My Story Tapestries uKnight residency at Neelsville Middle School in Germantown, Maryland challenged, inspired, and grew me. Through it, I had the pleasure of working with Ms. Joye Parker, an immensely promising young theatre teacher invested in the beautiful struggle of inspiring the creativity and trust of blossoming middle school expressions.

Throughout my time there, it was difficult to get many of my peer pressure prone fold to take the stage. I found that most were more responsive to writing, so I would give them writing prompts, like the time I challenged them to use hyperbole to raise the stakes of a monologue. One student who wasn’t shy about bringing his results to dramatic life was Zaccai; a natural actor and quite a “character”. Here is his “mini-logue” called “This Class Is So Boring” (don’t worry; he wasn’t talking about our class):

“This class is so boring, it makes an insane asylum full of sloths who can’t even move their eyes more fun. It makes a snail race look like the funnest thing in the world. It makes a pet rock look interesting. Anything but this class would be more fun. Anything!!”

Another jewel from the Advanced Theatre class was gifted poet and lyricist Emelin, who hath sayeth:

“That person is so attractive, he could literally be on the magazine for the World’s Sexiest Man Alive. He literally makes my eyes melt, and he makes me feel like there are butterflies in my stomach. Like I literally feel like they are about to come out. Gosh!”

And then there was the Sonya. Some students “take to” a subject, but others TAKE the subject. I think most drama teachers would love to have a class full of students with this level of creative fervor. Thank you, Sonya, for bringing the passion every time you touched the stage. I wish we’d gotten to see you do your thing in Little Mermaid Jr. before schools closed, but I’m sure your future theatrical pursuits will go “swimmingly”.

Sonya: “I don’t just hate you. There are approximately 200,156 words in the English language and I can’t string enough of them together to explain how much I want to hit you with a chair. I could tear you apart piece by piece and set you on fire. I would be your Inigo Montoya, and you killed my father. I’d be the Wicked Witch and you’d be Dorothy. I hate you! Stay out of my life! I hope you step on a Lego.”

Ouch!

My favorite memories from my time at Neelsville were from the workshop which I led on stereotypes and our in-class production of From Gumbo To Mumbo. The latter brought my co-conspirator Dwayne Lawson-Brown aka The Crochet Kingpin and our stage manager Alexis Hartwick of Keegan Theatre to Germantown to stage our Charm City Fringe Festival winning (and Helen Hayes Award-nominated) show for our rapt room of middle school thespians. And the former yielded the theatre students’ own original devised script: Faded Away.

Faded Away confronts a number of stereotypes about middle schoolers based on race, culture, and physical appearance. We heralded it as “the PRE-show as good as THE show!”, meant to precede the spring play Little Mermaid Jr. Unfortunately, due to schools being closed in mid-March because of the COVID-19 pandemic, neither performance got to see the light of day, but I sincerely hope that these unforeseen circumstances don’t cause the burgeoning theatrical embers of my cast (Jabea, Valerie, Leslie, Emelin, Faith, and Zaccai) to “fade away”.

By: Drew Anderson, poet, parody artist, and teaching artist