My First Kiss Was a Stage Kiss, so it Doesn't Count

I know it may stun some of you to learn that I went through all four years of high school without actually having been kissed by anyone. But it's actually fairly in keeping with my character at the time. I was shy, I had a lot of body issues, I was in a committed relationship with my studies  and I had even less of an idea how to interact with men than I do now.

I've progressed! I used to just not talk to guys I was attracted to outside of class. Now I talk to them, but I occasionally squeak at them or get all tongue tied, and when I say occasionally I mean "about half the time."

I'm a work in progress. I know it.

Senior year of high school, I was a major theatre kid. I was attending a performing-arts charter school which functioned in conjunction with a normal high school, so before you get all Oh, you didn't have any real classes? Yes. I did. I had lots of real classes. And they were all either Honors or AP, so no, I didn't go to a theatre school to get the easy way out. And for the record, performing arts school is not the easy way out. Hardly. It's difficult, strenuous even--mentally and physically--but highly rewarding if you are willing to put in the work.

Anyway. So part of my acting training that year involved a little class called Voice for the Actor, where we learned the International Phonetic Alphabet and applied it to dialects and speaking correctly and all that other stuff that actors need to learn how to do. So one of our assignments was to translate the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet into IPA, memorize it, mark it with our intentions and tactics, and then perform it for the class with a partner.

Now, if you've seen the balcony scene at all, you know that kissing is involved, and we had a grand total of 3, maybe 4 guys in our class, and about 14 girls. I can do math just as well as the next person, and that doesn't exactly divide out evenly. In fact, it doesn't divide out at all. So my teacher, Jared, came up with the brilliant solution of drawing straws to decide which one of us girls would perform with which guy, and each of the guys would end up performing the scene multiple times to accommodate the sheer number of women.

Frankly, I'm surprised there aren't more hetero guys in theatre in high school, because there are nearly always more girls than guys, and we theatre girls are kind of awesome.

I was transcribing and memorizing my scene, just like everyone else, but there was one thing that I didn't really have in common with most of my classmates.

I had never been kissed. I was eighteen. I was half humiliated by this fact, half proud of it. But I really, really was terrified of potentially getting kissed, even though it was just a stage kiss--and though there's no emotional connection, it's not like the physical part of the action just goes away because you're on stage. I had these horrible mental pictures of banging heads with my scene partner or missing their mouth and hitting their nose or something. Or, even more humiliating, I might end up getting assigned to do the scene with the guy I had had a crush on the previous year.

So I went to talk to the school's resident Teddy Roosevelt look-alike and one of my favorite non-arts related teachers, Mr. Gardner, who taught AP US History. Both of the AP History teachers at my high school were the best academic teachers I had during high school. Their teaching styles taught me more about what to expect from college than anything else had, and I always felt like I could go to either of them with any questions or concerns I had.

But on this subject, Mr. Gardner had less advice than I had hoped. When I said I had to do a stage class, he was like, "That's not a big deal, right? Actors do that all the time." And I was like, "No. I haven't kissed anyone. Like, ever." And he kind of just looked at me and was like, "Well, you better go find the guy you like and fix that before you do your stage kiss, because that's pretty sad."

I didn't.

So the day that memorization was due by and the first day of the scene performances dawned, and Jared drew our lots, and--no surprise--I was up first. They say things always come in threes, well, I had my first non-official kiss,  I had to perform one of the most famous scenes in all of history for my classmates, and it was also the day that my one-act play that I had directed for my directing class (shocker) was due.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeah. To say I was stressed that day was an understatement.

My number came up, and my scene partner was a young man named Austin. I think he was either a freshman or a sophomore, and he was really nice. Sweet. I was just glad that I wasn't going to be kissing that guy I had had a crush on.

So we got up there, performed the scene--I'm fairly sure one of my "what's next" notes was "SLOW DOWN," because that was always one of my notes as an actress; since I talk fast when I get nervous, and I was really pretty edgy that day. But I knew my lines and I only fudged up once or twice.

And then, right after one of my lines, Austin and I kissed, through the bars of the extremely rickety balcony on the globe-style stage. And it was fine, but--

Totally not what I was expecting. Actually, I don't know what I was expecting. I guess it was because Austin and I were only barely friends, I didn't really know him or have chemistry or history with him, and he was so much younger (the age gap is wider in high school) and I  didn't have any feelings for him beyond that, but I always thought the first time I kissed someone, I'd feel something. A spark at least. Not necessarily a fanfare or something, but our culture does tend to romanticize first kisses. . .and I'm pretty sure that Shakespeare's culture did, too.

It was a quick kiss, and then it was over. I was a little shocked and overwhelmed, but I sat and took notes from my teacher and my classmates like a good little actor. The best note was this:

Jared: You know how sometimes, kisses just happen?
Me: No.

It was fairly common knowledge in the class that I hadn't kissed anyone outside of now having been stage-kissed, and so I got a pretty good-sized laugh from everyone there at that, including Jared.

Jared: Trust me, they do.
Me: I'll take your word for it.
Jared: So technically, you could have gone for more than one kiss, since it doesn't exactly say when they kiss in the script or how many times it happens.

More than one? I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that the physical action of a kiss had happened to me once. Luckily, Jared didn't make me perform the scene more than once and so it gave me plenty of time to get my head screwed on straight and get the set all ready for my one-act.

Jared was right, though. Kisses do just sometimes happen, both casually and in committed relationships, and with people you don't expect, in ways you don't expect. More than once, too; which I learned after graduation from high school. Thankfully, none of the subsequent kisses I had off-stage took place on a rickety balcony that probably could have fallen off and killed me if I'd leaned on it wrong.

It's little things like that that put everything into perspective.