The Audition

Pee Soaked Polyester Pants and Other Indignities

(The following essay is from The Impatient Blogger archives.)

Color Outside of the Lines Digital Self Portrait Copyright 2025 Margot Potter

I attended my first year of Junior High at a public school on the Main Line outside of Philadelphia called Welsh Valley Junior High School. We moved about every two years when I was a kid. This made it hard to make any concrete or lasting friendships. My best and only friend was Erica, but she had transferred to a private school. She was abundantly blessed by the boob fairy, and that made her a target for bullies. We hung out after school and on the weekends. I spent most of my school days flying under the radar. You can become invisible with a little effort.

To say the Main Line is a wealthy area is to vastly understate things. This is the origin of the stereotypical stiff jawed old money snobbery. The offspring of these bastions of high society were referred to as The WASPS (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.) The girls had names like Lisa, Elizabeth, and Jenny and they sported neatly pressed khakis, Docksiders, Izod Lacoste shirts layered underneath matching button downs, and grosgrain ribbons tied around their long, straight, perfect blonde hair. They were the precursors to the Preppies. There was also a very large Jewish population on the Main Line. At Welsh Valley Junior High, there were many daughters of extremely wealthy families who were referred to as Jewish American Princesses or JAPS. These girls had names like Mercedes, Betsy, and Mallory and they wore more au currant designer clothing like Fiorucci t-s, Swedish wooden soled clogs, and flared embellished designer jeans. The popular crowd was divided into the WASPS and the JAPS. The WASPS of the old money well-pedigreed variety would dismissively refer to the JAPS as “Nouveau Riche.” This implied that they had new money and they were ostentatious in the way they spent and displayed their wealth. It also carried more than a whiff of anti-semitic trope.

To say that I fit neither stereotype is to vastly understate things yet again. I had two younger sisters and a single mother who was not receiving a dime of child support. We had food on our table, a roof over our heads, and clothing on our backs, but we did not live in what one might call the lap of luxury. We lived in a tiny two bedroom apartment. We struggled, we survived, and I was deeply grateful to my mother for everything she did to keep it all together.

My grandmother, a crafty seamstress and businesswoman, co-owned a girl’s clothing boutique on the Main Line called Her Royal Highness. It originally featured handcrafted exquisite clothing for little girls, but after a robbery and a move to a more prominent location it became a boutique of fashions for young ladies from high end children’s clothing manufacturers. This was a bonus for me because I had lovely clothes. They were not the clothes that the other kids were wearing, however, which was another source of humiliation at school. I’ve never been much for being trendy anyway, so my funky European fashions suited me just fine.

Regardless of my social ineptitude, I knew I was destined to be on stage. I longed for the smell of the greasepaint and more importantly, the roar of the crowds. When the auditions for Annie Get Your Gun were posted in the hallways, destiny met opportunity. I’d just finished a highly successful run as both Glinda and The Tin Man in our neighborhood production of The Wizard of Oz. Annie Get Your Gun seemed the logical next step.

I showed up on the afternoon of the auditions to an auditorium full of starry-eyed hopefuls. I was wearing a stylish outfit comprised of sky-blue polyester bell bottom pants with a pattern of tiny machine embroidered orange tulips and a matching blue short sleeved polyester t-shirt with an oversized tulip printed in the center. I believe, but don’t quote me on this, I was also wearing navy blue suede wooden soled clogs and white tube socks. It was the epitome of effortless chic, emphasis on effortless.

As the afternoon progressed, my nerves began to get the better of me. These other kids were so pretty, so popular, so talented, and so full of self-confidence. What was I doing there? How could I hope to compete? There were so many questions and thoughts and feelings swirling around making my stomach feel jittery. Then my bladder joined the fun. Ergh.

Eventually my need to pee became overwhelming. Before I could make it out of the stage door, the dam burst. There I was, The Duchess of Dorkdom, in a pee-soaked pair of sky blue polyester bell bottoms. I had two choices, bow my head in shame and skulk out the back door or scrape up my last bastion of dignity and audition anyway. Destiny called. I took the walk of shame to center stage, held my head high, and auditioned. I was so nervous my legs felt like rubber and I could barely squeak out a note. I was politely thanked for my time by a voice in the dark and slinked offstage to find the nearest bathroom.

I did not get a role in the show. They could not see the incredible talent that was hiding under my pee-soaked polyester ensemble. Due to some pity on the part of the director, I was given the most important duty of page turner to the show organist. I took this role very seriously. Each night when we took our bow, I swore to myself that next time I was going to be onstage.

The next year, at a new school, I got the leading role in their production of The Pajama Game. I went on to play many of the greatest roles in the theatrical canon in the years that followed. I’m still not a fan of auditions, but I’m pleased to report that I have never peed myself onstage again. I did once leak copious amounts of breast milk in a very sexy evening gown before going on stage to perform a Cabaret act...but that is a story for another day.

The moral of this story, if you want something bad enough, not even a pee-soaked pair of polyester pants or a breast milk soaked evening gown can keep you from it.

xoxo, Margot