Youngest of One

Show Stopper (Part 8 of 8):

And just like that, I'm back on campus for another semester.  I've had my first three classes by now, and today also happens to be my twentieth birthday.  I'm not a teenager anymore; how about that?  Because of the move during the weekend, you had to wait a couple of extra days for this post, but now I'm happy to present the final part of this memoir.  I hope you've enjoyed reading it.

    This is the point where our meteoric rise came down to earth.  The cruelest irony in this tale is that, although I got into Duo with the intention of preserving a friendship, tension arose between me and Joe as we got closer and started to fail.
    At our first away tournament, Joe and I, like any other Duo team, were forced to share a queen-sized bed in our hotel room.  The first night, neither of us could get enough sleep.  In the morning, I was all set to blame him, but the feeling was mutual.
    “Thanks for hogging all the blankets last night,” I said.  “I was so freezing that I could hardly sleep.”
    “Me?  What about you?” Joe said, staring at me with bloodshot eyes.  “You were taking up the whole mattress.”
    The following night, we used all those extra hotel pillows to build a wall between us in our bed.  That weekend, we didn’t even make it to the final round.  We couldn’t admit fault in our own failure, so we had to find scapegoats.
    “We just lost our home field advantage,” I said as we packed our bags.  “This is a big tournament with a lot of heavy competition.”
    “Plus, we didn’t get a good night’s sleep,” Joe said.  “Didn’t have our A game.”
    We got back our home field advantage at the next tournament, another one held at our own high school.  Among the Duo finalists, Joe and I were the only ones representing Regis.  This was our chance to really do our school proud.
    The announcer called our names first; we came in eighth place, worse than our first tournament.  Instead of trophies, Joe and I each got a black mug that said “Finalist.”  In the courtyard, after the ceremony, I wanted to smash that mug on the pavement.
    “I heard that they just trained a bunch of new judges for this tournament,” Joe said.  “They wouldn’t know a good piece if they saw one.”
    “You know what it is,” I said.  “It’s bias.  They bring in people from other schools to judge here, and look where it gets us.  They’re tired of seeing Regis win all the time.  Fucking judges don’t know shit.”
    I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t consider the possibility that we weren’t as good as we once thought, that maybe those early victories were just flukes.  But the crowds didn’t lie, and they always laughed.  They never stopped liking me, so why wasn’t I winning?
    As upset as that made me, I was really pissed when Joe told me that he couldn’t make it to the tournament at St. Mary’s.  Now I can’t recall his excuse—something involving his family, a wedding perhaps—but whatever the reason we missed a golden opportunity for success.  This was another small, local tournament with no broad range of competition, and I hated that Joe kept us both from going.  I wanted a new partner; I’d really make it big with Eddie.
    I never said that aloud to Joe because I still wanted to keep my friend, still valued appearances over honesty.  Still, I’m ashamed to say that I even thought that way.  When those feelings emerged, I started to understand that the Hearn knew more than one way to drive friends apart.  For the first time I had serious doubts about my decision to get into this game.  But could it really be that the right choice was to express my true feelings all along?
    With the St. Mary’s tournament out of the picture, Coach told us that we had only one chance left to make it to the State Championship: the Regional Qualifier.  This was no normal tournament.  There was no final round, no trophies, no ceremony to congratulate the winners.  You just went there, did two rounds, and if you ranked high enough then you’d automatically walk away with a full qualification for States.
    For some, like me and Joe, this was a last ditch effort, a final chance to live every Hearnster’s dream.  Others came here with a whole new piece prepared, hoping to qualify for States in a second category.  It all seemed to me like a big loophole.
    In each round, there were two judges and eight Duo teams—a captive audience, but only in the literal sense.  Nobody was there because they wanted to be.  No coaches or parents came to see this, just some kids who couldn’t make the cut in the real tournaments.  Kids like us.
    I didn’t want to be there, but this was the only option we had left.  Coach sent us there so that we could go to States, and I was sick of coming up short and making him wait for us to catch up with the rest of his team.  If we didn’t get this qualification, then all of our friends would go to Albany and leave us behind, just like they did when they joined the team.  If we lost here, I’d never get another chance to win over a crowd with this miraculous façade.  There’s no twelve-step program for people addicted to laughter and the approval of others.
