No. I started a post and then gave up.

Of course I’m going to elaborate!

… Apology accepted.

Anyways. There are hazards of being amongst the many Child Actors. And I’m not talking about being pulled through a vortex into an alternate universe. No, I’m referring to other Child Actors.

You see, as a playing group, we moved around a fair bit, and so we never really got to interact with others outside our acting group. That didn’t bother me.

What did bother me were the conventions.

Not that type of convention. No, I’m referring to large gatherings of actors, and their families. There were usually small ones about once a month that our group would go to. The large ones happened about every year.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I enjoy seeing other people, and spending time with other actors. The trouble, as I’ve mentioned before, is that the children are often forced into “children friendly” activity areas. With games. Stupid, pointless, monotonous, tedious games. Some were designed to “help us grow” and “improve group spirit and understanding”. Others were just designed to kill time while those in charge waited for our parents to come by and pick us up.

Fortunately, I am a decent enough actor to get out of most relays. All I needed to do was feign a cough or a cold, or fake vomit a few times, and the leaders would eventually decide it wasn’t worth it to make me play. After all, I am a melodramatic actress; I can turn anything into a production!

The one game I could practically never get out of, however, was the “Never-ending Story.” I don’t even see how it qualifies as a game! I mean, really. You all sit around in a circle. The leader presents the beginning of a story, and the next person in the circle is required to come up with the next sentence, to continue the story.

If we were all playwrights, that would be one thing. But no. We’re all children of actors; only some of us had been talented enough to actually be onstage, as I had. So some of the children couldn’t even add the proper flair to even a story.

But I digress.

Those “stories”, if you can call them that, were always horrid. They were never coherent, and I could never follow what was happening. (Maybe that was the point of the game! Make the plot so confusing, nobody else could follow!)

For the first several years, I tried to participate as they wished. After all, it’s a stretch of my creative and dramatic skills. But eventually, I just got fed up. When I was twelve, and we were next at the huge convention, I took my chance.

The story was as dismal as always. I was about the 20th person in. I have no clue what the story was about, but there were characters. That was all that I needed. When the story finally got to me, I figured out how I could save myself, and everyone else, from the misery of the story. I opened my mouth, and uttered the sentence, “And everybody died permanently, the end!”

With that, the story (at least in my own mind) was finished.

Well, not quite. It would have, if we were following the rules. But instead, everybody protested that my comma actually marked the end of the sentence; the words “the end” were not actually contained in my portion.

Also, the rules say that you’re not permitted to go against what anyone else said. (One of the first rules of Improv, after all.) But even so, the person after me brought them back to life. Or unlife. Or something. I think that in your world, you’d refer to them as “undead.”

I mostly just stopped listening.

But still, after about the third time I was in a game and killed all the characters, the leaders eventually learned to let me not play.

I think that a number of people besides me were a bit disappointed, actually. That was never a very popular game.

But I digress again.

If you are, in fact, following the rules of the Never-Ending Story, that one sentence can end the story. And if, as I proposed earlier, the point of the game is to make a sentence impossible to follow, that sentence is guaranteed to win.

Happy Sunday, everyone! And happy Easter!