Yeah... That Happened To Me

The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie is a play about a sweet, young high school girl named Laura Wingfield who grows playing with little glass animal figurines. The story goes Amanda Wingfield, a faded Southern belle of middle age, shares a dingy St. Louis apartment with her son Tom, in his early twenties, and his slightly older sister, Laura. Although she is a survivor and a pragmatist, Amanda yearns for the comforts and admiration she remembers from her days as a fêted debutante. She worries especially about the future of her daughter Laura, a young woman with a limp (an after-effect of a bout of polio) and a tremulous insecurity about the outside world. Tom works in a shoe warehouse doing his best to support the family. He chafes under the banality and boredom of everyday life and struggles to write, while spending much of his spare time going to the movies — or so he says — at all hours of the night. Amanda is obsessed with finding a suitor (or, as she puts it, a "gentleman caller") for Laura, her daughter, whose crippling shyness has led her to drop out of both high school and a subsequent secretarial course, and who spends much of her time polishing and arranging her collection of little glass animals. Pressured by his mother to help find a caller for Laura, Tom invites an acquaintance from work named Jim home for dinner.

The delighted Amanda spruces up the apartment, prepares a special dinner, and converses coquettishly with Jim, almost reliving her youth when she had an abundance of suitors calling on her. Laura discovers that Jim is the boy she was attracted to in high school and has often thought of since — though the relationship between the shy Laura and the "most likely to succeed" Jim was never more than a distant, teasing acquaintanceship. Initially, Laura is so overcome by shyness that she is unable to join the others at dinner, and she claims to be ill. After dinner, however, Jim and Laura are left alone by candlelight in the living room, waiting for the electricity to be restored. (Tom has not paid the power bill, which hints to the audience that he is banking the bill money and preparing to leave the household.) As the evening progresses, Jim recognizes Laura's feelings of inferiority and encourages her to think better of herself. He and Laura share a quiet dance, in which he accidentally brushes against her glass menagerie, knocking a glass unicorn to the floor and breaking off its horn. Jim then compliments Laura and kisses her. After Jim tells Laura that he is engaged to be married, Laura asks him to take the broken unicorn as a gift and he then leaves. When Amanda learns that Jim is to be married, she turns her anger upon Tom and cruelly lashes out at him — although Tom did not know that Jim was engaged. In fact, Tom seems quite surprised by this, and it is possible that Jim was only making up the story of the engagement as he felt that the family was trying to set him up with Laura, and he had no romantic interest in her.

The play concludes with Tom saying that he left home soon afterward and never returned. He then bids farewell to his mother and sister, and asks Laura to blow out the candles.

So when I was in middle school I was in a musical theatre group called Forefront Arts (if you like that stuff please look them up they're great). And I did two shows with them;

Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory (I was Mrs. Gloop, the mother of the gluttonous little boy)

Shrek The Musical (I had like 12 parts so I won't name them all lol but the Big Bad Wolf was my most important role)

It was a great couple of years! As we were preparing for Shrek the Musical we started doing acting workshops to help hone in our skills for acting.

All of us were broken into teams of two or three (except me and I would find it why later) and we were given a scene from different plays to perform for the class.

I was paired up with Shane. He was the tallest, oldest, most good looking guy in the class (since there were only two including him.) and I won't lie, I had a MAJOR crush on him. I was shocked when I found out I had been paired with him. And of course, as fate loves to torture us sometimes, we were given a romantic scene from the Glass Menagerie.

I KNOW!!!

I had to play a a shy character who was head over heels for a guy who only saw her as a friend. How crazy is that??? That was literally the scenario with Shane. He didn't see me as a potential girlfriend at all! We had one week to decently memorize our lines and settle blocking/acting for the scene and to gather props.

He brought the wine, I brought the glasses, and we both brought some seat cushions to sit on.

The scene we did was one where Laura's mother had set up a date for her and Jim (the guys she likes) with wine and candlelight. Lord knows I was SO nervous. I was afraid that the class would see me act out that scene and figure out that I like him.

And when we finally performed it, our scene won the little contest we had going. I received extremely high praise from my teacher, she said my acting was the best she'd seen in any middle school girl...but she doesn't know that I WASN'T ACTING!!! THAT WAS ALL TOO REAL FOR ME!!!

I was happy that no one pieces together my crush but still I was a nervous wreck until the end.

Sounds like something out of a fan-fiction right? I still sometimes can't believe it really happened. I almost wonder if my teacher knew and she was tying to set me up with him or something.

I'm not longer with that theatre group and I haven't seen or spoken to Shane since we performed Shrek the musical but life is going good! He has a girlfriend (who is stunning btw) and he's happy. I'm over him ;)

The next chapter is gonna be super interesting and it will make you laugh. We're gonna visit my first prom where I meet someone who played a big part in my first years of high school. The chapter will be called

The Mystery Girl in Red

All my love!

Xoxo~ Marie