    In the second round, Joe and I stood side by side at the head of the classroom.  By this point I no longer felt jittery every time I stood up to perform, and I assumed that this would be a bore like the last round.
    But for the first time in many months, I saw something out of the ordinary, something I couldn’t have expected.  One of the judges, sitting at a desk, pen poised over paper, was a nun.  I could tell by her habit-surrounded face that she wasn’t a warm, friendly, love-thy-neighbor kind of nun, either; this was an old woman with sagging flesh, hardened to the world, ready for the Rapture.
    Looking back on this, I think of Tyler Durden in Fight Club telling his alter-ego, “You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you.”
    My mind raced.  Have I been doing a crude parody of the Almighty all along, and is this how he takes his revenge?  Has he sent one of his disciples to disapprove of our childish antics and guarantee that we never move on to States?  I knew that, to win over this woman of God, I’d have to be at the top of my game.
    “In the beginning, there was chaos,” I said, in a British accent, because I’d learned to distinguish the voice of the narrator from my own.  Again, like in the early days, I became of two minds, separating myself from the façade.  I was so concerned about this nun’s reactions that my second self had to emerge and focus full attention on her.
    Scene after scene went by, and I couldn’t get a rise out of this nun—not a chuckle, not a smirk, not a twinkle in her eye.  Her face was marble, her frown and furrowed brow chiseled there.  I imagined her taking a thick, black marker to our script, blocking out lines of dialogue until all that’s left is “In the beginning…”
    When Joe said Eve’s only line, I regretted ever telling him to use that breathy, lustful voice.  In the Cain and Abel scene, I wondered, Do we really have to show Cain bludgeoning his brother to death with a rock?  When we came to the Tower of Babel scene, I asked myself, Why did it have to be sex humor?
    Nine minutes went by until it came time for our last hurrah.  Like all good works of silly comedy, this piece has a show-stopping number.  Ours was called “Revelation: The Musical.”  Joe and I wrote the tune ourselves, since we only got the lyrics to the brief song.  Our blocking was simple; while one of us sang the other danced.
    This was always the true test of my dedication to the performance.  Screaming in a loud and threatening manner was something that I’d learned to do well enough, but I’m neither a singer nor a dancer by any stretch of the imagination.
    While Joe sang, “Satan is waitin’ for his comeback supreme / which means pain for the nasty and mean,” I danced in the best imitation of vaudeville that I could muster.  If my mime skills were good enough, then the audience already understood that I had an invisible top hat and cane.  I kept an unflinching smile fixed on my face.
    As I waved my arms in the air or did my best Charleston, my gaze never wavered from the eyes of Sister Stick-in-the-Mud.  I was giving it my all, even though I looked ridiculous, faking a Harpo Marx sort of happiness.  Inside, my second self was in agony, begging this nun to snicker or snort.
    In this moment, I learned the meaning of the phrase “quiet desperation.”
    I felt like Pagliacci, the tragic clown, all that inner torment veiled by a life in comedy and excessive makeup.  I abandoned my old pretentions.  I was no actor.  I was a kid in fancy clothes doing funny voices with his friend.
    I wanted to scream, but the script didn’t call for that.  I wanted to run away and strip off my jacket and tie.  I wanted to quit pretending, and not just this façade but all of them.  I couldn’t tell if this nun just didn’t like the jokes about her holy text, or if she could see through them to the real me and she hated that, too.  Either way, I saw the solution: just be myself for once and forget about everyone else’s approval.
    An hour later, we’d learn that we earned our qualification for States, even though the nun ranked us sixth in the round.  In April, we’d spend a weekend in Albany, competing in five preliminary rounds.  We wouldn’t make it to finals there, and we’d blame it on the fact that we were up against the best of the best in the whole state.
    But I have to wonder if the blame should really fall on this round when I stared into the cold, dead eyes of a humorless nun.  The disenchantment with the Hearn that had been growing inside me suddenly came to a head.  I finally figured out that an addiction, even to laughter, couldn’t be good for my health, and I decided to go cold turkey, though it wouldn’t be easy.  I knew I had to quit this faux show business for good, and my true friends would be the ones who’d accept me even without the façade.

