them to kiss me felt, well, creepy. My two perfect women were twins—my friends Hannah and Heather—and while the idea of making out with either of them was certainly appealing, the idea of telling them when and how to kiss me … I couldn’t do it. So my tale of steamy romance lost all steam when Kyle bailed. The only kiss I left in the script was a peck on the cheek from Heather at the end of the play right after her character told mine, “It’s all over.”
When we appeared at the drama festival, the adjudicator—a professional actress who looked like the Wicked Witch of the West’s baby sister—pronounced my performance “dreadful.”
“You don’t enunciate,” she decreed. “You’ll never be an actore,” she said, complete with the faux British theatre accent perfected by so many Canadian actors of the era. She praised Hannah and Heather, said the blocking was, “very strong,” then dismissed us with a backhanded wave. I couldn’t be consoled, not even by Heather’s lovely hug.
“She didn’t mention the writing,” I said. “Not one word about the writing.”
It wasn’t until that afternoon at the JCC that I’d discovered that instead of making out with Heather and Hannah in Mistaken Identity, Kyle had decided to star in The Black Metal Fantasy.
4
Free Magic Secrets Revealed
If you don’t speak comic book, please bear with me a moment as I introduce you to the inhabitants of Medemptia, the mythical, mystical dimension that was about to take control of my life.
Oryon (alias Randy) was Medemptia’s reigning good sorcerer and cosmic protector. Imagine a young Gandalf with feathered hair.
The evil Santar, (aka Kyle), wore a black cape and a gold plastic Viking helmet and ruled a nameless nearby hell dimension.
Gamatria (Lisa, of course) was a supposedly ordinary villager with an important but unspecified destiny. The italics are necessary here, and if you’d like to imagine the word being spoken by James Earl Jones—ideally with a lot of reverb—that’s even better. But poor Gamatria’s destiny was preempted when she was kidnapped by Santar and brought to his demonic dimension to train as his evil disciple … unless that really was her destiny. Like I said, it was unspecified.
While Lisa’s costume might have looked inconspicuous in a post-Madonna world of belly shirts, thong underwear and low-rise jeans, it exposed more skin than any Canadian high school girl had ever publicly shown anywhere but on the beach in 1980. Her shiny black and gold outfit had the kind of cleavage-exposing bondage-wear cut that was normally limited to comic book heroines and haute couture that was much too haute for high school.
Santar also had an evil henchman, Adoma. Adoma wore black robes—like all good evil henchmen—and a goatee courtesy of fake fur and spirit gum. He was never supposed to smile. This was the perpetually giggling, perma-stoned Barry, an old friend of Randy’s whose key qualifications for the part were that he was basketball-player tall and he agreed to show up for rehearsals.
Oryon had his own henchman, but since Oryon was a good guy, his henchman was cute and tiny and named “Zephyr.” Zephyr was played by a grade eight kid whose voice hadn’t changed yet, Marvin Hollander.
It was never clear if anyone else lived in either of these dimensions, or what exactly Oryon and Santar were fighting about beyond the nature of good and evil, but chasing after Lisa Jorgensen in low-cut bondage-wear made at least as much sense as sending an army of flying monkeys after a used pair of shoes.
If Randy had worked out more of the mythology of Medemptia he hadn’t told anyone, but it really didn’t matter. The story was just an excuse for him to perform every illusion he owned, Jacko’s sold, or he and Norman could build. There were escapes, vanishes, transformations and lots of flashy flash pots that Randy and Norman had strategically placed all over the stage. Kyle and Randy were even equipped with fire-shooters—little hand-held gizmos that looked like Spider-Man’s original web-shooters, except these things spewed flash paper about a half-dozen feet across the stage before they burst into balls of flame. The shooters cost about ten bucks apiece and the flames they launched were so impressive that years later Andrew Lloyd Webber put pretty much the same trick in The Phantom of the Opera, using the Phantom’s cane to shoot the flames. That ten-buck trick scored the biggest oohs and ahs of the show outside of the falling chandelier.
Kyle and Randy loved practising with the fireshooters. Norman loved setting off flash pots. Lisa loved going outside to smoke.
In the script, Santar was always wearing a helmet. This was in the midst of Star Wars mania—and that meant every proper villain wore a helmet like Darth Vader. But Randy hadn’t modelled Santar after Vader—the inspiration was the original man in the iron mask … Dr. Victor von Doom, arch-nemesis of Reed Richards and the Fantastic Four, and the hereditary king of Latveria.
Kyle had read Randy’s script and loved the idea of playing the villain. He loved the idea of learning magic. And he loved the idea of acting in a show for a real audience—and getting a cut of the ticket sales. But he wasn’t remotely keen on wearing a plastic helmet. “I can’t see through it,” he announced at the first rehearsal. So Norman carved the plastic again and made wider eyeholes.
“It’s not comfortable,” said Kyle. “What if I only wear it for battle?” Kyle suggested.
“But your face is supposed to be mutilated,” said Randy.
“If I wear makeup under this it’ll smear all over the place when I take off the helmet,” said Kyle. “Maybe if we had a designer helmet …”
“It’d cost like,” Norman pulled a number out of thin air, “a hundred bucks to do a designer helmet.”
“We can’t afford a hundred dollars,” said Randy.
So Randy agreed that Kyle would just wear the helmet for battles.
Then, during a rehearsal, Kyle pulled off the helmet after a battle scene and Lisa, Randy, Norman and especially Barry laughed. Kyle had a terminal case of helmet head. Kyle was not amused. “I’m an actor,” he said, as if this explained everything. “I’m not wearing this.” Kyle eventually calmed himself and his hair down and everyone stopped laughing—except Barry.
Kyle wasn’t amused. “Barry!”
“We have to do it again,” said Randy.
“Sorry,” said Barry. And he went back to laughing.
Kyle tossed his helmet off the stage. “I can’t do this.” Then Kyle followed the helmet and Randy followed Kyle. As Randy chased Kyle offstage, Barry’s laughter grew into snorts.
“He’s stoned,” said Kyle.
“He’ll be fine.”
“He’ll laugh during the show. I thought you wanted to do something professional. If you don’t want this to be good …”
Randy couldn’t believe it. Was Kyle threatening to quit? It sounded like he was threatening to quit. “It’s gonna be good.”
Kyle looked back at the stage. Barry was doubled over now. Howling. “Not with him.”
That’s when the laughter stopped and they realized Barry had been sort of, almost, kind of listening. “This is bullshit,” said Barry. Then he yanked off a clump of his fake
