A Job To Dye For

The year of my nineteenth birthday, I got an acting job, one of the few I would ever get in my life.  It wasn’t an acting job that involved any kind of speaking of lines, only the dancing of dances and the singing of songs.  I was in college, pursuing my childhood dream of being an actor and I was doing what I could to audition for shows, any shows, without the proper training or knowledge required to do the work.  I did not grow up in the area (The Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex), the way some of my college classmates had, and I had not the experience they had, for they had been auditioning and performing since their childhoods.  I had not been taught how it goes down in audition rooms, what to prepare, what to prepare for, and how to be professional.  I also had neither the skill nor the talent to do the work.  I was a rank amateur, and I imagined, in the years that would follow, that people who were in the room with me when I auditioned had laughed and talked about me when I was gone.  And they should have.

My parents were as supportive as one could imagine or hope.  They took me to auditions (I did not drive) and they waited while I did my thing, and they offered me their spiritual cheers of encouragement.  One of the auditions they took me on was for Casa Mañana - I was, of course, dreadful.  I could not sing.  I could only barely do the choreography.  I had only the slightest capability that comes from having a natural talent for mimicry, and a graceful body and sense of movement.  I did my tryout on the actual stage of Casa Mañana, and I was dismissed.

In the weeks that followed, though, Me Mother reached me at school, at the TCJC Drama Department, to tell me that I had had a call about an acting job.  There, in the lobby of the Drama Building, I used a pay phone to call the number she had given me.  There was a play called TEXAS!  A MUSICAL ROMANCE OF PANHANDLE HISTORY and they had been given my name by the auditors at Casa Mañana.  They were looking for three boy dancers and Casa Mañana had given them three names of boys that had tried out and not made the cut.  Mine was one of those names. They would not need to audition me, they were prepared to hire me, sight unseen, based on the recommendation of the fine folks at Casa.

I had a job.  I had a job performing.

My parents were very happy for me and they helped me to prepare for a summer away from them, in a place called Canyon, Texas, where I would have my first professional job as an actor.

It was the worst summer of my life.

It didn’t have to be the worst summer of my life.  There were people in the cast of that show who were genuinely sweet, kind, caring, loving people, who were fun and who would have been fun to get to know and turn into family.  But I didn’t like myself, inside, where it counts.  I knew I wasn’t good enough for the job for which I had been hired.  I was struggling with being in the closet, and I was beginning to really embrace being an alcoholic.  I was a teenage drama queen and didn’t know who I was or what I was doing.  So I made a mess of some things, I made some bad choices, and I had to live with them.

One of my bad choices was my hair.

Nobody told me that you can’t change your hair when you go into a show.  Nobody told me it was unprofessional.  And nobody told me how to color my hair so I would look like David Bowie in the music video for “Let’s Dance.”  It was the most popular music video on MTV that summer and I loved that blonde hair of his, and I wanted it.  The cast was full of boy dancers with dark hair and dark eyes, I was just one more, nobody would miss my shoulder-length chestnut curls.  

Off to the pharmacy I went, where I bought a box of dye to turn my hair blonde.  Some of the cast were going to hang out at the public pool in Amarillo, where I was living, having chosen to room with a fellow cast member that didn’t live in Canyon.  I was so excited to have my David Bowie hair that I didn’t even wait to get home to do it - I dyed it in the public men’s room at the public pool, and I was very excited to see what my new hair would look like.

I had pumpkin colored hair.

I decided to embrace it.  I did the show with my tangerine top and nobody said a word.  I’m sure they had plenty to say when I wasn’t in the room, though.

One day a gang of people was talking about going to Six Flags Over Texas for the weekend.  The plan was to leave after the Saturday night performance, drive all night, play all day Sunday, drive back Monday morning, and be in Canyon in time for the Monday night show.  I hitched a ride back, not so that I could go to Six Flags, but so that I could spend some time with My Mam and Pap.  

As the sun was rising up over the suburbs of Fort Worth, we rolled into town.  The driver of the van was heading into Arlington but, first, swung into the neighborhood where my parents lived, as I guided him to the Mosher family homestead.  It was seven o’clock in the morning.  As the van pulled up at the curb in front of the house, I could see Mama, standing in the front yard, hose in hand, as she watered the lawn.  Out of the van I jumped, running over to my beloved Mama, excited to hug her and tell her I loved her, I missed her, I was happy to see her.  She did not hug me.  She did not say that she loved me, that she missed me, that she was happy to see me.

“What happened to your hair?”  she wanted to know.

I thought fast.

“I went swimming in a heavily chlorinated pool and then laid out in the sun all day.”

Juana dropped the running hose on the ground and walked over to me, and, as she did, she was saying, “When I was your age, I dyed my hair.”  She put her fingers into my hair and parted it with her fingers.

“Yup.  All the way to the scalp.”

Busted.

“Put your things inside and give your father a hug.  I’ll take you to the Walgreen’s”

It took three boxes of black dye to get my hair back to its original color.