End Post.

Show Stopper (Part 7 of 8):

Sure, it's the beginning of a rise, but it's also the beginning of the end.  I present the penultimate chapter of our story of intrigue, blasphemy, and forensics.

    My premonition was correct for a little while, since we did go up before we had to come down.  In November, we competed in a tournament held at Fordham Prep High School, where three was our magic number.  We were the third team to perform in all of our three preliminary rounds.  Then we advanced to the finals, where I got my next fix.
    The crowd there was only as big as the small classroom would allow, but still their laughter was the sweetest song I’d ever heard.  All of these spectators would identify me as the guy who made them laugh and forget about everything else for ten minutes.  I didn’t even know their names, and yet they looked on me with kindness, big smiles on their faces, smiles that I put there.  At the end of the night, Joe and I placed third in our category.
    Joe and I got our first trophies there, a magnificent gold-colored woman with wings pointed to the sky, standing on a modest red and white podium, fixed on a base with a plaque that told of our achievement.  My mother picked us up, congratulated us, and drove us home.  Still, by this point, we were no closer to the State Championship, or “States.”
    To this day I still don’t understand what the standards are for handing out qualifications for States.  In my experience, if you came in first place, then you were guaranteed a “full-qual.”  If you came close to that, then you might earn a half-qualification.
    In my mom’s Nissan SUV, Joe and I discussed why we didn’t earn a “half-qual” with our third place trophies, but it didn’t spoil our victory.  I was still calling it a meteoric rise, actually using those words out loud without shame, so I felt certain that we’d be qualified for States in no time.
    My ego got one last heavy stroke at our next tournament, held at Chaminade High School.  That final round would become the highlight of our short career in Duo.  The classroom was large enough to hold dozens of spectators, and most of the seats were filled by the time Joe and I arrived.  Before the round began, I offered my seat to a woman, probably a mother there to root for her kid, and I sat against the back wall while the competition performed.
    Again Joe and I had to perform second to last, since he picked the number while I sat in the corner.  The only team slated to follow us was Gavin and Percy, friends of ours with more years on the Hearn.  I’d seen their piece before and knew it was funny.  But was it funnier than ours?  It’d be hard to beat third place, our old record, but I didn’t want to slip backwards in the ranks.  I thought it would be a disappointment to Joe, my mom, our coach, and myself.
    Our turn came around, and from the front of the room I saw a lot of friendly faces.  Several of my classmates sat on the floor in front of the first row of seats, looking up at us, smiling with anticipation.  These people are here to see you, I told myself.
    I wonder how much truth there is in that harmless, little statement.  Weren’t they really there to see the characters I played, lines written by others, the show I put on?  Would anyone have come to watch if it was just me, the real me, under the spotlight?  Then again, there would’ve been no show without me.  Do the spectators ever separate me from the characters?  Do I become the façade?
    I never considered these questions then because I liked being the characters more than I valued being myself.  Through this stint with the Hearn, I went from wanting people to like me to needing their joyful laughter.  In this round, my consciousness didn’t feel so divided.  I’d become so comfortable with the façade that I didn’t need to separate myself from it just to say the lines.  I wasn’t just an observer; I was an actor.
    At one moment I was Goliath, stomping and towering over the masses as I screamed, “Fee fi fo fum!”  The next moment, I was the architect of the Tower of Babel yelling at his wife, “Yo quiero Taco Bell.”  Not a minute went by before I was Jesus Christ sitting at the Last Supper, surrounded by his disciples, one of whom asked, “Why are we all sitting on the same side of the table?”
    I couldn’t have asked for more from this performance.  Everything was just like we rehearsed it, maybe even better.  The laughter just encouraged me to act bigger and better and funnier, holding nothing back, and for those ten minutes I felt loved by each and every one of them.  The high was incredible.
    And when it was all over, I’d leave them wanting more, and this time I’d be the one who’s not around, the one with better things to do.  I’d walk out on the audience the same way that Brian and the other Hearn recruits walked out on me so many times in years past.  They’ll miss me because they love me, I thought.  Like I said, the approval was an addiction, and the laughter was a high, so the haze must’ve blinded me to the fact that those people only saw a façade for ten minutes and then moved on.
    At the awards ceremony, we stood onstage hearing name after name called but still not ours, until there was only one other team beside us: Gavin and Percy.  We turned to each other, four young men overwhelmed by ecstasy and anxiety.
    “This is the part where we shake hands, right?” I asked Brian, reaching toward him.
    “I don’t know.  I’ve never gotten this far before,” he said as he took my hand.
    As our hands fell back to our sides, the announcer named me and Joe as the second place winners.  Of course it’d happen like this, I thought.  We’d opened for them, warmed up the crowd.  We congratulated Gavin and Percy, took our trophies, and walked off the stage.  I looked down at the familiar sight in my hands, the winged woman on a slightly higher pedestal.
    We may not have taken first place, but I wouldn’t trade that final round for all the little gold ladies in the world.  Plus, that win brought us our first half-qual for States.  I felt sure that the next tournament would bring us the second.  I couldn’t have known how long we’d have to wait to get it.

