BWW Blog: My First Time - The Chincident, The Dairy Queen, and the Finsta Famous Video

So picture this: you're in your high school rehearsal studio. It smells like an unsightly combination of sweat, Chipotle, and teen angst, and you're trying to ignore the sweat-stains that mark the Christmas sweater that your counterpart is wearing in MARCH, for some reason. There's a height difference of almost a foot and a half, so the simple task of making eye contact is a chore in and of itself. You try not to think about the fact that the extent of your relationship was one brief conversation about the Israeli government or something, and you can't tell if all eyes are on you or if you're not interesting enough to hold the attention of a group of kids with the attention span of a literal WALNUT; I certainly was not.

When the time for the long-anticipated *stage kiss* arrived, I got up on my toes, leaned over, and did something that to this day, I will solely refer to as "The Chincident--" YEP. I totally kissed his chin. And like, in front of people too. How humiliating.

Any onlooker might have assumed that that traumatizing debacle was my first kiss, but at eighteen, it certainly was not. My first kiss was, of course, in an amateur production of "13 the Musical,"--probably just like yours was if you've taken the time to read this--and so it became that most of my big "firsts" were onstage.

As a girly-girl who truly values romantic sentiment, I had my love life planned to a T from a very young age. The perfect first kiss, the perfect first boyfriend, the perfect first...other stuff...and yet, at thirteen years old, I found myself in an outright panic, adjusting my first bra to look cute for my counterpart so he wanted to kiss me in front of a makeshift "Dairy Queen" sign. It had never occurred to me that my first kiss might be in a play, but when I thought about it, it made perfect sense. I spent so much time doing theatre, and like, okay, I DEFINITELY needed to get out more--but for the time being, I had devoted a large majority of my teenage existence to plucky renditions of JRB duets; what did I expect?

The real tragedy comes from something a little more intense than kissing; something I like to call "Saying 'I Love You' To Strangers Syndrome." My first time saying "I love you" outright to a boy I wasn't directly related to was in the same production as "The Chincident," which, like I said, was a total bummer since it lacked eye contact, any real chemistry, and a decent smelling environment. My teacher had to tell me to be louder repeatedly, and I remember struggling with the emotional toll of having never said it, but fatally attempting to say it authentically to someone I barely even knew. I was, well, saying 'I love you' to a stranger--something actors have to do all of the time--but I had JUST finished going through puberty so the no-real-boyfriendness of it all hit particularly close to home.

The first time someone told me they loved me was also onstage, and it wasn't even a direct "I love you" either; it was an "I THINK I love you," followed by a kiss that was of course videotaped and airdropped around--*sigh*--theatre camp--the following day. As I overcompensated with humor and posted the video on my "Finsta," I wondered if I would be doomed to an eternity of pretending to be in love and having an odd complex that would come from not knowing what's real or fake. I was given the name "Stage Kiss Girl" in high school because I, for some reason, was the girl who had to kiss someone new every semester, but, um, EXCUSE ME, there were girls who kissed someone new every time they went out, and they certainly weren't pretending.

Does it even count? Do I say the first person to kiss me was my counterpart in a play I did in middle school or do I just suck it up and say I waited another two years to be kissed for real? I was once told that the reason I was able to play that I was "in love" before I ever was for real was because I was so in love with what I was DOING that it all sort of blended together. I'm not sure if that's true, but for what it's worth, consider it the ultimate rehearsal for real life.