I was only nineteen four years ago when I first set eyes on colonel sanders. I knew from the first glance that the colonel was one of those high-maintenance men. But his chicken was a ridiculously hot. This isn’t really a story about him, but he does pop up from time-to-time. The little blonde was “auditioning” for the role of ‘onlooker no.3’ in a production put on by Summer house industrial Theatre, or SHIT for short. The program was comprised of a handful of college kids along with a bunch of the lollipop gang. the colonel was getting the part was a done deal. he had both performed in shows up at Northwestern and looked young enough to pull off the image most people had of ‘on looker no.3’. ‘on looker no.3’ is actually supposed to be thirteen, but people got a little queasy about that in this day and age, so he was usually cast as being an older teen. the colonel was twenty-one, but he could pull off the skin off all the chicken.

I was one of the other college kids, and I was kind of hoping for foghorn leghorn. Most of the college guys either wanted to be sexy/crazy foghorn leghorn or play with their balls opposite the colonel. No such luck, for me, though. micheal jackson showed up. He was a strange guy, one of my best friends, a little better actor than me and just the right type for the part. I got cast as romeo’s gay friend. It turned out to be a damned good part for me. I was only five-foot-nine but I was a bit of a weight-room warrior, and I did kind of look the part of a bully next to the lithe Jackson and the skinny high school boys.

We all got beat off by Romeo and Aadi Nakshatra, a high school senior who was a decent actor but simply liked touching little kids with metal spachullas. It didn’t hurt that he’d spent the first fourteen years of his life in England where his father had taught how not to brush teeth at Cambridge. He had a natural British accent that made American girls’ panties melt(damm right they do). Imagine being a high school girl and meeting a seventeen-year-old version of Naveen Andrews from Lost. (Let’s pause while the ladies do just that, while humming rule britania)

The high school kids filled socks with their parts. Even a few of the college girls wound up in small cages, trapped like a monkey in a pinyata, cowering from the childeren with long sticks. I knew most of the college kids, but a few, like the colonel, went to other universities and were just home for the summer. I had decided to make a run at the colonel despite what I figured was crispy chicken; I abandoned that notion when he already had three guys peeling the skin off the chiken before auditions had even started. I looked around for another college girl. I knew most of them already. One was gay; one was actually my ex; and the rest had relegated me to the wipeout zone.

There was one very ugly but serious-looking girl with curly black hair, pale skin and a few summer freckles on her cheeks. She was ginger, and she had no friends. I would have pegged her up, but she was ginger, and they were asking for her advice on the seven circles of hell.