...Where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain

Watching Disney's Beauty and the Beast at Limestone College last weekend filled my head with singing and dancing cowboys.

I know, there's not a cowboy — singing or otherwise — in a "tale as old as time" about finding love in the unlikeliest of places. It's set, I presume, in a small French village or some otherwise European locale that doesn't lend itself to grazing cattle on the open plains. And the names in Beauty and the Beast sounded French to me, at least. How many Gastons (Gas- Stones) and Lumieres (Loo- Me-Airs) do you know?

It's just that watching this musical, even as an impartial observer who spent most of his time off to the side of a dark Fullerton Auditorium trying to figure out how to take photographs without a flash in low light conditions, unleashed a flood of memories about my brief experience as a dancing cowboy in the musical "Oklahoma" so many years ago in high school.

While I've put on a few — ahem — pounds since then, I can still remember some of the dance steps that were more difficult than you can imagine while wearing somewhat inflexible cowboy boots.

And as weird as it may sound for someone who rarely can remember what they had for breakfast, let alone dinner the previous night, I can still remember many of the lyrics from the Rodgers and Hammerstein score.

And who could forget this dancing cowboy's famous line: "He's thrifty alright!"

I think it came in the middle of the song "Everything's Up to Date in Kansas City," which really had me wondering if Kansas City was all that it was cracked up to be.

Confused about whether I should channel Robert De Niro in "Raging Bull" or Marlon Brando in "On the Waterfront" when it came time for this all-important line — a line so important that this production could not have possibly been a success without it — I think I ended up channeling Shaggy from the Scooby-Doo cartoons.

You know, kind of squeaky and raspy at the same time.

"Zoiks!"

But just as quickly as that flood of memories came back, so too did all the bad memories of having to appear on stage for multiple shows, wearing unmanly pancake makeup, suffering through bronchitis during half of those performances, and nearly breaking the toes of a dancing cowgirl.

And unlike the many dedicated students and faculty from Limestone College's theater and arts programs and the folks from the Gaffney Little Theatre, I remembered how I never wanted to be in "Oklahoma" in the first place.

Chorus, I recall, was one of the many "electives" I got to choose from when filling out my high school schedule. It was an easy "A" on the report card, I had been led to believe, and unlike other courses such as mechanical drafting, it was the second-best chance at a heavily lopsided female-to-male ratio next to home economics.

No one really explained up front, however, that a school year of chorus would culminate in having to appear on stage, dressed as a makeup-wearing cowboy.

And as someone who experienced this, even if only on a high school level, I can vouch for the fact that this is really hard work. Well, not bricklaying-hard where you burn 10,000 calories a day, or assembly line-hard where you risk repetitive motion injuries, but you get the point.

Practice and set building started weeks in advance.

"Do it again," the choral director would yell over and over and over from her piano in a "I can't believe I'm stuck doing this for a living" kind of tone.

And no matter how much we practiced, nothing quite prepared you for when things went wrong.

I think I had a temperature of about 102 degrees during the opening night performance as a bad cold set in. My chest congestion and coughing became so bad the only way I could get through performances was to keep my head over a bathroom sink of steaming hot water between the 10-minute musical numbers.

So tired and sore at one point, I put my head down on a lunch table and when I looked up, the entire dancing cowboy cast was nowhere to be seen. They were on stage dancing, one cowboy short of a proper makeupwearing dancing cowboy formation.

And then there were the technical glitches.

One of the sets on wheels, a mock front porch, was so heavy that its wheels broke through the stage floor during a scene. Despite the best of efforts, it took the might of nearly the entire cast, dancing cowboys and cowgirls alike, to get it removed.

Someone had the bright idea to videotape the performances for a keepsake. Those are the kind of things, my friends, that show up on Youtube.com when you're running for elected office. Like the Ghost of Christmas Past, they do nothing but haunt you.

Of course, I digress as usual.

None of that has anything to do with Disney's Beauty and the Beast at Limestone College, or the performers and stage hands.

Everything they did was quite professional. The sets were beautiful. The music was soaring.

The performers were polished and well cast. And, mercifully, there wasn't a dancing cowboys with bronchitis in sight.