Mrs. A was head of the dance department, such as it was, at my high school and did most of the advanced level teaching. I never had her for dance, had her for this one-off class called CAPA Internship which I'll get into. My freshman year dance teacher and my favorite of all time was Ms. Conley, coincidently the sister of Ms. Johnson my middle school dance teacher who I also really liked. She was great but she didn't stay on, I don't think the school had the budget for a third full time dance teacher so goodbye Ms. Conley. I had Ms. Krishmanya(lot of people just called her Ms. Krish) sophomore year and again junior year by some stroke of scheduling luck. Senior year when I knew I couldn't dodge the Mrs. A bullet I took my PE waiver for playing soccer, something I had never bothered to do previously because although I'd never say it to my friends who weren't in CAPA(which stood for Creative And Performing Arts, the arts program in our district) I liked dance quite a bit and I was, if not necessarily good, at least surprisingly passable at it.
Mrs. A had a dominating type of presence and Ms. Krish wasn't a push over exactly, great dancer/choreographer, good teacher, but never very assertive so she took a back seat most of the time, at least when I was there. Mrs. A was the kind of person who wanted to be the friend of her students as well as their teacher. I never gossiped with her but I know people who did and I overheard her a couple times pumping kids for info. She was also the kind of person who wanted to appear to be in charge, appear to be doing new and innovative things, without necessarily having the follow through or willingness to do the actual work. You could tell the intent of some of her "close" relationships with some of the more talented students was that she was betting some day they'd get notoriety or fame and cite her as inspiration. I don't know how she was as a dancer or dance teacher(I imagine relatively good) but I can tell you she was, generally, low grade mean. So I avoided her as much as I could, when the spring dance concert would come around I made a point to always go through Ms. Krish if there were any issues.
Senior year I signed up for this new class that sounded cool, CAPA Internship, where we would be paired with local artists to get some real world experience. Come to find out on the first day of class this was Mrs. A's idea, she was the teacher, and that's what it mostly was, an idea. It was just a fuck around class, Mrs. A talked a big game but she had zero actual internships lined up for the 15 or so kids that were in the class and after the shine of having launched a new class wore off she mostly checked out. She was "too busy". It was still fun and to be fair we did do some interesting stuff and she did eventually connect like three students with gigs. I got to do one day at the local NPR affiliate and go on air to do a newspaper reading for the deaf where I had to spell out Mendota(a town in Wisconsin) cause I froze up and didn't know how to pronounce it, on the whole it was honestly thrilling. Actually for the most part Mrs. A was kinda nice and chummy in the class. So hey maybe I was wrong about her. Or maybe being on the inside of her circle was just better than being on the outside of it.
Second semester senior year she had negotiated with the two theater teachers Mr. Sleger and Mr. Harnish to direct the spring musical Joseph. I never got cast in the musicals, my friend Joey was the triple threat and usually(and justly) got the leads, and I had just played Creon in Antigone the winter play which was a pretty big part so I wasn't sure if I was even going to audition. Mrs. A called me up to her office a week or so before the auditions, which was very odd as we never had the like check-in lets-chat type of relationship, and asked me if I would be the stage manager. I was never very good at or very interested in the tech side of things and my gut reaction was I didn't want to do it. Standing in her office as she sat at her desk the vibe felt wrong and I had heard enough stories about working with her that I knew it would be a challenge at best and extremely difficult at worst. But I'd never been an SM and one of the things Sleger(the teacher I was closest with and learned the most from) always taught, with his actions and his words, is that you should know how to do it all(at least a little bit) and that the techies were just as important as the actors(his specialty was set design, he encouraged the tech kids to do acting stuff too). So I figured it might be a good learning experience but the kicker was it felt like I couldn't say no. Standing there in front of Mrs. A behind her desk next to the Martha Graham mural with Ms. Krish teaching a class outside with the thump of students grand jeteing across the floor, it felt like I couldn't say no. It was a formality, it felt like Mrs. A was doing me the courtesy of asking even though she could absolutely make me. So I said yes. And that was my mistake.
