All science students have had this thought at least once, even the nice ones, even the few that don’t have an intellectual superiority complex: I could crush a drama slash screen studies minor between my thunder thighs, like a watermelon on New Year’s Eve. But life adores to prove us wrong, and it does it in the most unexpectedly brutal ways.
Let’s take an imaginary computer science student, and throw them into a random drama class. Since they are a computer science student, statistically they are a white male with a bland name like Dave, or Dan. It really doesn’t matter. This imaginary Dave, Dan, or Danyle is about as interesting as a desert. To pick his distribution credit Dan made the rooki-est of all mistakes and threw a dart at a class list, instead of doing the sensible thing and looking up the top 10 bird courses at Mt. A.
This is how he ended up in an upper year Act-itorial, walking into the beautiful Purdy Crawford Centre of the Arts, with its high ceilings and modern architecture. Dan couldn’t help but be amazed, and in awe, of all the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090’s the compsci department could buy for the amount of money sunk into this fancy art shed. Yah, Dan’s that kind of asshole.
Brushing off his rampant superiority complex, Dan pulled his head out of his ass just long enough to find the classroom. The ever locatable theatre room. Which was his first hint that he should feel out of his comfort zone in the realm of the theatre kids. Dun, dun, dunnn…
Dan missed all the warning signs. Including the students that kept singing everything they said instead of talking normally. Dan sat down in an inconspicuous spot, pulled out his computer to do whatever computer science students do. I want to say, surfing GitHub, and looking for his coding rivals repository so he can make something more impressive. But as Dan waited for the boring syllabus explanation to start, to hear that he would get to grade himself, to get his participation marks for the day, and for the class to be over, he got a bit of a shock. Class was in session, and he was about to learn how hard those participation marks are to earn.
The professor stood in front of the class and called them down saying that they should start with a fun little act-ivity, before calling it a day. Unfortunately the professor’s love of puns was only matched by his love for the stage. The eyeroll-inducing act-ivity was simple. Everybody wrote down one thing they did in the past week on a slip of paper, and one feeling on another. Each went into separate bowls and they were mixed up. Everyone would get both an action and a feeling at random. Then they would have to act it out.
Dan wrote down “making a sandwich” and “bored,” hoping he would get his own papers. When it was his turn the first part of his plan went off without a hitch, he got making a sandwich, easy enough. Even if he got an emotion like sadness it should be pretty easy, right? Wrong! His card had one word, horny.
That’s how Dan was standing on a stage asking himself the one question that we all eventually must ask ourselves: How on god’s green earth do you even make a smut sandwich?
After a great deal of blushing and shuffling around, Dan resignindly started to act. Consoling himself by thinking that it was better than pretending to stick his head in the fridge and saying, “step bro I’m stuck.” Dan pretended to open a peanut butter jar, imagining he had boulder shoulders in place of his scrawny little sticks. Then he stuck a finger into the jar and sensually licked it. Deciding that if he was in for a penny, he might as well be in for a pound, Dan said in his most rugged tone, “YUM!”
As Dan continued his performance he began to sweat from all the sexy shoulder rolling and smoldering that he was doing. By the end he had forgotten about the audience and was solely dedicated to the art of smut sandwichery. Dan may have come in with his nose a bit high in the air, but once he left he was well on his way to becoming a devout theater kid.