In high school, I spent a lot of my time wearing a WWJD bracelet, singing along to showtune CD’s in my bedroom and chatting online in Broadway chatrooms hogging the phone line with my parents’ brand new internet connection.

(My first screen name on AOL was L24601rent – L for Laura, 24601 for Jean Valjean’s prison number and rent for the musical Rent, ‘No Day But Today’, etc. And there you go, I have single-handedly wowed you with my adolescent awkwardness.)

As such, I didn’t have a lot of time for kissing boys.

Much of what I knew about sex came from surreptitiously reading all the Stephen King novels from the school library in junior high. I’m not sure my mother knew I was reading them and I’m not sure she knew that along with being completely horrific and disturbing, Stephen King novels each contain a few graphic sex scenes.

My mom repeatedly tried to have the puberty/sex talk with me over the course of a few years (she even went to the religious ed library at church and brought home a movie or two and a copy of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves) and each time she tried, I basically put my hands over my ears and ran screaming from the room.

What can I say? I didn’t need my mother to explain to me the gross details of THAT. And thus, all I ever knew about sex, I learned from Cujo.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I had a callback for the spring musical, Grease. My theater director in high school took his art very seriously. This was no goof around high school cheeseball acting program. THIS WAS MUSICAL THEATER. And damnit if he didn’t require us to commit to showing up to every single rehearsal, act like a freaking grown up instead of the children we were and learn some self-discipline.

I love that guy.

Initial auditions were held privately one-on-one but callbacks were held in front of everyone else who was called back.

This was to ensure that we could handle the material appropriately in front of our friends other people.

As such, my theater director always chose the most difficult or potentially embarrassing (on a high school level) scenes from the play to use at the callback.

If there was a kissing scene, you better believe he wanted to see if you could mash your lips against a fellow classmate’s without laughing out loud or getting uncomfortable.

SO PICTURE IT:

I am fifteen years old.

I have never kissed a person romantically.

Everything I know about kissing is gleaned from It.

I am instructed to get onstage and act out the scene from Grease with Sandy and Danny in the car at the drive-in where he tries to make out with her and she freaks out and runs away.

IN FRONT OF ALL THESE OTHER PEOPLE THAT I KNOW, I AM SUPPOSED TO HAVE MY FIRST KISS.

WITH A HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR WHO HAD A SERIOUS GIRLFRIEND AND WAS, LET ME BE HONEST, NOT VERY ATTRACTIVE.

Kissing a boy for the first time is one thing.

Kissing a boy for the first time in front of a group of people and several adults is quite another.

I don’t remember much about the kiss itself. I do remember that it felt super weird and I didn’t know which way to turn my head. I also remember that my friend Jackie was sitting watching in the audience and she LAUGHED OUT LOUD WHEN IT HAPPENED SO THANK YOU FOR THAT WHEREVER YOU ARE.

And then it was over.

And I got the part.

And I kept having to kiss that senior again and again during performances IN FRONT OF MY PARENTS and he would eat tunafish beforehand ON PURPOSE.

Alas.

That is the story of my first kiss.

You’re welcome.