Friday, May 12, 2017

Flashback Friday: Flaming Friars Edition

I played a firefighter and a cheesy dancing monk, as one does, in an original musical about blossoming gay romance in a monastery, which just took me four attempts to spell with zero help from autocorrect, in my last show with always-delightfully-inventive Chicago Gay Men's Chorus eight years ago. I can't find an archive of shows on the CGMC site to confirm the name, but I believe it was called Bad Habits. Or maybe Betcha Can't Spell Monastery on the First Try. If I remember correctly, my firefighter character showed up at the end of the show for a false alarm, but otherwise a good name might have been Putting Out the Friars. Or, given the budding-gay-romance theme, it could have been shortened to just Outing the Friars. The show included a brilliant repurposing of the impossible-to-memorize-because-it-used-every-rhyming-word-in-Latin "Amor volat undique" from Carl Orff's epic cantata Carmina Burana, so we could have called our show Carmina Burnana. Or Carmina Banana since we'd already broken the calling-ourselves-fruits barrier with an earlier production titled Low-Hanging Fruit. In any case, the moral of this story is I wish CGMC had a more thorough archive of show titles on its site -- or at least the mobile version of its site -- so I wouldn't have to embarrass myself like this struggling to remember the name of a show I did eight -- which autocorrect just changed to "right" so WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM, AUTOCORRECT? YOU WANNA TAKE THIS OUTSIDE? BECAUSE I GUARANTEE YOU DON'T WANNA TAKE THIS OUTSIDE -- years ago about monks and firefighters in a place I still need to learn how to spell. Ooo! What about Love Amonk Friends? Or Monktown Abbey? Or Going Robe? Or Monk Rock? Or Monk'd? Or Friar Knowledge? Or if my part had been bigger and I'd maybe have had the romance with one of the gay monks -- both of whom I remember as being totally cute -- we could have called it Friarfighter. But that sounds more like the exact opposite of romance -- kinda like MME [for Monk Madness Entertainment] Smackdown! -- so maybe not. Wait! Monkey Business! That would have been totally awesome! So would Hey, Hey, we're the Monkees, but I think that had already been taken by some other monastery (there's that word again, still with no help from autocorrect, but this time it took me only two tries so my retention skills are improving) act. No! Wait! I've got it! Monky Town! MONK. Y. TOWN. Ha! They really don't pay me enough for my brilliance on Facebook. I need to open a GoMonkMe page on here to make my remuneration commonksurate with my talents. Because, as you just KNEW this was coming so you have no one to blame but yourselves for reading this last sentence, Monky Makes the World Go 'Round.

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