Who is this Tony anyway?

I don't do plays anymore and I quit following the New York theatre scene when I quit reading the Sunday New York Times every week. But I still watch the Tony award even though I don't know jack shit about the straight plays or most of the new musicals. The reason I watch them is because I feel like it's an act of rebellion against the culture-less assholes I grew up with and around.

As soon as I knew what things like plays, TV shows, and movies were I wanted to be in them. The first time I saw a live action play, I was probably 8 or 9 and the play was The Three Musketeers, I knew I wanted to be up on a stage doing that sort of thing. But for many years I had no outlet for doing it. When we got packed off to the farm Aunt Rageaholic and Uncle Adultery owned I was further from my dream than ever. She paid lip service to the arts but they were something only for her and her kids to be doing, for my siblings and I there was no time for such things because we had to clean her house, work in the garden, and basically take a back seat to her kids. When we moved from Howell, Michigan to Jonesville, Virginia things looked even bleaker for my dream of doing plays because Lee County was an even bigger cultural backwater than Howell was.

So during all my adolescence and my teen age years I had to keep my longing to be a part of the theatre quiet. If I had expressed my desires out loud then my cousins, aided and abetted by their parents, would have made fun of me for daring to dream that I had talent and the desire to do plays. They, mainly Cousin Psycho, called me a fag for showing interest in the theatrical arts. It was useless to express any desire to do plays anyway since there was no theatrical outlet for me in south west Virginia.

By the time I got to college I was ready to spread my wings and try out for plays. However my love of partying and smoking pot kept me from doing anything my first year. But by the second year I was all in. I got to do Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Midsummer Night's Dream and Our Town in college. And despite not being able to sing, I got do to a couple of musicals. After college I did many dinner theatre shows, that's where I met Sparky by the way. I went on to do many plays after my stint in local dinner theatre. I got to do parts in such shows as The Mousetrap, The Ritz, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Greater Tuna, and others.

With every play I did I felt like it was a strike back against that pack of culture hating jackals who used to torment me for being different. And every time I watch the Tony awards I feel like it's a beacon to other kids out there who were like me, kids who wanted to do that stuff but were held back from it for one reason or another. Long live the Tony awards and long live live theatre!