Some of you love working kids shows, and some hate it, some don't mind, but I'm pretty sure you can't stay in this career long without working with at least one person who has "not yet reached majority." What is something a kid has done or said on one of your productions that has just left you blinking in shock and astonishment?
I was hired as an ASM by a producer who didn't know the difference between ASM and child wrangler, and that you need both. I found myself exhausted, trying to fill both shoes. It was a Christmas show with 16 kids, ager 7-16 in the cast and I had my hands full. Opening night, I'm in the SR wing, breathing a sigh of relief because all the kids have just made their first entrance on time, in the right costumes, and are standing in the right places. Then I see it. One 8 year old little boy is standing there, quite calmly, pulling pennies out of his pocket, putting them in his mouth and swallowing. Pennies. As in the smallest denomination of U.S. currency. Eating them. Like candy. About one every 15 seconds.
At this point, I was so fed up with the kids, and exhausted (it was also my senior year of college, and fall semester finals had coincided with tech week) that I would have just let him go on with giving himself copper poisoning, or whatever, except it was distracting the other kids and I could hear the audience start to murmmur. It was a long scene, about 8 minutes, and I had no idea how many pennies this kid had. To make a surreal sitation stranger, passing truckers on the highway kept picking up our wireless coms on their CBs and hitting on the SM, so communications were shot. Hissing at the kid and waving franticaly from off-stage wasn't getting his attention, so I finally grabbed a nearby yard stick, slid it along the stage floor and poked him in the foot with it. Impromptu sign language (during which he ate another two pennies) finally got across the fact that you don't eat on stage, which I reinforced with a lecture as soon as he exited. Because it was just too weird for me, I didn't mention the penny thing, just stressed that you don't eat anything on stage unless the stage directions call for it.