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recently went to see a local community theater production of "Of Mice and Men." It was good, though some of the performances were lacking. The theater holds around 200, and about 2/3 of the seats were filled. The non-balcony seats were only about nine rows deep, so even in the last row, you were pretty up-close-and-personal with the actors.

One thing I found interesting was how, because I was one of only about 130 people there, I felt an increased pressure to applaud loudly - not because I enjoyed the play so much... but because I felt appreciative of their effort for so few of us. I mean, don't get me wrong, it was very entertaining. I just didn't want them to feel bad if they didn't get that much applause. Maybe this stems from my stint in "treading the boards" in college. Yes, my friends, for a brief time I was a thespian.

Now mind you, I went to Georgia Tech... not quite the womb of many future Academy Award winners, so I won't fault you for not being too impressed. I actually only got into it because my French professor was giving us extra credit for volunteering to be a part of her French Drama Troupe... all four of us (and yes, it was all in French). When I showed up for the first meeting and acting coaching session, I got a good picture of what was to come, and everything I did from that point on was coupled with a sense of fear and dread.

The first exercise she made us do was to walk around in a circle and silently act as if we are looking at some odd object on the ceiling and then try to, without using words, describe it to each other. We looked like the scene from "2001: A Space Odyssey" where the apes are investigating that big, black monolith. I don't know how I kept from busting a gut laughing. I don't remember much from college, but I still vividly remember everyone's faces from that exercise.

The play we were slated to do was entitled "Le Pot de Fleurs" or "The Pot of Flowers." It was a short, artistic satire on the trappings of modern life that somehow involved a pot of flowers. I don't remember much of it, but somewhere in the play the main character's arms get pulled off, after which she performs a short, armless soliloquy before the curtain falls. I was the guy who smoked a cigar and pulled off her left arm. I remember that, because all the lines were in French (of which I had only one semester under my belt), I really didn't understand completely what I was saying, but I practiced smoking very cheap cigars for weeks.

The professor was so excited

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