[complete history of america (abridged) - 2004]
 

Another in the series of screwball but semi-historical plays by The Reduced Shakespeare Company, The Complete History of America (abridged) is two hours of three men skewering every major event in American history from Colombus on up through the Reagan years. Women's suffrage as a game show. Cheech and Chong as the founding fathers. Lincoln's assassination as a silent comedy. And so on.

Amazingly enough, I can't seem to remember a single thing going wrong during this show, and we definitely gave it a shot. We cut stuff. We wrote stuff in. We crammed two extra actors into it. We even broke in a new stage with it; this was the first full-length production on Baton Rouge Little Theater's Second Stage (you know, where they stage the shows they're ashamed to put on the main stage).

An interesting side note: there is usually something that could conceivably kill me in every show I do, but this was the first time the threat of death came from a balloon. During the Native American fertility dance segment (seriously), I had to make a balloon animal; while learning to do that, I found that they are nigh-impossible to blow up by mouth. It can be done, but it's a skill akin to a kiai, the shout used in martial arts to focus your entire being on a single point. Several people have actually blown out arteries attempting this.

I got a balloon pump. I'm not checking out on the second stage.