Burning for the Bard
During my senior year of high school, I became known for my interest in video production.
Since that night, I've never been able to read a Shakespeare play the same way.
It was a good feeling to have finally found my niche in the halls of my school. Everyone from the JROTC department to the principal to the theatre geeks would come to me asking for help when filming or editing a project.
It was nice indeed to be needed.
One day my friend Jon came up to me asking for help with an extra credit project he was working on. His English teacher had assigned him the task of filming a scene out of “Macbeth.” I agreed to help him out not only because he was a friend, but also because I love the play and thought I could really do some interesting things with the scene. It also didn’t hurt that his teacher was also my teacher and she had agreed to give me some points as well.
“You don’t have to plan anything,” Jon told me. “We already have the idea all thought out. All we need is for you to operate the camera and edit the thing together.”
The group was set to film at Garza Park, a tiny playground located next to the local elementary school. I was told to meet at the merry go-round at dusk and to bring my camera.
That afternoon I packed all my equipment and hopped into my parent’s van, heading towards the park.
When I had gotten there, the first thing I noticed was a lack of actors. There was nobody at the park but tiny children playing to their heart’s content at the slides.
I sat down at a picnic table, fiddling with my camera and trying my best not to look like a pedophile cruising for prey.
The minutes whisked by and I grew more and more agitated at the lack of any thespians waiting to be filmed. I did not have a phone and could not call Jon so, instead, I continued to sit on the picnic table and watch the sun slowly set.
The day’s light was fading and it was becoming more and more obvious that filming was going to soon be impossible baring the usage of a powerful headlight.
As dusk finally settled in I noticed my friend walking my way. On his head sat a cardboard Burger King crown; a sheet was tied around his neck.
Jon sauntered over to where I was sitting and plopped down next to me.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said.
His parents had refused to drive him to the park so he had to walk. The rest of the group would be arriving soon. He may have said some more but to be quite honest, I wasn’t listening too hard. Instead, I was staring in shock at his excuse for a costume.
Now, the films I had done during high school were not known for their professional appearance, I’ll be the first to admit that – but wow, he was doing Shakespeare!
Couldn’t he have found something more slightly royal to wear then the trash perched on his head? Even Jughead Jones wore a more distinguished looking crown.
I dreaded to see the costumes the rest of his group would be wearing.
“We can’t film right now,” I told him. “There’s no light. The camera’s not going to pick up anything.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he responded. “We’re going to use fire.”
At that point, I took notice of the bag he had hauled over his shoulder. He reached inside and pulled out a stack of newspapers, a plastic gas canister and a Bic lighter.
I was already pissed off about having been kept waiting and seeing the unprofessional nature of my friend’s costume so you’ll have to excuse me if my spider-sense didn’t go off when Jon suggested we should light a scene with a miniature bonfire.
I merely shrugged and began setting up my equipment.
Soon enough, the rest of the team had arrived.
There was the creepy girl who sat in the library reading encyclopedias during lunch. She now wore a plastic trash bag as a cloak.
There was the asshole that used to date my friend and made fun of me during junior high. He had on his letterman jacket.
The other girl I didn’t recognize, but she was dressed in cutoff shorts and a tube top, clutching a baby doll and a bottle of ketchup.
Shakespeare in the Park, this was not.
While they set up their “props” and rehearsed their lines, Jon started the fire.
He placed the newspapers in a barbeque pit and poured some gasoline over the stack, lighting it with his Bic. The light the gas-fueled inferno radiated was certainly bright, but the smell was almost unbearable.
I no longer cared, though. I strapped my camera to its tripod and checked the battery.
Soon, the cast was crowded around the pit and ready to begin their scene.
Jon was supposed to play Macbeth, facing the three crones who would reveal his destiny to him through elaborate symbolism and visions.
What I filmed was a group of high school students butchering Shakespeare as they awkwardly read their lines off of a sheet of paper and occasionally held up a prop that would heavy-handedly signify a part of Macbeth’s dark future.
The light of the fire was fading rapidly as the gasoline burnt up. My camera’s LCD screen was showing me that the picture was quickly becoming grainy.
Jon called for a break as he and I assessed how to get the fire going again. As he hemmed and hawed about proper safety precautions, I grew agitated with the time that he was wasting; time that could have been spent watching TV.
I grabbed the gas can from his hands and splashed some of its contents onto the flames.
“Look! How hard was that? Instant fire,” I sarcastically quipped.