End Post.

Show Stopper (Part 6 of 8):

Your head must be filled with so many questions.  Did Joe and I make it to finals?  How long could we go without messing up again?  Does that "split mind" metaphor mean that I have schizophrenia or dissociative identity disorder?  Stop asking and start reading. Here's the antepenultimate chapter.

    After the preliminary rounds, I sat with some friends in the cafeteria, swapping stories about our rounds, sizing up the competition, as we waited for the results.  I kept asking myself, “Will we be expected to watch the finals, or can I go home once we find out the bad news?”  I had ruled out the possibility that Joe and I would make it to the finals.  If no one expected that, then I’d still be accepted when we lost, and that relieved the pressure to succeed.
    A man at the center of the cafeteria stood on a table and yelled for our attention.  He had the results in his hands, and he read off the finalists’ names, category by category.  It took him an eternity to reach Duo.  When he did, I heard some familiar names, including the Stepford Wives girls, Pete and Eddie, along with three other teams from our school, and then our names.
    “No way,” I said.  Joe high-fived me.  Our grins were mirror images.  In minutes we were climbing the stairs, all the way to the fifth floor, up to the Physics Lecture Hall, home of the weekly Hearn meetings, now the location for Duo finals.
    I never expected this little piece of success to come so soon for us.  Sitting down among those seven other teams, I wondered if maybe I’d found a new calling.  In hindsight I realize that this early triumph went straight to my head and swelled my ego so that our later failures would be unexpected and the disappointment as bitter as black coffee.  Where was our humble beginning?  I wish the story ended on a note as high as this one.
    There was a much bigger crowd this time.  This round had not one but three judges, plus an audience of some parents, coaches, and students who didn’t make it to the finals in their own categories.  I felt like a huge bundle of nerves in a suit again.  Joe chose the number for our random assignment in performance order.  He opened the slip of paper to find a seven.  We’d have to sit through an hour’s worth of pieces before we got up to bat.
    “From now on, I pick all the numbers,” I told him.
    For an hour I watched the competition, and I considered it a blessing that I was among them.  I asked myself if God was happy with my portrayal of him and this was his way of showing it.  The truth, of course, was that somebody had judged me to be as good as them, or almost as good.  That meant I was winning people over, so I was doing something right.
    Finally Joe and I got up to the front of the room, not center stage exactly because there’s a huge table there bolted to the floor, so everyone used the space beside it.  During our piece, my second self threw a party in my head.  Performing for this many people gave me a new kind of satisfaction, better than sucking up to make friends.  Laughter of this magnitude, rushing towards us in a wave for each punch line, was a drug, and I was an addict after my first hit.  Never had I pleased so many people at once with any façade.
    A short time later, we sat in the auditorium, in chairs lined up in rows facing the stage, as I listened to Regina Spektor on my iPod, thinking I would’ve brought a book if I’d known there would be all this waiting.  Tournament officials took the stage and told us that there would be certificates instead of trophies, because that money went to fund something noble, and I wasn’t listening because for fuck’s sake I just wanted to know who won.
    Finalists in category after category were called to the stage, and again Duo was far down on the list.  We applauded for the contestants as their places were announced and they went back to their seats.  The winners got standing ovations.  Whenever only two people were left on stage, they always shook hands before they learned which one was the victor.
    Once my hands were sore from clapping, the Duo finalists at last took the stage.  “In eighth place, the announcer said, and I knew for sure that he’d say our names, but instead I heard, “Peter Flynn and Eddie Ray.”  I hadn’t expected it, but it made sense actually.  They’d really messed up their piece in the finals, skipped too much material, finished way too short.
    After the applause died down, the announcer declared that Joe and I came in seventh place.  We walked to the edge of the stage, accepted our certificates, shook an official’s hand, and climbed off the stage.  As we returned to our seats, I didn’t take my eyes off that paper.  If I’d died at that moment, I would’ve been damned for pride.
    Seventh place isn’t spectacular, but it’s respectable, especially for a couple of beginners.  Plus, we had beat out the team who did this same piece last year.  I could hardly wait to take this certificate home to Mom.  I imagined her putting it up on the fridge.  I felt like we’d arrived.  I thought of all the people I could impress with this skit in the course of a whole year.  I sensed this was the beginning of a meteoric rise.

