This being the first Month of Me Zombie Tuesday… I figured I would cut this down to its essence.

Zombies are about scaring people.

Well… and making a statement on modern society. And kickin’ it old school.

But mainly about scaring people.

So. In the spirit of that essence, while staying true to the boundaries and proscriptions of the Month of Me, I am about to present… a picture of me that scares the bejeezus out of me.

(I must warn you. Genitals have been known to retract in reaction to this photo. At least mine do.)

The image in question dates back to the spring of 1992. I was finishing my second year of theatre school. And we were presenting the final production of the year, the musical Working, by Studs Terkel.

Let’s let that sink in for a moment. Me. In a musical.

(My Lovely Wife, at this moment working several miles away, has just shuddered, as though someone walked on her grave. Or as though she had just heard me sing.)

One evening, during intermission, we decided we needed a picture of the boys — nay, the men — of the cast. We needed to get all that surging testosterone in a controlled space and capture a record of it for the ages. So we all hustled out to the loading dock (where the cool kids smoked… and trucks were loaded) and we posed like we were the Titans of myth. Oh, we were badass. We were kings of the world. We were the coolest shit this side of death, and we knew it.

And yet… somehow… that didn’t quite come across in the photo:

If you looked up “butch” in your thesaurus, and then decided to look up its antonym, and if your thesaurus was published by a publishing house with a cruel yet obscure sense of humour… this would be the photo they would show.

I can’t look again. I feel emasculated just thinking about it.

So there you go. No zombies. But the zombie essence… of fear.

Hell, I’d eat brains to avoid looking at that again.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 at 11:30 am and is filed under me, pictures, monthofme, theatre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.