Wait … something’s not right. Why do my hands feel so … hot? I looked down to see that that some of the fiery gasoline had splashed back toward the canister that I was now holding. The chunk of plastic in my hands had now become a flaming chunk of plastic.
I dropped the canister onto the ground and shook my arms, desperately trying to relieve myself of what I was sure were fiery hands.
It was only once I confirmed that my immediate person was not engulfed in flames that I attempted to assess the situation.
The gas container was now sitting on the ground, the fire burning brightly and spreading to the notoriously dry Rio Grande Valley grass. The barbeque pit itself was an inferno. I could feel the heat emanating from the dual fires as they started to tickle my arm hairs.
I panicked and quickly scanned the surroundings for any other troubles that I would have to consider – mainly, police. I wasn’t positive but something told me that lighting a city park on fire was illegal.
While the park itself was empty, next door was a public library with a parking lot full of cars.
Okay, I’ll admit it.
I didn’t know what to do so I panicked and ran off.
I ran like a little girl and hid behind a car in the parking lot.
This fire was not my problem. This was not my project.
Let Macbeth and his crones take care of this.
As I sat crouching behind a car, attempting to catch my breath and trying my best to calm my beating heart, I noticed a lack of weight hanging around my neck. My camera! I had left my camera back at the picnic table. I had to go back and get it.
As I ran back towards the quickly growing flames, I saw Jon, still standing in front of the barbeque pit. He looked at me in surprise and asked me where I had gone.
I lied and told him I had gone to search for a water hose or something. While lying, I noticed Jon and his partners hadn’t made much progress in containing the fire.
The two girls had run off to hide in their cars, leaving me feeling slightly better about my actions.
The other guy was scrounging around in his truck looking for something to put the fire out with while Jon danced around the flames, his face growing more and more frightened by the moment.
As Jon hopped around, I spotted the sheet he had used as his cape that was now lying on the floor. I quickly picked it up and threw it upon the fire, hoping to smother it.
Instead of smothering it, the sheet only became additional fuel to an ever-growing fire.
Jon panicked at the site of his mother’s bed sheet going up in flames and I panicked at the sight of the fire consuming the sheet and continuing to spread.
The other guy, decidedly calm, ran up from his car wielding a McDonald’s Styrofoam cup. He doused the fire with day old coffee and jumped back when the drink ignited mid-air.
The fire had taken on a life of its own. We had to stop it before it took our lives.
We tried everything to put the fire out. I tired to smother a portion of it with my foot before my shoelace ignited. The other guy tried kicking dirt on it. Finally Jon saw the proverbial light bulb over his head and ran to the playground, grabbing a bunch of play pebbles from under the slide.
Throwing them on the fire, he showed us that they were our best weapon in our war against the fire.
All too eager to follow the lead of somebody else in this nightmare, I was soon working overtime to smother the fire with the pebbles.
We finished the barbeque pit posthaste before we moved on to the gasoline fire. The gas had been burned out so we no longer had to worry about containing it, merely dowsing it.
We were almost finished putting the fire out when a couple of kids sauntered over our way.
“Dude… where did that fire come from?” one of them asked.
I was not in the mood to explain the situation to two potential witnesses so I tried to shoo them away. If that did not work, I would probably need to quiet them permanently.
“I’m not sure,” I replied. “I just found it here. You should go away.”
As I weighed the likelihood of the playground pebbles effectively smothering the two kids, one of them took a joint out of his jacket and bent over the fire.
“Got a light?” he asked, laughing as he lit his cigarette.
I felt like kicking what was left of the fire into his face.
He stood up, puffing away.
As Jon and I watched the two kids saunter away, I told him that I would not be available for filming for the rest of the evening. Perhaps he would like to reschedule?
We eventually finished filming at a different park, many miles away from our arson adventure.
The next time I picked up the camera, though, I made sure that there was plenty of light in the sky. We would not be playing with fire again.
The end footage was crap, fire or no fire, but I managed to edit something together that got my friend a B in his class.
A week later, I went back to the park.
Nothing was left of the gas can or the sheet, but there was a sign reading, “Arson is a crime. Any reports leading to the arrest of offenders will lead to a substantial reward.”
Realizing that I, a criminal, was returning to the scene of my crime, I quickly turned around and walked away — keeping an eye out for two stoners who may have been able to identify me and already wondering how much it would take to bribe them.
