Sure, Might’s Well Git It Over With

That was my line in the play. My only line. I was ten years old, and I honestly felt I could handle something more substantial, but there it is. The play was called “The Saga of Thataway Gulch” and it was put on by St. Mark’s Methodist Church in Brooklyn, but it was not even remotely religious, at least as far as I can tell. I guess it was a fund-raiser, and maybe an opportunity for families to gather and watch the kids perform, but the reasons behind it were irrelevant to me. I simply wished I’d gotten a better part. It was written, cast, and directed by Mrs. Norwood, a lady of the church who also led the choir, and she took these things very seriously. I assumed I wasn’t good enough in Mrs. Norwood’s eyes to carry more than seven words. But this wasn’t even a line I could really work with. I mean, how many ways can you say it? I tried to find potential for building in pathos or humor, for somehow making my moment count, but it always came out as a lackadaisical kind of drawl.

Perhaps I should clarify here that the line referred to a hanging. I don’t remember much about the plot except that a bunch of cowboys from Thataway Gulch had to capture an outlaw and then deliver justice, Wild West style, with a noose. For a brief time the cunning outlaw eluded them.

“Hey! Let’s form a posse and head him off at the pass,” one of the cowboy citizens suggested, marking a crucial turning point in the story. That was another one-line role, but at least it had some meat to it. Here was a character who was thinking strategically, generating ideas, trying to solve a problem. Me? With a mild shrug of resignation I hastened a man to his death. I was the wishy-washy cheerleader for a bunch of cowards. The guy was cornered. Should we hang him right away?

“Sure, might’s well git it over with.”

Heck, why not? Maybe we could still make it home in time for lunch at the High Noon Saloon.

What’s worse is that I had to be a boy. I approached Mrs. Norwood and stammered out a timid request to at least be a cowgirl with a fringed skirt and borrowed boots, but no, Mrs. Norwood was having none of that. This scene was a nod to neorealism, dark and authentic. No pretty girl worth her salt would be standing out there on that windy bluff looking at the hanging post without swooning, let alone urging the others to complete the deed quickly and not out of mercy for the man about to die, but so they could git it over with, because, well, because they might as well.

I wore my brother's dungarees and one of his old flannel shirts. Someone lent me a vest, a toy gun, and a cowboy hat. They put some tawny pancake make-up on my face to simulate a more outdoors complexion, and darkened my already thick eyebrows. I put a stop to the attempted mustache, perhaps craving some vestige of dignity despite the odds. Finally I stuffed my ponytail under the hat, and suddenly I was male. It was a very effective transformation. I know this because when I went into the girls’ bathroom, there was shrieking. That hurt.

What hurt more was watching my best friend Carol Bessey strolling around in the costume she got to wear for her scene. It was a long full skirt with an ivory-colored blouse and a jaunty bonnet beneath which her blonde hair fell freely to her shoulders. Her cheeks were pink, her lips red, and I’m wondering now, nearly fifty years later, if she might have been portraying one of those fallen women who lived in the Old West’s mining towns, the kind with a heart of gold? But no, I think she was going for more of a teen-aged Becky Thatcher look. I was jealous, but I offered to help her get ready since it didn’t take me long to stuff my hair into a hat. She seemed to be avoiding me. I did, after all, look exactly like a boy, and this may have been disconcerting.

But I accompanied her to the dressing area nonetheless. With the elaborate modesty of pubescent girls, she draped a sheet over some chairs and awkwardly crouched behind it to take off her regular clothes. Suddenly, to her horror, the sheet slipped, and I glimpsed the real reason for her newly heightened shyness even around me. She was wearing a bra -- a brand new, starchy white bra. There was a shock value to this revelation that my adult self can barely understand. It was as though she had been initiated ahead of me into some secret scary wonderful society.

And I was left behind, light years behind, in my brother’s dungarees.

It’s funny, but I can’t remember if the hanging occurred. There must have been a twist in the plot, a quirky curveball that gave the villain a reprieve. Because, after all, how could a play put on by a 1950s church group actually depict a hanging? I know it was NOT the sort of thing where everything is metaphor for something else. The bad guy was not a Christ-figure, and the rope was surely not a cross. I am led to conclude that the outlaw got away somehow, despite my own character’s cold-hearted bid for promptness.

I was glad to have it over with, one way or the other.