End Post.

Show Stopper (Part 5 of 8):

    After our rehearsal with Eddie, we returned to the auditorium, where we got our schedule and locations for rounds.  Our school was so full to capacity with competing students from around the district that the Duo rounds were set to take place in the grade school across the street.  Joe and I headed over there and found the classroom for our first of three rounds.
    The same impatience that had caused me so much anxiety in the auditorium was here in this room tenfold.  It was only my first tournament, and already I put so much pressure on myself to succeed.  I thought that if I failed then not only would I disappoint Coach but also I’d take Joe down with me.  His success depended on my talent as much as his own, and I worried that I’d lose his friendship if I messed this up.  My notion of friendship was so fragile back then.
    I had to keep a level head somehow, so I reminded myself that expectations would be low for us as we were just starting out.  I remembered what my friend Greg had told me, that it took him seven tournaments before he ever made it to a final round.  I figured we’d start slow and succeed more at the end of the year.  Little did I know that the sequence would be ironically reversed, and most of our failures would come later.
    Things finally started when the judge, a middle-aged white guy, entered the room.  He sat down at a desk and used little slips of paper with numbers on them to determine the random order in which we’d perform.  Joe and I were picked to go third.  In the meantime, I got another chance to sit on the edge of my seat and wait, alone with my thumping bass drum of a heart.  At least this time there’d be some entertainment.
    While we watched the first team—a couple of tall girls performing “The Stepford Wives” by Ira Levin—I asked myself if there was such a thing as the mercy rule at these tournaments.  When they played the brainwashed spouses, I was impressed by their painfully cheerful voices and robotic movements.  Their punch lines got laughs even as they performed this biting and eerie satire on gender roles.  They were versatile and refined.  A pair of newcomers like us couldn’t possibly stand a chance, I figured.
    When we got up to perform, I wanted to go home.  The competition looked too good, and I felt sure that we were going to be laughed at, but not in the way that we wanted.  I drew in a deep breath, asked the judge for time signals, said my first line, and to my relief my mind immediately split again.  While half my mind was saying “Let there be light” and the like, my inner self stared into the face of the judge, looking intently for any sign of amusement, wondering what he was writing on that paper.
    The judge would have had my full attention, except I noticed that our opponents were laughing at our skit.  The satisfaction that I had gotten from Eddie earlier came rushing back, only more intense this time.  I felt that I could win over anyone just by saying these lines, and that’s a power I’d been waiting all my life to have.  Before, winning someone’s approval might takes days or weeks of agreeable behavior; now it took only ten minutes.
    In the second round, Joe flubbed one of his lines, slightly messed up the Tower of Babel scene, which was the most difficult to memorize and, in Eddie’s words, “the funniest scene in the history of Duo.”  Basically we had to do the same scene twice, where I played a husband coming home to find his wife, played by Joe, in bed with another man, also Joe.  The first time around, we’re all speaking plain English.  The second time, I had to speak in a mangled amalgam of Spanish and Italian, while Joe used a butchered parody of Chinese and Japanese.
    We were performing this scene the first time, the normal way, when Joe prematurely said one of his Asian lines.  My mental balance got thrown off, and my two minds collided together.  In my head the character disappeared, and I was just me in a suit in front of people asking themselves why that guy just said some gibberish that sounded almost racist.  The piece is ruined, I thought, and I despaired that it should have to end like this.
    But I hadn’t said anything yet, I realized, so I could still recover.  Just pretend that everything is normal, all according to plan, I told myself.  I said my next line, and my mind was safely in twain again.  My second self breathed a sigh of relief.
    After the second round, we got time to grab lunch before the third, and I made fast work of my burger and fries because I was starving.  Still I couldn’t relax from all the anxiety.  We might be late for our third round, I worried.  And what if one of us were to mess up again?  I’d seen what could happen if a line got flubbed, and I didn’t want a Duo career and a friendship to be lost over something so simple.  I still clung to that irrational fear.

