Editors’ Choice
How Dead Dogs and A-Level Geometry Helped Me Realize I Could Do Anything By Jimmy Bowler
Being humble is very difficult when you were gifted at birth with unfathomable will and talent. That’s an exaggeration, obviously, but that’s the type of attitude you need to have when you’re majoring in a field like theater. It’s a cold world out there. You get cast in one lead for a one-act in high school, and suddenly you believe you can take on the world. Optimistically? Maybe you can. Maybe you were a step above the rest, landing a starring position after being pitted against a class of thirty people who all wanted what you were after. If you’re anything like me, however, you feel that the more logical reason was that you just got lucky. When I set foot at UCA for the first time, the pressure could have swallowed me whole. I was an underclassman. For the first time, I had to compete for acting positions with people who had 148
years’ worth of college-level theatric ability under their belts. By what can only be described as a miracle, I managed to snag the role of Mushnik in the Spring production of Little Shop of Horrors, and even then, I was just filling a spot that had been dropped. So come sophomore year, I had one mainstage acting credit under my belt: an old Jewish man from a comedy musical about a man-eating plant. I was proud of it, too. But there was something in the back of my mind saying that it was just a fluke, that I only made it by the skin of my teeth. Impostor syndrome, right? Anyway, the announcement had arrived for our 2022-2023 season. The Spring production would be a stage adaptation of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. It’s an inspiring story about a teenage boy on the autism spectrum who stumbles upon
