Auditioning for Acceptance

Rick Spurgeon, who had been treated miserably for five years by his middle school and high school classmates, decided to take an unusual audition class to reduce his problem. The title of the class was Auditioning For Acceptance in High School. Its instructor was Hutchins B. Caliber, MA. He had a genial way of relieving awkwardness in his one-on-one tutorial by extending his large hand to Rick for a prolonged shake and saying "Call me Hutch." Hutch's firm belief was that most human encounters, whether people realized it or not, were auditions for continued acceptance, and our lack of awareness of that fact led to many needless setbacks and rejections. "You need to be playing the role well that your intended audience happens to be looking for." There was a preliminary hazing session with Hutch to help Rick shed his natural load of self-consciousness, fear of poor social performance, and timidity. Rick was told to divest himself of clothing and run naked around the apple tree in Hutch's walled in backyard while Hutch sprayed him with a garden hose. Rick admitted afterward that it felt much easier than being pelted by spitballs in Math class. "The water was pure and the fact that it was aimed at me was no judgment on who I really was." In later sessions Hutch taught Rick to suspend his own interests, idiosyncrasies and opinions indefinitely and instead learn to perfectly mirror the viewpoint and behaviour of the student with whom he was interacting. "You have to learn to be a subtle mirror of course, not a conspicuous "yes man." You need to show a slowly building recognition and appreciation of what you're seeing, and slowly taking it in. Offer some signs of initial difference which melt away in the face of what your "kind instructor" is providing. Affirm his or her stance with hesitant, slightly inarticulate gratitude. As the relationship continues, be a willing but not cloying surface to be shaped, eager for the last coat of varnish to be a finished disciple. You will be surprised at how chameleon like you can become in modelling yourself entirely to the specifications of each and every friend you hope to have. You can prove stimulating in the way you emulate and anticipate your "quarry's" moves. I hope you can understand now why I strongly urged you in our first session to get rid of your red checkered pants. Observe closely what your classmates regard as fashionable, and dress accordingly, but not in a manner striving to outshine them. You must be a happy moon to their sun." Rick had almost no athletic ability, so Hutch urged him to play up this fact with merry self-deprecation. "Now how can I possibly top yesterday's performance as worst player on BOTH volleyball teams." Hutch did not overlook the valuable attribute of creating a certain mystique in the midst of so much voluntary servitude. "It won't hurt your cause in the least to suggest, as people get to know you as their mirror, that there is a hint of masculine danger about you, but danger thankfully harnessed to the cause of good. Hutch had Rick watch a certain scene in the Nicolas Cage movie, Con Air, over and over again. Cage was confronting a grinning homicidal maniac who had discovered that Cage was not a prison baddie, like himself, but a softie. He was squeezing and manhandling a stuffed rabbit that Cage had bought for his daughter, who, due to adverse circumstances, he had never laid eyes on. Before Cage backs up his quiet firmness with violent action, he says to his psychotic adversary, with such delicacy, "Put the bunny back in the box." Hutch's lesson about Cage's relevance to Rick's hope for a quality of danger was this. "Where capacity for aggression is concerned, this man is a lethal weapon. But he is also, and most importantly, a Christ figure, who longs to sacrifice himself for any good person in need." Hutch's final lesson.