배재미디어센터

The Biggest tremor of my life

김나은

  In cartoons or dramas, when the main character precedes an important performance of something, the writer always describes the main character's feelings like this. The moment you can't hear the surrounding sounds and only your heart sounds, that's probably the moment you tremble. Have you ever experienced this dramatic moment like the main character of a story? Surprisingly, I have experienced this feeling. 

  In the winter of 2018, I and my friends were preparing to enter high school after three years of middle school. My classmates and I were very sad about finishing middle school. Then one day, my friend Yeram suggested our class. "Why don't you prepare for a play at our school's last festival?" said Yeram. All my classmates, including myself, were enthusiastic about these suggestions. From that day on, the passionate challenge of youth began. It was decided unanimously to do the play, and a few days later, under the leadership of my friend Yeram, the theme of our play was set. The theme of the play was 'Modern Mermaid', comedy. I had no intention of appearing as the main character of the play until that day. So I tried to take on a relatively less important seaweed role when I had a character-setting meeting. When I made this decision, my friend suddenly recommended that I play the main character of the play, Prince. I was greatly embarrassed by the unexpected recommendation. I wanted to shut my friend's mouth who recommended it quickly. Because I couldn't, my classmates had already listened, and soon after, they agreed to her proposal one after another, saying that I was cut out for the role of Prince. I honestly didn't hate to play a major role, either. It's also the last memory I have of my classmates, and I wanted to play hard before entering high school. Of course, although it wasn't easy for me to decide to take on a weighty role that required responsibility, I eventually decided to take on the role of the prince, and soon after, Yeram's script was completed. We started practicing based on the script, and now I'm starting to feel burdened in earnest.

  Our class, which seemed to be going smoothly, faced some problems as we began to practice in earnest. First, let me tell you another reason why I chose to play the Prince role before I tell you the first problem I face. The reason I decided to take the role of a prince was that I believed in Yeram's words that the prince had few lines. After receiving her scenario, I realized that her words were a lie. Now that I think about it, it wasn't such a long play, but I was the one who had the most lines in the scenario. Here comes the first problem. I'm not very good at memorizing lines. I have shot other plays, such as short films, besides this play, which took more than a week to memorize lines. Even though I spent so much time memorizing lines, I even re-filmed them dozens of times because of me when I was filming the actual movie. It was hard for me to memorize lines, but I also had a dance time for myself in the middle, so it took a tremendous amount of time to learn the dance. 

  Secondly, the time was very short to prepare perfectly for the performance. The period of preparation for this performance given to us was about two months, of which about one month was used to make scenarios and props. Therefore, the actual time given to us was only a month or so. We thought we had enough time to prepare props, but when we started practicing in earnest, we were already told to give up.

  The third is the absence of unity in our class. While practicing all day, some practicing parts were relatively fast, and others that were slow. Especially when progress was slow, our class had several big and small disagreements. Once friends had a little fight over what material and size to make a boat into paper for a play. My classmate Yeram said, “Our ship should be bigger and made of plastic!” And I and some of the classmates replied, “It is too hard to find a ship made with plastic. This paper ship is the best we can make now.”

  Still, we overcame these trials and prepared for the performance. I came to school all day long and did the same lines and acting, so I think I could memorize them mechanically. Such days continued, and before I knew it, the day of the school festival came. The festival of our middle school was divided into two parts: the first part in the morning and the second part in the afternoon when we performed. The first part autonomously operated and experienced booths run by each class, when a key event occurred. Some of my classmates and first-year students got into a fight. The fight was caused by our classmates stealing food exchange coupons from first-year students at the food experience booth, which was just heard by our homeroom teacher, who appeared in the performance. The teacher was very upset about this, so he refused to appear in the performance which had to be done in part two. That's how we met the biggest problem with this performance. At this time, I felt as if I had lost a major screw from my hard-working robot. Maybe the whole class felt the same way as I did. 

  The atmosphere in the class became more and more serious. Since we declared that one of the main roles of the play would not come out, I thought we could not do our play anymore. I assure that the atmosphere at that time was the coldest of the year. After such a serious lunch hour, we seriously pondered whether to give up the performance or find a substitute for the teacher. At first, there were overwhelming opinions to give up the performance. The reason is that the teacher's role was so large, and I thought that the teacher's role would bring sympathy and laughter from the whole school. Nevertheless, considering the efforts of our class so far, we finally decided to play a role. One of my friends graciously supported it, and as a result, we were able to show our play to the whole school on stage. When we made this decision, we should have performed almost immediately on stage.

  Thankfully, the audience applauded enthusiastically. Though, we were worried about my friend's sudden role-setting mistakes, we recited the lines perfectly. I could feel the first ecstasy of my life at this time as the students laughed out loud whenever I heard each line. Of course, just before I was on stage, I felt the greatest tension of my life. I felt the tremor in the cartoon for the first time. 

  After the performance, our teacher apologized to our class for suddenly refusing to attend the performance. We accepted his apology, and we were able to make special memories and graduate.