Dramatic Twist

Cast, and Cast Aside

In ninth grade, I was cast as Anne Frank in my middle school production of “Diary of Anne Frank.”

I was reserved, quiet, not your typical drama club extrovert, so auditioning had been a stretch, and getting the part, a shock. I’d read Anne Frank’s diary years before, after which I walked around for days, pulled low by the enormity of loss. And now, I’d been chosen to play Anne! At times, I felt cosmically that I was destined for the part, but more often, I wondered why out of all the girls who tried out I got picked by our middle school English teacher/drama coach, a frustrated wannabe thespian in his early thirties with a receding hairline.

Certain lines were hard for me to say because I was easily embarrassed. I hated when Anne got all mushy about her first kiss with Peter Van Daam, the teenage boy whose family had gone into hiding with hers. Even worse was a line about getting Anne her period for the first time, which she framed as a “sweet secret.” One day, after rehearsal, the drama coach pulled me aside and asked if I understood what Anne meant by this. He peered into my thirteen-year-old face. Blushing furiously, I told him, yes, I understood.

Backstage opening night, waiting for friends and family to fill the auditorium seats, we kept whispering to each other to break a leg. Actors took their individual places behind the curtains, since we all entered the stage separately. The drama coach came up to me in the dark. He asked if I was ready, and I nodded. I expected to hear break a leg, but he pulled me in and kissed me lingeringly on the mouth. Then, the lights came up and I went on stage, because sexual predation aside, the show must go on.

We did such a fine job on opening night that the principal gave us the next day off from school. My parents had never been more proud of me. I made those my takeaways from opening night, so the kiss was pushed back into the inner recesses of my psyche where I jammed small traumas, making it a not-so-sweet-secret I never told anyone about.

That summer, I worked as an assistant camp counselor and grew five inches. I filled out. At the same time, the drama coach was offered a job at the high school I’d be attending, which made me think, given our history, that I’d have a foot in the door when it came to landing parts. I auditioned for the first play he’d be directing, “Death of a Salesman.” I went onstage and to my great shock, instead of being happy to see me, he looked at me with a mixture of disappointment and disgust. “You’ve changed,” he said. I was given the microscopic role of Letta, a prostitute, which I think he considered type casting. At 14, I was washed up.

I don’t know what got me started thinking about this, but today, I woke up furious about what happened to me long ago, and the irony that playing a young girl who believed people are really good at heart made me into a woman who does not.