Everybody needs a hobby
- Classic City News
- 6 hours ago
- 5 min read
By Eddie Whitlock
Hobby
Remember Jon Lovitz as “the Master Thespian” on Saturday Night Live? He was a fellow who was all ham. His catchphrase was to stop whatever nonsense he had devolved into doing and shout, “Acting!”
I am no actor. I respect actors. When I was a kid, I thought the people on television were just making things up as they went along. Memorize a script? Are you kidding me?
In fifth grade, we did a class play. I was cast as the King’s advisor. I had a few lines, but I never memorized when to say them. We would be in the middle of something, and I would say my lines from the next scene.
To this day – more than half a century later – I remember the line, “Adults should have eight hours of sleep! And children should have at least ten!” And to this day, I cannot remember when I was supposed to say it.
That bad experience with theater turned around the next year. Our English teacher was Althea Johnson. I didn’t find out her first name till about thirty years later and still called her “Mrs. Johnson” when we crossed paths. Mrs. Johnson will always have a place in my heart for her focus on creative writing.
Mrs. Johnson had us write and perform plays.
We were sixth graders, and it was 1969. We divided ourselves into a boys’ group and a girls’ group. I wrote the play for our group.
The title was “Swamp Rats,” and I would give anything if I still had a copy of it.
The plot was simple. We were a group of Allied soldiers fighting the Nazis somewhere in Europe in World War II. My character was named Rob. Rob got wounded in the big battle scene and got carried off by the other soldiers.
If I had not appreciated the God-like power of writing before, I did then.
Of course, my Divine Script was met by very human actors. My friend Ray (last name withheld) agreed to play Hitlerbecause he had the right hair for it. He did a fantastic job of shouting and screaming in what certainly sounded to sixth graders in 1969 as German.
As we were rehearsing, my friend Clark – who was playing the part of Frenchie, the cook – pointed out that I had given myself more lines than I’d given anyone else.
Damn. How did that happen?
So, I went through the script and balanced out the number of lines of the major characters to approximately equal. Clearly,I would never make it in Hollywood.
We staged the play. Apparently, I remembered lines and when to say them better when I wrote them! “Swamp Rats” was a major success.
Okay, no one booed loud enough for me to hear them. (For a sixth grader, this qualifies as major success.)
The girls did their play, too. It was set in a classroom and there was a lot of talking, but it did not have a battle or any over-the-top heroics. It was good, but it was no “Swamp Rats.”
After that major success, I took a 28-year-long hiatus from playwriting. Adulting occurred.
In 1997, New York actor Jim Middleton came to Griffin, Georgia, and started the Camelot Theatre Company. I wanted my daughter to have a chance to perform and signed up to work with the group.
Jim and I hit it off. I told him that I was interested in trying to write something. He didn’t respond. At least not then.
The first play the company produced was “The Music Man” with Jim in the role of Professor Harold Hill. During the intermission of the first performance, Jim addressed the audience and told them, “Our next production is being written by Griffin’s own Eddie Whitlock!” Then he had me stand up and take a bow.
So. That’s how I got back into writing plays. Honestly, it was the best way. I had a deadline and no parameters.
My first Camelot play was “Biscuits & Bullets: Southern Fried Homicide.” It will come as no surprise to you that it had a simple plot.
The Culpepper Family was squabbling over the family business, a southern cooking restaurant. The matriarch, Bertha, is murdered. The sheriff, who is an Elvis impersonator, investigates.
The villain, Bertha’s ne’er-do-well New Yorker husband, was a toupee magnate Ronald Trump.
Yep. In my playwriting careers, I was ahead of the curve on both Anti-Fascism and Anti-Trumpism.
“Biscuits & Bullets” was an audience-participation/comedy/local satire/musical/murder-mystery. Oh. And it was dinner-theater. I stole the format for it from a place in Atlanta called “Agatha’s.”
My friend Michael Dyche wrote the songs for the show. Thanks to Mike, people left the shows humming catchy tunes with lyrics chock full of double-entendre. (You can look up Mike’s music on YouTube. He’s worked with some well-known names over the years.)
“Biscuits & Bullets” did well. It did so well that we did a sequel. Spalding County had gone through a scandal involving the coroner at the time. We brought Bertha back and joked thatthe coroner was prone to making mistakes. It got a laugh.
We did five shows about the Culpepper Family, Sheriff Tucker C. Bodine, and Ronald Trump. It was a lot of fun. Usually. We spoofed every local event from prominent citizens who were delinquent property tax payers to the implementation of stormwater management fees.
I poked fun at a local politician who had married a woman who was – let us say – very financially secure.
The county sheriff, though, thought the joke was about him and confronted me about it one day. Poking his finger repeatedly in my chest, he informed me that he did not think it was funny. As he had a gun, I could see his point.
So that was our last “Biscuits & Bullets,” though we did do two other original plays after that.
That stretch of playwriting ended, of course, because nothing gold can stay. And neither can anything silver, bronze, or high-quality plastic.
I moved to Athens in 2007. I started writing books and self-publishing them. I’ve done three. It’s fun, which is good because it’s not profitable.
I wanted to write for the stage again. A couple of months ago, I heard about the “From the Page to the Stage” contest being conducted by the Winterville Players. I entered.
My entry, “Death Comes for Charlie,” was selected as one of the four plays to be performed at the Marigold Auditorium on April 24 and 25. I’m ecstatic.
For what it’s worth, the play is not political at all. And despite the title, it’s a comedy.
I’m looking forward to seeing what the director and performers do with it. I hope you come and see it. I hope you enjoy all four of the plays presented.
And if you don’t? Well. “Writing!”
Eddie Whitlock is a Georgia native, graduate of UGA, and wannabe writer. He retired in 2021 from the Athens-Clarke County Library, where he worked as coordinator of volunteers, community service supervisor, and vending machine scapegoat.
