P. Divvy Thinks

In today's entry, I woo another cast member from Disney's Beauty & the Beast, and then I indulge in a little kissing and telling.

Valentine #5: Adrienne Paquin

A little about Adrienne: Adrienne is a Theater major at UMass, Amherst. In the ever so famous on this blog production of Beauty & the Beast, she played Babette, the anthropomorphic feather duster, who is pretty much the sexiest part in the show after Gaston. Recently, she was in a very recently written play called Milosevic at the Hague, which toured Serbia. So yeah, she's been places.

Commence Wooing
So the audience came to see Beauty and the Beast thinking it was about the characters Nichole and Josh played, but we both know that the title was referring to your beauty inciting bestial passions within me.

All the world's a stage, but as far as I'm concerned, you're the one standing in the spotlight, even when you're in the wings. You sweep me off my feet, you sexy anthropomorphic talking feather duster, you!

Our Dream Date: Adrienne is a very continental woman. She once came over to say “hello” to me in a UMass dining hall. In my memory she was wearing a red dress... I'll have to verify, but she turned some heads. For that reason, I think it only fitting that I take her to a martini and piano bar for drinking and dancing.

Then we could go to my place and open a bottle of French wine and delicately spread brie over a sliced baguette.

Today's Subject: Stage Kiss

When I was a high school student, I acted in the Young Company division of Hampshire Shakespeare Company. The Young Company acts as an ensemble in one of the mainstage productions that summer, understudies the main roles, and then puts on their own production of that play.

In both of the mainstage productions, there was a very beautiful woman named Sandra. She had blonde hair and a petite body, matched with a slightly breathy, relaxed voice, that she could use with such energy.

We were in two plays together. The first was As You Like It, when I was 16, she played Rosalind, the lead. It was a sixties-style production, so the director made me wear a long tangled wig and a red dashiki suit. My brother told me he thought I was a girl in pajamas when he saw the show. This was definitely not how I wanted Sandra to see me.

She did see me in the Young Company production, where I played Orlando, Rosalind's lover. They gave me a much better costume for that part; I looked like Kelso from That 70s Show. We had a little discussion on my costume after the show, which we agreed was much more flattering than what they had me wear in her production. Her opinion was very important to me.

I continued to fawn over her in secret the next year as we did The Winter's Tale together. When I was finally old enough to join the mainstage, I hoped I could be cast in the same play as her (HSC does two shows a summer). I wasn't cast in either play and I kind of forgot about her for a while.

Years later I was asked to participate in a staged reading of 'Til All the Boys Come Home. It was a play written by the director's mother about her Scottish grandmother's efforts to pull her son out of the military during World War I. I played the son, who had to kiss a certain actress onstage: Sandra.

During rehearsal, the director said, “You don't have to kiss each other yet if you don't want to.”

Sandra, being the professional, said, “Oh, we don't mind.”

And before I knew it, her lips were on mine and I was frozen. It was definitely not my first kiss onstage, but it was one of my only fulfilled childhood wishes onstage.

That night I went home and confessed to my girlfriend that I had kissed another woman that night but that it was for acting. She was cool with it and even laughed at me for being nervous about what she thought. It was only acting, right?

Aside from not being appropriately inebriated for the scene (my character was supposed to be drunk), the conditions were perfect for realistically recreating that kiss. My character, like me, was a bit nervous at the sight of her, and she played an older woman. In fact, our age difference in real life was close to the age difference of our characters. I think it was seven years. I really hope it came off well, or at least better than my Scottish accent.

So I'm wondering: Is it helpful or detrimental to have a crush on the person you're supposed to kiss onstage? Maybe a crush between equals, but I was already used to viewing her as that unattainable older woman. It's good that I only had one kissing scene with her, because we only had a couple of weeks to prepare this piece, which did not give me enough time to get over my schoolboy crush on her.

Hey, folks! I have a Valentine's season recommendation for you: Wainy Days, the lightly fictionalized account of one comedian's search for true love in New York City. Let me warn you, though: it is most certainly not safe for work.