I don’t know about teaching, but I’m pretty good at being bossy

One of the traits I was always qualified as having when I was a young girl (ah, who am I kidding? This is a quality I’ve been described with even into my adulthood) is bossiness. When I was quite small, my parents thought perhaps I would be a lawyer or a teacher, the way I commanded my sister and our friends in play. Of course, I was often a bit mean about it…so I don’t know why teacher crossed their minds, but there you have it.

At any rate, I am still quite bossy, even today. Even as an adult, I like to tell people what to do and am satisfied when they go off to do what I so wisely commanded of them. So, here I am a teacher. And I tell people what to do, and they do it.

And I don’t enjoy it.

(Turns out that teaching isn’t just all telling people what to do. Who knew?)

Tonight Robert and I went up to his community college and saw their production of Tartuffe. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s about a religious hypocrite (Tartuffe) who swindles a guy out of house and home by his charming, smooth-talking ways. The students did an admirable job at the play, but it was severely cut (curtain rose at 7 p.m. and fell at 8 p.m.), and there were moments where I thought to myself:

Gee…if only they knew that that bit they just said was funny, they might have delivered it this way.

So, I’m left wondering this. If I don’t want to be a director and I don’t want to be a theater teacher, do you think I could have a job as the bossiest person in the auditorium, just telling people how to deliver their lines and why the jokes are funny?

What’s that job called?

(P.S. You might have noticed that this is an extremely late, extremely short post. I spent the entire day working on a draft of my introduction that I am e-mailing to my director tomorrow morning after a couple more edits. It’s crunch time; I’ll explain more later.)