How To Overcome Stage Fright

My theater roots run deep.

At age 5, I could be found writing plays, bossing the neighborhood kids into playing specific parts, being the director of said play, and organizing the cast and crew to round up paying audiences from hither and yon to come watch the production on our lovely stage (my front porch).

By high school, I was an officer in the drama club, head of the competitive speech team, and had leading roles in many of the plays. My work earned me a theater scholarship to college. When I realized being a starving actor was a dumb idea for my personal situation, I settled on a career that was the next best thing to being an actor.

Being a litigator.

My two favorite parts of being a lawyer were the a) research and writing and b) “performing” in court.

I was a ham. A bossy ham. And still am.

I am also delusional in believing that EVERYBODY should be a bossy ham and that performing is fun and exciting and one of the biggest adrenaline rushes you could ever have and that EVERYBODY should LOVE doing it.

So you can imagine my dismay, and my disbelief, and my dilemma, over the fact that Little CEO is bossy, but not a ham.

At least not in public.

She has stage fright of the most horrible kind.

I am sure this is God’s way of teaching me some much-needed empathy. But I feel bad for Little CEO, because I feel so ill-equipped  to understand or help her.

I should have known when she threw a tantrum at her first dance recital at age 3 and stood there, looking adorable in a Christmas tutu, sobbing on stage while all the other little girls happily danced around her.

I chalked it up to age, but she has a fear. A real, palpable fear.

Next week, she has to perform twice at school. Once for her reading group, where she will read lines in a 2-page play, and once in the Thanksgiving program, where, along with her classmates, she will do a Thanksgiving dance.

She is petrified.

Petrified that people will laugh. That she will mess up. That someone will boo her.

This fearful little thing is the same child who has no problem being Queen Defiant Sassmaster at home, doing weird dances in the backyard or just being plain silly.

Where? Where did she get such fear? How did she not get my vaudevillian DNA?

She says she’s scared, and I want to run lines with her.

She says she will play sick that day, and I want to wrap a feather boa around her shoulders and show her how fun it is to play somebody else.

She says she hates it, and I want to shake her and sing, in my best show-tunes style, a tune that tells her, chin up, kid, it all works out at the end of every musical.

She says she doesn’t like the dance steps, and I want to educate her on stage left, downstage, and the principles of blocking.

But I don’t do any of those things.

I don’t know what to do. But I know that I have a palpable fear of water that most people can’t understand. I know I can’t tell her “not to be afraid.”

Because I know she can’t help it, just like I can’t help being afraid of drowning.

So all I can really do is tell her it’s okay to be scared, that I’ll be there cheering her on, and that she just needs to try her best.

I promise I will bring her Fuzzy Bear in my purse, just in case she needs him, for after the performances.

And when she finishes her Thanksgiving program, I will have for her a bouquet of flowers and tell her bravo – because even the tiniest, most fearful of actresses deserve that.

My hope is that she’ll have such fun, her fears will melt away, that she will overcome. But if she doesn’t, I’ll put aside the scripts and the boas and the show tunes for another day, and let her dance in the backyard to her heart’s content – where no one but Mom can see her.

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