Another one rides the bus

I had an acting gig the other night with Dacha Theatre. It was Bainbridge Island High School’s graduation and we were asked to entertain the no-longer-students on their bus trip from the ceremony to the ferry and on to the Ballard Elks Lodge. The kids would board six different buses and one of our actors would join them as their tour captains. My thoughts were, most likely, a good portion of the kids would find this contemptible and we would struggle to keep them engaged. 

How wrong I was! They were absolutely delighted. We invented a scenario where we were a bus tour company on the skids. I was Ted, the CEO and if my captains did not get high marks, I was going to have to get rid of them, or maybe even shut the whole thing down. This really got the graduates engaged in helping their captains, and vilifying me – though some of them liked me, too and asked me to pose for pictures. It was wild!

We had a competition to choose a song – Party in the USA, of course, and then filmed them all singing and dancing along to it. We did trivia and bingo, and a survivor auction using “bus bucks.” They ate it up. Their delight was contagious and all of us actors grew larger in proportion, audience and artists in perfect sync.  

I find myself thinking there is a mirror image sometimes between teens and senior citizens. One set is too new to the world to be anyone other than their own wonderful selves. The other set is done pretending. 

Anyway, young or old, people like stories. And theater-makers, like Dacha want to keep engaging them, drawing them in, and writing the stories together.

Photo: two frames from the video edited by Mike Lion of Dacha Theatre.