Ian Mckellen

"Ian Mckellen"
Originally uploaded by tonbabydc

No one but theater nerds knew who McKellen was in 1987, so I guess there's some cache to this stub...

My mom forced me to go to this at the tender young age of 13, and the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that she wanted at least one of her kids to be gay so very badly.

You see, my older brother was in the theater, but had taken an interest in females sometime during his senior year of high school. So, there's strike one for mom.

Meanwhile, my younger brother was definitely showing signs that there was an inner jock that was breaking free. Strike two.

That left the middle kid. I was skinny and good looking enough, and girls certainly didn't show any interest to me; I guess mom saw me as her last hope for entree into the fabulous world of high fashion, gossip, antiquing, and leather pants.

In fact, she was practically engaged in a social engineering project, between this and forcing us to go see "Side By Side By Sondheim" the year before, featuring Karen Akers (GAH! Why do I even know who Karen Akers is? Dammit mom, it was an NFL Sunday. All I wanted to do was be normal and play basketball with my friends and maybe sneak beers and kiss a girl some day! WHY?!?)

All of that said (....did I really just admit all of that?), even at 13 years old I recognized that this was a kind of awesome good night. McKellen was able to hold my attention span for consecutive hours, which was no small accomplishment at that age (...even more so now). He even brought audience members up on stage to be extras during one performance, and that included me and my brothers.

So, yeah, I performed with Ian McKellen. 

Or, as my fag hag mother would prefer to think of it, I got it on with Dumbledore.