (which turned out to be a fun task attempting to navigate the narrow labyrinth from backstage to onstage). The buzzed group in question was seated off to the right and thought it would be hilarious to throw popcorn at me. To save face, I turned it into a game and tried to catch the popcorn in my mouth and then distract their attention to what was happening onstage.
The rest of the show went off without a hitch, but deep inside I was humiliated. After almost 30 years of performing, I felt like I was a joke; a perfect target for patrons armed with popcorn. I came home and burst into tears. As I relayed the story to my husband, I actually started to laugh through my tears, because the words coming out of my mouth sounded so ridiculous:
“I wuh…was on…on stage.. and they…. they threw….POPCORN at me!”
I shared the deeper layers of my humiliation 7-layer dip: that I was a clown, a joke, and would never be a real actress or even a good one. My husband held me in his arms and soothed me. “You are NOT a joke,” he said. I replied, “Tanner…I’m a flipping BOX!” He laughed and replied with the best spin-off of a Dirty Dancing movie quote I’d ever heard: “…Nobody puts Jamie in a box.”
I felt better after that and realized nobody could put Jamie in a box unless I let them; including myself. You’re truly unlimited until you start to believe the limits placed by others, by circumstance or anything/anyone else. And your opportunities are unlimited. I need to always believe in that. More than anything else, this experience with being in a Christmas box taught me to never put myself, my ability, my future, or my potential in a box ever again.