Victim of Circumstance

"I never said I was a victim of circumstance."
 -Billy Joel

Sometimes, you just end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's an altogether unavoidable fact of life.

Case in point: On Friday night, I arrived at the theater for our weekly improv show a few minutes earlier than I normally do. Upon entering, I discovered that the children's theater group was using our usual stage, the black box, for a Halloween performance that would conclude in plenty of time for us to set things up for our own Halloween performance at 10 p.m. Dressed in my costume as Teddy Roosevelt, 26th president of the United States, I had shaved my usual goatee down to a Teddy-like mustache.

The mustache part is vitally important to the rest of my story.

Because the black box was occupied, I ventured over to and walked into the green room, planning to wait out the end of the show there while my fellow improvisers arrived. Only it wasn't the green room I had become accustomed to, per se. I was confronted by an angry parent and/or chaperone who asked me to leave at once, because the green room was being used, in her words, as a "little girls' dressing room."

Keep in mind that these people had no I idea who I was other than what may have appeared to them to be a creepy guy in a mustache.

Well, obviously, I had no idea that the green room was being used as a little girls' dressing room that evening. After all, no one had posted a sign outside indicating this fact, and it's not like we hadn't used that green room on every other Friday night for the past two years (we, in fact, had).

Incidentally, if you missed the show that followed that night, then you missed seeing what turned out to be the Greatest Halloween Improv Show of All-Time.

Not that I am biased! I guess you had to be there.