Brooke Dixon
“God, do you ever shut up?!”
Kick. My foot rolls and suddenly, I can barely walk down the Jersey Shore boardwalk. Fast forward months later and I’m on a knee scooter recovering from foot surgery.
Let me back up. I’m a theatre kid; I always have been and probably always will be. I like to think I’m delightful and that life is much more fun if you treat it like a musical. That said, I can often be found singing phrases with corresponding song lyrics, humming a musical number under my breath, running lines in my head, and occasionally going through the motions of bad choreography (I cannot dance). My sister, however, does not find me delightful, fun, or exciting and finds me an absolute embarrassment to society and to her. Essentially, she is a typical younger sibling.
However, when you think about it, it isn’t my fault. My parents let me get started in theatre when I was just in second grade and then things got out of hand. I tried to write a musical in eighth grade. It was not good. But that didn’t stop me! I kept doing shows, writing them, learning the music, designing sets, and auditioning, and I kept embarrassing my sister! Even foot surgery couldn’t stop me from my goal of achieving world domination through musical numbers (or at least that’s what my sister believes). I tortured my entire house by singing “Agony” from Into the Woods every chance I got, and nobody could stop me because I looked pitiful, and I was only in this mess because of my sister.
Really though, it’s not my fault the rest of society looks down on us theatre kids. I mean, we didn’t ask to be fun-loving people that everyone else judges for no reason. Sure, we break into song at random moments of the day, share TikTok’s of shows 24/7, constantly ask our friends to run lines with us, are overdramatic at any minor inconvenience, and “ruin” the road trip playlists by adding the entire Hamilton album, but all of that doesn’t mean we deserve to meet raised eyebrows every time we hum a lyric or ruin a playlist. Or even, in my case, get your foot kicked out by a younger sibling while you’re on vacation.
Art has been used to express and process emotions and complicated feelings for centuries and before we were annoying and a nuisance, theatre kids were artists; we are still artists. We express ourselves through music and dialogue and dance instead of normal boring conversation because, for us, it is the only way to get across what we feel in a moment. Then, when we’re not in a show, we continue to use those methods to simply get through boring day-to-day life by making it more interesting. So, sure, being a theatre kid probably bothers almost every person on the planet, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
