potential.
So at the beginning of Year 8, Mr Stevens, the drama teacher, walked in and ran a ten-minute exercise—which was some sort of theatre game—and then proceeded to pick the fifteen deserving boys and cull the fifteen no-hopers.
When Mr Stevens started to assemble his star class we all sat there in anticipation. I reckoned I had a pretty good chance because the year before I had done well at the subject. It was like those horrible times in the playground when two captains get to pick their teams and your self-esteem endures a knife wound with every kid picked before you. You look around and hope that you’re not stuck at the end with the nerd and the fat kid. Then the end arrives and you’re the very last one standing, and you realise with abject misery that you are the nerd and the fat kid all rolled into one.
As I watched Mr Stevens select his fifteen stars, I started to get worried about a trend that was emerging. He was basically picking the loudest boys in the class—all the class clowns, the ADHDs, the look-at-me-I-need-to-be-noticed types. I was thinking, Oh man, there’s a real chance I might miss out here . There was so much tension in the room; A Dancing with the Stars elimination is nothing next to this.
I counted the grinning faces on the other side of the room, noting there were twelve already. I looked left and right at the bunch of remaining rejects and, sure enough, we were the quieter ones.
What an idiot , I thought. There’s still a bunch of great talent sitting here. C’mon, don’t you realise some of the world’s best actors were introverts: James Dean, Robert De Niro, Charlie Chaplin… C’mon!
Three more places left and he called out the names.
Not me… damn!
Not me… damn!
Not me, again. Bloody hell. My heart sank.
I rationalised that I wasn’t really the performing type. I’d rather sit in a room and stare at the clock, waiting for the talented boys to come back and tell me all about their heroic adventures. And that’s just what I did. For many, many long periods.
Then one day Mrs Borny, our English teacher, who I’ve always thought was my very own real-life version of Robin Williams’ character in Dead Poets Society , walked in and decided that us bunch of rejects weren’t hopeless and started to run her own drama classes. She had never agreed with splitting up the class in the first place, and even though she’d never taught drama before, she improvised and pretty soon we were doing our own version of plays and acting games. Suddenly this bunch of rejects felt like the lucky ones, the ones taught by ‘The Secret Drama Teacher’.
Mrs Borny not only taught us drama but also how to write it, creating stories from scratch. One day she said to me, ‘Anh, you’re a very talented storyteller.’ She had no idea how far that one line of encouragement would take me… until twenty years later, when this little boy became a famous comedian and surprised her on a TV show called Thank You .
It’s funny how boys and girls are treated differently. My sister always got a haircut at the hairdressers but Khoa and me, that was a job for Mum. And she was appalling at it. No training, no method, no tools; just a pair of kitchen scissors—the type that you use to cut chickens apart—and a two-buck comb. She always took it slowly, figuring she wouldn’t start too short and give herself room for error, and then she would slowly chip away at it until it kind of looked right. But it never looked right.
One side too short, a patch missing, a crooked fringe. It looked so bad that when I went to school the next day all my friends thought I had picked up some sort of disease. A couple of mates waited until we were alone and asked, ‘What happened there?’ It looked so bad that no one even laughed; they really thought something bad had happened.
‘I got into a fight a few years back,’ I’d lie. ‘There’s a scar, and a bit less hair there.’ They believed it.
Once,
So at the beginning of Year 8, Mr Stevens, the drama teacher, walked in and ran a ten-minute exercise—which was some sort of theatre game—and then proceeded to pick the fifteen deserving boys and cull the fifteen no-hopers.
When Mr Stevens started to assemble his star class we all sat there in anticipation. I reckoned I had a pretty good chance because the year before I had done well at the subject. It was like those horrible times in the playground when two captains get to pick their teams and your self-esteem endures a knife wound with every kid picked before you. You look around and hope that you’re not stuck at the end with the nerd and the fat kid. Then the end arrives and you’re the very last one standing, and you realise with abject misery that you are the nerd and the fat kid all rolled into one.
As I watched Mr Stevens select his fifteen stars, I started to get worried about a trend that was emerging. He was basically picking the loudest boys in the class—all the class clowns, the ADHDs, the look-at-me-I-need-to-be-noticed types. I was thinking, Oh man, there’s a real chance I might miss out here . There was so much tension in the room; A Dancing with the Stars elimination is nothing next to this.
I counted the grinning faces on the other side of the room, noting there were twelve already. I looked left and right at the bunch of remaining rejects and, sure enough, we were the quieter ones.
What an idiot , I thought. There’s still a bunch of great talent sitting here. C’mon, don’t you realise some of the world’s best actors were introverts: James Dean, Robert De Niro, Charlie Chaplin… C’mon!
Three more places left and he called out the names.
Not me… damn!
Not me… damn!
Not me, again. Bloody hell. My heart sank.
I rationalised that I wasn’t really the performing type. I’d rather sit in a room and stare at the clock, waiting for the talented boys to come back and tell me all about their heroic adventures. And that’s just what I did. For many, many long periods.
Then one day Mrs Borny, our English teacher, who I’ve always thought was my very own real-life version of Robin Williams’ character in Dead Poets Society , walked in and decided that us bunch of rejects weren’t hopeless and started to run her own drama classes. She had never agreed with splitting up the class in the first place, and even though she’d never taught drama before, she improvised and pretty soon we were doing our own version of plays and acting games. Suddenly this bunch of rejects felt like the lucky ones, the ones taught by ‘The Secret Drama Teacher’.
Mrs Borny not only taught us drama but also how to write it, creating stories from scratch. One day she said to me, ‘Anh, you’re a very talented storyteller.’ She had no idea how far that one line of encouragement would take me… until twenty years later, when this little boy became a famous comedian and surprised her on a TV show called Thank You .
It’s funny how boys and girls are treated differently. My sister always got a haircut at the hairdressers but Khoa and me, that was a job for Mum. And she was appalling at it. No training, no method, no tools; just a pair of kitchen scissors—the type that you use to cut chickens apart—and a two-buck comb. She always took it slowly, figuring she wouldn’t start too short and give herself room for error, and then she would slowly chip away at it until it kind of looked right. But it never looked right.
One side too short, a patch missing, a crooked fringe. It looked so bad that when I went to school the next day all my friends thought I had picked up some sort of disease. A couple of mates waited until we were alone and asked, ‘What happened there?’ It looked so bad that no one even laughed; they really thought something bad had happened.
‘I got into a fight a few years back,’ I’d lie. ‘There’s a scar, and a bit less hair there.’ They believed it.
Once,
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