- Everything was knocked out,
and there's was a river of blood.
And I was like, "Oh my gosh."
- Hi, I'm Tommy, I've been a drama teacher for 15 years.
- Hi, my name is Jona,
I've been a drama teacher for four years.
- Hi, my name's Mary,
and I've been a drama teacher for 13 years now.
- My name is Erik.
I've been a drama teacher for just over nine and 1/2 years,
and these are my horror stories.
(slow jazzy music)
- I've been teaching drama for 15 years.
That started in the summer of 2004
when I went from being an archery counselor
at my childhood summer camp in Vermont
to being a drama counselor
and I did improv games and whatnot.
We had this new musical that was
called "Put Me in Coach," and it was about a baseball team.
There was a big ensemble of about 16 boys
all playing these baseball players
with two big numbers with complicated choreography
in pairs and whatnot.
And it's opening day of the show.
All of the parents have just come to town
for the weekend and it's Friday night.
And I get down to the main house
for dinner and this counselor comes to me
and says, "Hey, Johnny," that's not the kid's name
but whatever, anonymity.
"Johnny says he wants to go to the girls' camp
"to watch his sister do the play."
Johnny's in the baseball ensemble,
so I'm like, "And you told him that he can't
"do this 'cause we've been rehearsing for weeks
"and we need him in the show, right?"
He was like, "Yeah, but he says he wants to go
"see his sister and it seems like what
"he plans to do so talk to him."
So I talk to Johnny and I explain
the reasons why this doesn't work,
and he has a partner for the choreography.
And we're getting ready for the show,
and then about 10 minutes before the show
I started to realize I haven't seen him in about 20 minutes.
And then someone walks into the main house
and comes to me and says,
"I just got a call from the girls' camp.
"Apparently, there's a boy
"in a baseball outfit at the girls' camp."
Yeah (laughs) that would Johnny and okay,
too late to get him back here.
Hey, Jamie, Will, and Phillip, gather.
Okay, so Jamie and Phillip,
you know how you're normally a pair
and Will you're normally with Johnny?
Well, you're gonna be a triad for today
and do the choreography.
We'll adjust it in this way and just go.
Okay, let's go, go, go, go, go.
That was definitely my most stressful moment,
I'd say, directing a show at camp.
- So I work at a summer camp where I'm in charge
of all the drama that happens.
Something that's really special and unique
about the summer camp that I work at
is that it's a Jewish summer camp,
so all of the musicals that we do are in Hebrew.
This was my first time working at this job,
so I was working on "The Little Mermaid."
Two days before our show,
my camper who was playing the lead,
her counselors came up to me and went,
"Sally had a family emergency,
"and she's gonna need to leave camp early."
What do you mean she needs to leave camp?
I was like, "She's playing Ariel in The Little Mermaid."
"I don't know if you've ever seen The Little Mermaid,
"but she's kind of a little bit really important."
So what I ended up doing is I pulled
one of the girls aside who was fluent in Hebrew,
and I was like, "Listen, I know this is a lot
"of me to ask of you, and if you don't think
"you can do it, that's totally fine.
"But do you think you can step in?"
She was like, "Yeah, I got it."
And she did it and she was great,
and the show went really well.
- So I think I was like 15,
and I started teaching drama at a local church.
This was my first day on the job,
never done this before.
We were out, it was break,
and I heard screaming coming from the jungle gym area
where they had swings and stuff.
And I was like, "Where is that screaming coming from?"
This little girl comes up to me,
she's like, "Miss, Miss, Miss, Jeremy fell off a swing."
And I was like, "Okay."
And this child had knocked out their whole front teeth.
Everything was knocked out,
and there was a river of blood.
And I was like, "Oh my gosh."
I stopped the bleeding with my shirt,
so I pressed my shirt onto their teeth.
I had to drag him, still keeping my top on his teeth,
and then finally got him into the headmistress office.
But I literally had blood all over my top,
all over myself, and it was so frightening,
but everyone was like, "You did so well."
At the time, I was so young.
I'd never seen that much blood in my life.
And he was fine, but that was just very scary.
- I teach a lot of improv and drama workshops
at a lot of detention centers, camps
for incarcerated kiddos.
A lot of them are great kiddos and they just wound up
in the wrong situation and they're there.
I was doing this workshop one time
and it was crazy because in this center
we were literally in a 12 by 12 foot space.
It was the only space we could use.
They didn't have a theater.
We couldn't really do it outside
'cause you can't really have the kids outside,
so all we had was this library that we fit 10 people
just sardined in there and we would just be super close
and play improve games with each other.
There's a giant window and then just walls.
And we're doing this workshop,
and outside the giant window I look over
and a kiddo scales a 20-foot wall,
escapes from the detention center.
Everyone sees it, they start freaking out.
Everyone's running away.
Everyone's just causing chaos.
And we're stuck in this tiny room
with 10 kids being like let's do improv.
That'd be fun.
But they couldn't focus 'cause the only thing
they could see in this room was the outside
where you just see police and probation officers
and helicopters and people going crazy
'cause someone just escaped from a prison.
And it was really tough trying to get them focused again.
I don't know if they ever found the kid.
I hope they did.
I hope that person's safe.
But I also know that was just the end of the workshop.
- Being a drama teacher is wild.
It's a lot of thinking on your feet
and responding to curve balls
and finding ways to energize kids
into doing things that are maybe uncomfortable at first
or vulnerable or scary or intimidating or challenging.
- You are changing people's lives.
You have the ability to inspire.
- Every person deserves to feel that confidence.
They deserve to feel that self esteem.
They deserve to feel that they can do something
super worthwhile and amazing, give it to the world,
and they'll receive love and acceptance and fun for it.
- I also think it's the most rewarding job ever
because to see how proud kids get of what they
perform and what they produce,
there's no better feeling then that.
(slow jazzy music)