End Post.

Show Stopper (Part 4 of 8):

    On the day of the tournament, standing in my school auditorium surrounded by friends and competitors talking and rehearsing, I wore my dressy black pants, my black suede blazer, and a black tie with a white fingerprints pattern on it.  Joe was wearing khaki cargo pants, a navy jacket he’d borrowed from his dad, and a tie decorated with carbon copies of the rampaging Tasmanian Devil from the Looney Tunes.
    Standing around and waiting for the festivities to being was an awful chore for someone so anxious.  I shifted my weight from side to side, paced back and forth in the small unoccupied space around me, quietly recited my lines from beginning to end and then again and again.
    Eddie spotted me and Joe in the crowd and came over, pushing his way through a mudslide of blazers to reach us.  “Hey guys, there’s still time before the announcements,” he said.  “You wanna find a room where you can practice?”
    Joe and I followed him up to the third floor, where we found an empty classroom.  Eddie took a seat near the window overlooking the courtyard at the center of the school, while Joe and I stood side by side facing him.  I imagined him as a complete stranger, an impartial judge, an adult volunteering his time to criticize me.  I decided he should just be Eddie.
    “Alright, do the piece like you would in a round, and I’ll give you some pointers,” he said with his smile worthy of being trademarked.  I took a deep breath, and Joe and I looked at each other with a nod.
    “In the beginning, there was chaos,” I said, the first line of our piece.  Suddenly I became of two minds.  One mind was saying my lines, moving according to our blocking, totally in character.  The other was myself, no character, aware of my surroundings.  This was the part of me that never wavered from watching Eddie, because I had to know if my act could win his approval.  I took pride in his every grin and guffaw.  His laughter felt more refreshing than a cool breeze on the hottest day in August.
    “Time out,” Eddie said.  “You gotta be louder, Will.”
    My first criticism brings the satisfaction to a screeching halt.  Eddie stopped us in the middle of my favorite scene, the one in which God tells Abraham that he must sacrifice his son, Isaac.  Abraham doesn’t comply at first; Joe’s line was, “Excuse me, but isn’t this a bit…pagan for a supposedly monotheistic religion?”  My reply, in the voice of God, a baritone that I modeled after my sophomore year theology teacher, was, “Pagan-shmagan!  Do you live in fear of me or not?”
    My reading of that line was flippant and sarcastic, but Eddie made me realize that God is infuriated.  God doesn’t convince Abraham to kill his own son by making a witty retort, but by yelling so loud that Abraham makes a new brown stain on his robe.  “Pagan-shmagan,” I said, only this time sternly like I was scolding a misbehaved child.
    “It’s gotta be louder than that,” Eddie said.
    I hated that I was failing at this, and I wanted to win back his approval.  I shouted the line, seething with rage, like red-hot anger in my belly was overflowing out my mouth, but as soon as the line was out I knew I was holding back.  I was too concerned about what people might think if they overheard.
    “Louder!” Eddie said.
    “Pagan-shmagan!” I yelled, and I had to wonder if I was mad at Eddie.  If God’s voice is a booming opera singer that comes from all sides of you, then this scream was as close as I could come to it.  My voice might have cracked if it wasn’t so low.  I imagined my holler echoing through the building, students in the auditorium collectively looking up to the heavens with puzzlement.
    “Good,” Eddie said.  “Do it like that.  Now keep going.”
    We continued through the piece, with Eddie occasionally interrupting to give us another tip.  While the first of my minds said all the lines, my second self was feeling something completely new.  I’d never been given permission to shout like that before.  I felt as if I’d been holding that back all my life, and now I saw a chance to be liberated.
    When we were done, Eddie checked his watch.  “Okay,” he said, “let’s see it one more time, but this time I won’t interrupt you.  You want time signals?”
    “Sure,” I said.  “Can we have a one at nine and a fist at ten please?”  Just like a pro, I thought.  I felt like a true Hearnster.

