I have always loved the performing arts. My career as a volunteer stagehand at The Grand Opera House in my hometown of Stewsburg climaxed the night that I had to make a nasty, semi-public poop in the lone toilet just off the stage. We subsequently remodeled the basement into nice dressing and bath facilities; but in the old days, the single backstage crapper was a sort of "stall" on the stage level. The walls didn't go up very far. You had only minimal visual privacy and none hiding your sounds and smells. My only consolation is that over the 100+ years of our beloved Opera House, everybody from Caruso to Houdini to Elvis must have used this thunderjug. (Yes, girls, ELVIS -- unless he shit on the floor of his dressing room, which I heard he was wont to do.)
On the fateful night, my supper had been three sandwiches, a large order of onion rings, and a Dr. Pepper from a local place called the "Pig-'N-Whistle." (Can you think of a better name for a greasy barbecue joint? Early Truth in Advertising!) This greasy stealth bomb almost immediately hit my small intestine and went into nuclear meltdown.
We were hosting a touring company of Oklahoma. They had their own stage crew so I was just the resident in-house techie, and I didn't have much to do but sit around and get more and more miserable as everything in my lower tract prepared to head for the exit. I wanted to leave, but it was my job to stay and lock up.
During the first act, my bowels were rumbling and churning like a speech from von Ribbentrop to the Reichstag; by intermission I felt like I had appendicitis and was doubled over in pain upstairs on the bridge, praying for a fartulary release. Finally, somebody did shout "fire!" in the crowded theatre of my intestines. An immense blast of gas bubbled towards the grid (the natural convection of the building drew air from the auditorium and wings across the stage and upward into the flyloft). I was able to make my way back downstairs for the finale (so I thought).
Would that I had held my wind. The release of the gas seemed to ignite deep within me a pyroclastic lava flow that tore through my lower tract with all the inexorable force of the Johnstown flood. As this tsunami of shit hurtled towards the frail restraint of my anal sphincter, I knew it would be curtains for me well before the curtain calls for the show. With my hand clenching my butt, I waddled to the privy. Just as Curly was beginning his big finale number, I somehow managed to get the door closed and my pants open. As Curly onstage was singing, "Oklahoma / where the wind comes sweeping down the plain," my tush hit the toilet and something came sweeping out of me that sounded and smelled like you were pouring a barrel of rotten onions off a tall building onto a dead pig carcass lying in wet cement. This was not the most disgusting shit I have ever taken (that story will come later); but it was definitely the #2 of #2's.
Of course, the open-roofed "stall" simply acted like both a megaphone and a wind tunnel, and as Curly sang, "where the waving wheat / can sure smell sweet," the sound and stench of my humiliating bowel burst was wafted by the building's natural convection right through the wings and across the stage.
I am told that a significant number of this professional cast broke character and looked offstage (maybe they thought a bomb had gone off); but I just sat there, groaning out my colonic confessional to St. John, until well after the curtain rang down. Even though this was, at the time, the only offstage pot, nobody bothered me (maybe they were waiting for the Coroner to get there); I am told that they just held it until the audience had left and then went to the lobby bathrooms.
I never knew. I stayed in there and shat and cried until the touring company was out of the way, and then I crept out and did my locking-up duties as inconspicuously as possible.
I regret to report that this Gobbligato for the Butt Flute has been, to date, my most significant contribution to the performing arts.