Something's Comin', Something Great

by Kristoffer Law (Canada)

A leap into the unknown USA

Something’s Comin’, Something Great by Kristoffer Law I’d been to Disneyland once before. For some reason I could never understand, these sorts of trips always seemed to begin at some ungodly hour, like four-thirty in the morning. My father once surmised it’s so you can beat the crowds. I’m not quite so sure. Traipsing through an unfamiliar airport before the sun has even cracked the horizon always felt to me like a unique sort of test to endure and overcome. Everyone is bleary-eyed at that time of day. Some are hopped up on caffeine, others on one form or other of anti-nausea medicine. Me? I was working hard to stay coherent after spending an excited night not sleeping. I was also going over my checklist in my head, making sure I hadn’t forgotten anything important. Passport...toothbrush...a book to read on the flight so I wasn’t stuck with the in-flight magazine or worse, the side of the airsick bag. All double-checked and accounted for. Then I remembered: gum! As usual, it’s always some small, incidental thing which you forget and have to replace at the last minute. Like I said, I’d made this journey once before before with my family, back in 1989. Five years later and I was with a group of my peers. A school band trip. A week in April in the kingdom of the world’s most famous mouse, chock full of workshops and performances. With our Concert Band being a smaller one, the Theater students were invited to come along as well. All told we numbered about eighty boisterous teenagers and five adult chaperones. I looked around at my classmates. For the most part we were well-behaved, but a week away from home? I didn’t envy our chaperones. We landed at LAX without much incident and made our way to the Marriott hotel around four that first afternoon. Certain details blend together in my mind after so many years away, however I distinctly recall the elevators being rather unsettling with their reflective gold-lacquer finish, but perhaps my memory embellishes a little too much. We gathered the next morning in the lobby of the hotel and prepared for the day’s events. A day in the park! No workshops, no classes, no practice sessions! Seems our instructors understood us better than we understood ourselves. Until we got our fill of Tomorrow-land, Toon Town, and Space Mountain, no amount of bargaining could have convinced any of us to focus on anything remotely educational. We had only one edict: behave ourselves. I had no idea of the bombshell which would soon be hurled my way. A bit of background: every year our Theater class put on a musical as our year-end performance. We had come up big the previous year with a production of Little Shop of Horrors, and 1994 was slated to be our biggest yet with a production of West Side Story. With a supporting cast of sixty and myself in the lead role of Tony, West Side was proving to be our most challenging production to date. While we waited for the tour buses, my Theater and Band directors approached me with a slight change of plan in the itinerary. How would I feel about performing Something’s Comin’ from the show the next morning? “Sure,” I said. “No problem.” Only one thing puzzled me. Which one of the workshops would I be singing at? When I asked the question, I was greeting with a pair of smiles, which only puzzled me further. “You wouldn’t be singing at one of the workshops,” my Band director informed me. “We were wondering if you’d be willing to sing on the Main Stage,” my Theater director finished. Wait. What? I don’t know how they’d managed to arrange it, but that’s how I stepped on the Disneyland Main Stage and performed one of my signature songs from the show without rehearsal or any preparation at all. A leap into the unknown, indeed. There’s only one thing I would have changed, if I could go back in time and do so. I would have preferred to sing Maria instead.