The Crazy Sauce Theory

I went to Taylorsville High School. And when I say went there, I mean I lived there. Sixteen hour periods of time at school were not at all uncommon. I had sleeping spots. I had a toothbrush there. I had extra clothes stashed in various spots around costumelandia and a pillow hidden in one of the music rooms. I went back to see a show a year after I graduated and found some shoes and a scarf I'd been missing.
Crazy sauce, right?

I spent so much time there working on some pretty intense projects, and I became really good friends with my teachers. Mr. Schmid in particular was kind of a mentor. We were good friends. (He does tailoring on the side with his wife, who I also love.  I kind of seriously want Schmid to make my wedding dress someday, possibly in a geometrically patterned silk, as opposed to a floral one, of course. )  The thing is, Schmid is extremely eccentric. The most eccentric man I have ever met. And he came up with some pretty insane ideas for shows. In fact, I can't think of a single conventional idea that ever came out of that man's mouth.

 That being said, I was thinking the other day about a conversation that took place my senior year during a rehearsal for Les Miserables ( yeah. we pulled that off in a High School. bam.). We were doing it at the same time Riverton High was doing it, and we were (completely egotistically, kind of jerkishly) talking about how ours was better than theirs. (we didn't have to be brats about it, but it was true.)

We were discussing why we could pull off these big, sometimes weird, usually cool ideas. And we came to the conclusion that we were just crazy enough to think we could do these impossible things. Specifically Schmid was just crazy enough to think we could ever pull this stuff off. He was always coming up with these insane ideas that seemed completely impossible.

Like the time:
- when we built a twenty foot turntable from scratch in a week cause he thought it would look cool.
- we made forty foot high fisherman's nets out of butcher paper that actually held people's weight.
- we built a whole new stage out into the pit by ourselves
- we did a six and a half hour show for Schmid's master's thesis, dubbed "the marathon show"
- we made from scratch "hundreds of hats in a hurry!" literally.
- we did all of that with no skills, no major injuries, and a bunch of broken staple guns.
- we pulled all that off with absolutely no budget.
- through all this, we became this little family of "Schminions", and we all had a place. 

While he is sometimes a crazy man who sews with one shoe and swears at us, he has just the right amount of crazy to pull stuff off that other High Schools never even attempt.

Lesson I learned from High School Drama # 32:
If you have one crazy man leading you and enough students who want to spend sixteen hours a day at school doing things like welding bridges together from scratch and sewing eighty pairs of pants in two days, you can accomplish things that don't normally get done in the public school system. I like to call it the Crazy Sauce Theory. ( I am slowly developing a series of theories that I live by. So far we have the awkward hands theory, the crazy sauce theory, and the railroad tracks theory.)

Usually this theory discourages me. I don't try to do really big awesome things because I get scared. And then I was thinking about it today and I actually felt great about myself. You know why? One of the biggest things on my bucket list was to go to Schenectady with my dad. Another of the huge ones was to move across the country just because I can. And this august, I am knocking those both off the list. I am expanding my box, and I am doing things I am terrified to do, because if I don't start now I never will.

I am hoping I am just crazy sauce enough to pull this off. We'll see.