End Post.

Show Stopper (Part 3 of 8):

Here's the section in which I explain the rules. Thrilling, I know ...

    Thursday afternoon, at 3:00, I went to my first Hearn meeting in the Physics Lecture Hall, the only classroom large enough to contain all the students on the team.  Coach always got everyone’s attention by saying, “Alright, sports fans.”  I soon realized that this weekly ritual was mostly self-congratulatory.  He’d spend most of the meeting reading off our latest successes, who placed what in the last tournament, and each name was met with a round of applause.  This went on for a while, since we had a lot of successes.
    I quickly got tired of clapping for my peers, but I was excited by the appeal of having your triumph announced and publicly acknowledged by a hundred of your close friends.  I longed to hear my own name called this way.  In my imagination, I nodded and winked to the applauding crowd, all of them humbled by the victory of this newcomer.
    Once the meeting was over, I approached Eddie to seek his advice, a new student reaching out to a wizened master.  The more he told me, the more I worried that Duo wouldn’t be as easy as I thought.  Coach hadn’t let us in on the ground rules for our category.  Here’s a brief overview of those rules:
    As in all other speech categories, performances are expected to last ten minutes.  The judge of the round times you with a stopwatch to make sure you stay within thirty seconds of this parameter.  Perfecting this takes a lot of rehearsal.  Also it’s common to ask the judge for time signals.  “Can we have a one at nine and a fist at ten please?” you might hear the performer say, and the judge will provide these gestures.
    Sounds simple enough, right?  Here’s where it gets tricky.  In Duo, the two performers can’t touch each other.  You’ve got to act out this whole ten-minute piece without making any physical contact.  Instead, when necessary, just pretend to make contact.  Use some mime techniques.  Learn to knock on the door that isn’t there, and if you’re really clever tap your foot in sync so it makes some sound.
    As if it’s not difficult enough already, Duo performers can’t make any eye contact either.  You try carrying out a complicated task with a partner without ever looking at him.  Rather than facing each other, both of you face the audience and pretend you’re standing face to face.  If the script calls for two characters to hug, put your arms out and embrace the empty air out in front of you.  All of these actions are called the “blocking.”
    The rest of the rules are easy enough to follow.  You have to include an introduction to your piece at or near the beginning of the performance.  Always wear a jacket and tie to a tournament.  You ought to have at least one foot planted on the ground, so no leaps or falling to your knees.
    While Eddie told me all this, I had to wonder if I’d gotten in over my head.  I thought that the hard part would be memorizing all of my lines, since that was always the worst part of Speech class.  I didn’t realize that the script came with a rulebook that I also had to memorize.  Still, I knew I’d do whatever it took to keep my friends.
    “Thanks, Eddie,” I said.  “I think I’ve got it.”  Nice guy that he was, Eddie agreed to watch us rehearse on the day of our first tournament, only three weeks away.  That afternoon, on the bus ride home from school, I took out my script and highlighted all the lines labeled “P” and then repeated them to myself over and over again, muttering under my breath so maybe I got some funny looks from other bus passengers, but I didn’t look up from the paper.
    For those three weeks, Joe and I spent every spare moment memorizing our lines.  After school we’d meet up and recite the script, looking for patterns in where we’d make mistakes.  At lunch we discussed how we’d move around in order to mark the transition between each scene.  By October 12th, we had worked out and rehearsed all of our blocking, and I’d read the script so many times that I even knew all of Joe’s lines.

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