Adult Language

I remember sitting about fifteen rows deep in the orchestra section of the Byham Theater. Mom was out of town - it was just the four of us. I was wearing one of my Laura Ashleys - the less formal one - the one more appropriate for a straight play - for Neil Simon's, Laughter on the 23rd Floor. I had cozied up in my seat with a box of Junior Mints. Looking around, I noticed a general absence of children. I was used to being minority status in theaters, but not this much of a minority. I started to think perhaps it was a Miss Saigon sign, but I pushed it aside, and popped another mint into my mouth.

The curtain opened, the white ooze of the candy splayed across my tongue, and it started - a verbal ambush on the audience. F bombs exploding from stage left to stage right. I gulped. Oh no. It was happening. The chance meeting of an inappropriate play for children with a family who stuck to G-ratings.

The majority of the audience had their armor on - the assault didn't seem to bruise their spirits - they laughed along with the rhythmic curse words. But we were in a different, far less prepared camp. My brother and sister awkwardly slumped lower and lower into their seats, my Dad hemmed and hawed at the ebbs and flows of crude language, and I started to get that terrible nervous feeling that burns from esophagus to stomach - minty acid not going down right - the same kind of feeling that I experienced when watching Captain Ron with my Mom.

Act I ended when they revealed that the fat guy's sudden heart attack was actually really bad gas. The theater erupted with laughter, the actors harmonized in an exiting hymn of F words, the curtain went down, the lights went up, and my Dad said we were leaving. On the way home, my Dad turned it into a teaching moment. We learned that yes, some people do talk that way. But we, as a family, do not.


Last night, in a small community theater in Wheaton, Illinois, I got another dose of adult language during a play. But this time, I was fairly warned. One of the lead actors, a friend from work, said there would be an F bomb or two or ten - that it had actually offended one theater goer to the point of walking out. (I thought back on my family's grand exit in the 90s.) However, hardened by the language that flies with the ball up and down a lacrosse field, and the language used to express burns, gashes, and thirty-minute ticket times on the line of a restaurant's kitchen, an F bomb doesn't have nearly the same effect as it did when I was in grade school.

So, from the second row, of a three-row, 75-person theater, I heard the other words in the play between whatever vulgarity was used. And they were well written, well orated, well acted, and very entertaining.

I made it through both acts. And I left thinking not about the curse words, but about joining a community theater as well. Great job Jackie - you might just have inspired this retired thespian!

Lo.