The lights dimmed. This was my cue to walk offstage. I knew
that I had to change my costume before I came onstage again. I ran to the
dressing room, beginning to unbutton my dress as I entered. I looked up at my
friends and froze. Something was terribly wrong. Never in my theater experience
had I encountered this dilemma. There was a boy in the dressing room. A boy. Perhaps one of the more shocking
aspects of this was that the other girls didn’t seem to care. The group was
talking as if nothing was wrong. I buttoned my dress back up, acted normal, and
changed in the bathroom. I thought that surely he was only there momentarily
and would be gone soon.
I thought
wrong. At the end of my next scene, I hesitantly approached the dressing room,
only to enter and find the boy still there. I sat down on the floor, my mind
racing with the challenge of trying to figure out what to do. Looking back it
seems it shouldn’t have been a very hard decision, but at the time I was stuck.
I knew this boy. He was very talented and I knew him to be uplifting towards
other cast members. I didn’t want to ruin his reputation. I also didn’t want to
be mocked by the other girls. There were so many of them and only one of me.
Then I heard a girl say to the boy, “I’m about to change. Close your eyes.”
This seemed completely unacceptable to me. The girl was entirely exposed, and her
only protection was the boy’s eyelids which were not guaranteed to stay closed.
The situation was still unfathomable to me. I had always thought these peers
were so virtuous and proper, values clearly not being demonstrated here. For a
moment my mind wavered, almost willing to overlook the situation. But I knew it
was wrong.
Luckily we
were still in rehearsal, so I left the dressing room and approached the
director in the auditorium, voicing my concerns. She was shocked at my news and
assured me that things would change. That evening she announced that she would
not tolerate students being in the dressing room of the opposite gender.
The cast
returned to the dressing room to change before we went home. I glanced at the
boy and his outrage was obvious. It was surprising though that back in the
dressing room, all of the girls were voicing their happiness that somebody had
spoken up. Many girls were uncomfortable with the situation but were too afraid
of their peers to stand up for themselves. Our peers have such an enormous
influence on our lives, and many are so afraid of that influence that they cast
aside their values or choose to overlook problems. They are scared that their
peers will mock them. I used to be scared of that. Now I know that if I do what
I know to be right, everything will work out.
Well that took a LOT of space... but hey. It's about three pages shorter than most essays in that class.
