On a makeshift plywood stage in my high school cafeteria, I stood in the wings at my first drama club rehearsal, expecting to be totally underwhelmed.
One of my classmates, Trice Ash, was presenting a monologue from For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. It was oh-so-many years ago, but I still remember. Thirty seconds into Trice's performance, everyone had fallen quiet. We hinged on each emotional word. Tears welled up in some eyes.
Flash forward 22 years and Trice is still clinging to her original copy of For Colored Girls.
"I still have it on my nightstand," Trice said when I tracked her down in Tallahassee this week. "It truly changed my life."
Seret Scott, one of the original cast members who brought the poems to life on Broadway in 1976, says no matter where she goes, someone tells the story about when they first saw For Colored Girls.
"It's one of those plays, because of the nature of the poems or the fact you were listening to a group of people you hadn't even thought about before, that people remember it like they remember where they were when a national event occurred," Scott said by phone from New York this week.
A nationally recognized director and actor, Scott will be in town today as a guest artist at the University of South Florida School of Theatre and Dance. At 8 tonight, Scott will share her experiences as a woman and a person of color after the USF performance of For Colored Girls at Theatre II of the College of Visual and Performing Arts. (Scott also will present her one-woman show, The Owl Attack Chronicles, at noon in Theatre II.)
For Colored Girls poetically presents the varying emotions of seven black women on topics ranging from sexuality to spirituality. It is billed as a "choreopoem" because a new term was needed for a production that helped redefine Broadway.
"It changed the way people thought of what is Broadway and who does it belong to, because Colored Girls was not a musical," Scott said. "There was music and movement in it, but it didn't have a plot. It did change the way people thought about what could be produced."
Tonight at USF, Scott will tell how the collection of poems Ntozake Shange crafted in 1974 blossomed from get-togethers in Haight-Ashbury cafes to theatrical efforts in lower Manhattan to Broadway's Booth Theater.
She'll also speak of the effect For Colored Girls had on her and others in the cast. This is a production which has become a theatrical touchstone for blacks and whites alike. Women consider it a rite of passage when they perform it.
And to think, when it started on Broadway Scott said she was just hoping it would last a while because everyone in the cast needed work. Nearly 800 performances later, everything had changed.
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My conversation with Seret Scott hasn't been the only reminder of my high school drama days. Thousands of teens are milling about the northern end of downtown Tampa this week, here for the annual Florida State Thespian Festival. I too logged enough stage hours to become a thespian but I never made it to state because, well ... we won't talk about that.
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Frankie Avalon will be here Sunday for Festa Italiana, the seventh annual Italian Club event in Ybor City.
The festivities begin at 11:30 a.m. at Centennial Park and will include food from 35 restaurants. That would have been enough to get me there, but there is also entertainment on the Sorrento Cheese stage (where else?) with Avalon, Dick Contino and Lena Prima (daughter of Louis). I wonder if she's going to sing I Want To Be Like You from Disney's The Jungle Book.
Admission is $3 for adults, free for kids 12 and under. Proceeds benefit the Italian Club Restoration Fund.
I think you have to pay $1,000 if you want to touch Avalon's hair.