For the most part the process wasn't terrible but it became clear Mrs. A wanted less a stage manager and more a secretary, a lackey, a yes man. Which, not really my thing, but I'd signed up, I'd committed- I'd play the part. It became clear Mrs. A was the type of woman who liked to have boys or young men under her thumb. To control. In a way that you couldn't exactly say was abusive but that you could absolutely say was unpleasant. There's a kind of cold unobtrusive cruelty some women have towards boys, usually as a result of having been abused by men themselves, that I recognized in Mrs. A because I was intimately familiar with it from some women in my extended family. I knew it so I tried to roll with it, the show was finite, I just had to get through it.
If that's all it would have been, the small stuff, the subtle stuff I couldn't identify until years later in therapy, it would have been if not by any definition fun at least negligible. But one big issue popped up the week of the show during tech(that part of rehearsal where you integrate the lights, music, and costumes etc.) which was - the sound system.
The theater had a pair of kinda old, kinda cheap speakers, it wasn't an issue for any other performance because the plays didn't have music and every other musical used the school band or orchestra. Mrs. A ditched the student musicians in favor of an instrumental recording. So at our first tech rehearsal, I'm in the booth working the soundboard, my buddy Hans(a great actor as well as lighting designer) was working the lightboard, Mrs. A decides that the speakers are shit and gets her doof of a husband to bring in her stereo speakers from home which they couldn't run to the front of the theater(where the regular speakers were) so they put them on top of the booth which was at the very back of the house. Immediately we start having issues. If the sound is turned up high enough for the actors to actually hear their back up its deafening to the audience, if its at a good level for the audience the actors can't hear it well enough to sing to it, and me in the booth controlling the volume can't gage it because the sound is emanating right above my head. Mrs. A doesn't agree that there's an issue, her speakers and her set up are perfect and just what she wanted. So we open.
First act of the first show I set the volume at what I think is a good volume, probably low for the actors but appropriate for the audience. Fifteen minutes in or so Mrs. A comes in and tells me to crank it, I say no problem, I'm a yes man. At the intermission I get knocks on the booth door, multiple people coming by to tell me the music is too loud they can't hear the singing, some nice about it, some not so nice, I'm getting frazzled, I know they are correct, I say no problem. Start of the second act I turn it back down, couple minutes in Mrs. A comes in says what's the deal with the sound, turn it up, I say people complained, she says I don't care, I turn it back up. I get a couple knocks during the second act and then after the show I get a couple return customers just to chew me out.
After notes to the cast I convey all this to Mrs. A, her attitude is like it's my problem to solve, that she's put upon, exasperated, irritated I even brought it up, I suggest going back to the old sound system, she refuses, she says, concedingly like she's doing me a big favor, that she'll ask Sleger for a monitor for the stage.
Next night, next show, we don't know if the monitor works, we go through the same song and dance. I set it low, Mrs. A comes in says high, I get complaints, down, then back up again. I get very frazzled and start feeling really bad. After, Mrs. A is pissed, like why am I fucking with the sound, why am I fucking with her show, and I'm like I'm honestly just doing my best. Her response is disappointment and veiled disgust. I'm fucking wrecked. She marks the sound board for the level she wants and tells me to suck it up and ignore anyone who complains and to without equivocation keep the sound at that level. This feels profoundly wrong to me but I can't quit, there's only one show left and a lot of my friends are in it, and on some level I knew what I signed up for. Standing in front of her desk next to Martha Graham's frozen swan leap and the thundering of the tour jete's I knew then on some level this had the potential of being one bad rodeo for yours truly. But I’d said yes. So I figured- take your fucking lumps Steve-o.
Last night it is ol' Mrs. A's show. I made signs that I put on the booth door that said "Do Not Disturb". I set the volume at the prescribed mark and I let it roll. And it was, without question, too loud. The show was not great. But afterwards Mrs. A is fucking beaming and giving me an I-told-you-so, I-am-vindicated look, holding two dozen roses from her grinning husband and his glistening veneers, giving a speech after the curtain call all performative humility and masked rapture at the attention. It was lunatic. I got the hell out of there and it was done. I survived, good riddance.
The whole circus taught me one, profound, simple lesson. "No" is an option most of the time. If someone asks you to do something- work related, creatively, socially, a favor, what have you- "no" is on the table. I grew up being taught that you said yes to things, you helped out, you pitched in, you did your part, which is great, for the most part its served me well. But there are people who will take advantage of that quality, people in positions of authority need to earn trust and respect, there are situations its better not to be involved in. I needed a couple reminders after that but I got the message eventually, it was a lesson hard earned.
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