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unearths some literary gems.
From Back Story, by David Mitchell:***I had to come on in the last scene as a character who hadn’t yet appeared in the play, Signior Anselme. He’s the deus ex machina who miraculously solves everything at the end. This involved a complete costume change for me. Most of the parts I played were servants, but Signior Anselme is an authority figure so my costume was a rather nice cream suit and a silk bow-tie. Not a made-up bow-tie but one you had to tie. I’m okay at doing that. It takes me a couple of minutes but I can fairly reliably make it into something bow-tie shaped. At the age of 22 I was still proud of my bow-tying skill and so, even when I realised that there wouldn’t be a mirror in the wings where I’d be doing my quick change, I didn’t suggest getting a clip-on as backup. ‘I can do it by feel,’ I thought. The problem was that I never knew the extent to which I was right about that, because I couldn’t see the state of the object that was under my chin when I walked on stage. This was a very unfair position to put my already giggly fellow performers in, night after night. ‘What will it be tonight?’ they must have been wondering just before they turned to face me. ‘What insane, lop-sided, unravelling knot, what weird lump or clod of cloth, will be lodged under David’s chin unbeknownst to him as he comes on with the placid face of the character who’s about to resolve the plot?’ Soon it didn’t matter what the tie looked like – they’d still laugh. If it was a disaster, as misshapen as a Generation Game contestant’s first attempt at a pretzel, that would be hilarious. If it was basically okay but a bit wrong on one side, that would be hilarious. If it was totally fine then that would be even more hilarious because it would make a mockery of all their giggling speculation about something disastrous: it would be a hilarious anticlimax. There was actually nothing funnier, they discovered, than me appearing placidly from the wings in a normal-looking tie. The moment had gone toxic.***
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