This is the second chapter of the Amateur Revival story. This chapter starts where Chapter One ended. While I hope this chapter can stand by itself, it will make more sense if you read Chapter One first.
This story is a work of fiction. Some real places and institutions are mentioned or alluded to, but they are used fictitiously. Insofar as the author knows, no real person affiliated with any of those places or institutions has done anything akin to what is described in this story. Any similarities between any character in this story and any real person are coincidental and unintended. I encourage comments on this story, both favorable and unfavorable. Thank you for reading.
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Over Carol's objection, I put my pants on that Saturday evening long enough to pay the girl who delivered our pizza. We both got dressed to go to the supermarket on Sunday morning to get things for breakfast and dinner. Otherwise, Carol and I stayed nude until she dressed to go to work Monday morning. We made love enough times over that day and a half that we were both sore. It was a good sore.
Our next rehearsal was to learn the "group dance." Kim's dictum was "if you're going to perform nude, you rehearse nude." We also had to learn it nude. I'm not sure it was truly a dance, more a series of movements to music. The scene started with us standing bunched together at center stage with our arms in the air, a pose taken from the original show. When the music started, we began running around the stage, doing things like cartwheels and rolls that had to be choreographed so we didn't hit each other. That was followed by each guy picking a girl up from behind under her shoulders and spinning her around. The women had to keep their legs spread. "Show some slit," Kim instructed. The "dance" ended with us lining up boy-girl-boy-girl and leapfrogging over each other until we were all offstage. Seeing this written description, it sounds a little goofy, but it was fun to do.
Another development at this next rehearsal was the presence of Kim's boyfriend Luke, clothed of course. "Luke's my second set of eyes," Kim told us. Luke would attend all the remaining rehearsals.
We spent almost three hours getting the "group dance" to the point where we weren't running into each other. Kim finally called a break. "We'll start on the couples' dances next. I'll e-mail each couple when I want to work with them." In addition to the group dance, each couple would do a dance by themselves.
Again, I don't know whether what Carol and I did was really dancing. Our dance started with the two of us standing back-to-back at center stage. When the music started, we each ran to the side of the stage we were facing. The bulk of the dance was the two of us running patterns across the stage in which we came very close to each other but never touched. The dance ended with Carol going into the stage left wings. I stood slightly right of center stage facing left. Carol was to run at me and leap with me catching her legs and lifting her in an upright position until her knees were level with my face. I was to hold her in that position and do a 360 degree turn. Kim was emphatic, "I want you to hold Mom high enough that the audience can see her mound above your head and your dick below her feet." When I completed the turn, Carol was supposed to slide down my body with us embracing "passionately" when her feet hit the stage floor.
Wisely, Kim started with us practicing the end of the dance. More wisely, Kim had borrowed some thick gym mats for us to practice on. The tricky part was for Carol to time her jump so I could catch her and use her momentum to lift her up. That meant she couldn't jump too far from me or too close to me. In practice we did both. When Carol jumped too early, I could catch her but couldn't lift her. The result was I usually dropped her. When Carol jumped too late, she usually knocked me over and the two of us landed in a heap on the mat. It took a lot of time, but we finally mastered it. The rest of our dance was easy.
The only parts of the original show which Kim had retained were the opening "taking off the robe" scene and the final scene which ended with the cast in the nude "daisy chain" line across the stage that was an iconic image from the original show. Consistent with the show's original formats, Kim had included a few skits.
In the sequence of the show, my first skit was with Sarah and Derrick, called "Circumcision." Sarah came onstage in a suit and began a monologue about male circumcision. When Sarah said, "Let's look at an example of a circumcised dick," I walked onstage nude and stood beside Sarah. I am circumcised. Sarah took my dick in her hand and began talking about it. A camera mounted over the stage projected an image of my dick in Sarah's hand on a large screen upstage.
When Sarah finished talking about my dick, she said "Let's look at an uncircumcised dick." Derrick then walked onstage nude and stood on the opposite side of Sarah from me. Derrick was not circumcised. Sarah took Derricks dick in her hand and talked about it while an image of Derrick's dick in Sarah's hand appeared on the screen. The scene ended with Sarah facing the audience and saying, "The most important question is whether a circumcised dick or an uncircumcised dick provides greater stimulation in the vagina. I need to research that further." All three of us then faced upstage. Sarah put an arm around each of our bare backs we walked upstage together. A curtain came down behind us.
The most interesting, and longest, part of Kim's re-written show came in the middle. The portion had no script. Instead, the couples came onstage nude, one couple at a time, and simply talked about their experience of being nude onstage in front of an audience and why they were doing the show. The idea was to say what you were thinking and what we said was meant to change from performance to performance. Beyond establishing the order in which the couples would appear, Kim never rehearsed this segment.
We moved into the theater for rehearsals the second full week of April. Even Sarah, Maria, Aaron, and Antonio had gotten comfortable going nude in the room we had used on campus. Sure, Kim and Luke were there clothed; but the rest of us were nude and there was no one else coming and going. It had become like our own locker room.
Walking onto the stage naked for the first time, in front of the auditorium full of empty seats, gave all of us, I think, a strong sense that we were naked in a place where people are supposed to wear clothes. The sense of exposure was heightened by the fact we who were nude were a minority in the huge room. During that first rehearsal in the theater, there were probably twenty clothed people working on lights, sound, the few sets, and setting up storage of our few costumes. We were also introduced to the two theater students who would be the stage manager and assistant stage manager: Clarissa and Doug respectively.
At first, our nudity attracted a lot of attention from the crew. Carol, LaTonya, Sarah, and Maria drew most of the attention, of course. After some initial hesitance, all four women reconciled to the idea that they were there to be seen nude. I never quite got over the feeling I was doing something naughty when I walked out of the dressing room, across the hall, and through the door into the backstage buck naked.
We opened on the first Thursday night in May. Our "dress" rehearsals were the preceding Tuesday and Wednesday. On Tuesday, we got a shock: make-up! I don't think any of us had thought about wearing make-up. I hadn't known that bare skin doesn't look natural under stage lights. We needed a base all over our bodies to appear to have natural skin tones. We would also need facial make-up so that lips and eyebrows didn't wash out. Kim also wanted us to use make-up to make our pubic hair stand out a little. It took a couple of hours on Tuesday for one of Kim's classmates to teach us about make up and for us to be made up that first time. Getting make up on all parts of our bodies became a collaborative effort. That was fun and created a sexy mood for the rehearsal, which may have been part of the plan.
Carol told me that the theater's maximum seating capacity was 350. About a dozen clothed people, including Kim's faculty advisor, were sitting down front for that first "dress" rehearsal. While we'd gotten comfortable being nude with each other, that first dress rehearsal again put us through the anxiety, and excitement, of being nude in front of strangers. I think we were all having fun with it by the end of the rehearsal.
We had to wash the make-up off our bodies after rehearsal. The dressing room had a tiled shower room with showerheads mounted around the walls, and two individual shower stalls that afforded privacy. No one used the stalls. After the rehearsal, we all showered together.
