I guess I finally need to explain what I've been alluding to Re: "Once More With Feeling"
Many of you have heard at least part of this, and a few of you were actually there for bits, but here's the full story.
I was a high school junior, all nerdy and spazzy and a couple of fuzzy pink sweaters and a bottle of hair dye from actually being Season 2 Willow. My after-school activity of choice, though, was a bit less saving-the-world-from-demons and a bit more sitting-in-a-hole-under-the-auditorium-stage-and-creating-M&M-embargoes-(and-occasionally-playing-flute,-but-mostly-the-M&Ms-thing).
See, I was in the pit orchestra for the school performance of Crazy for You*, which was 42 different kinds of wonderful, but unfortunately occurred during a very stressful and emotionally confusing time in my life. Among all of the usual 16-year-old girl drama, That One Superhero Team had grown apart because of class schedules and after-school commitments and expanding social circles, I was trying to shake abandonment issues and build new friendships, and my first attempt at a relationship was _still_ dragging on because I was an idiot. And then, suddenly, it was closing night of Crazy, and the one purely enjoyable thing in my life at the time was over. So, when magpieinthesky asked me if I wanted to go to IHOP after, I didn't ask questions, I just jumped at the opportunity to spend some time with good friends.
It didn't dawn on me until we got there that this wasn't a small gathering of people I knew well, this was a _cast party_. Which is, y'know, when the ENTIRE cast and crew of a show gets together to blow off some steam after it wraps. I found myself right in the middle of a too-small room with a handful of good friends and about five dozen people whose names I *might* have been able to put to faces, the majority of whom either had no idea that I was even involved in the show or didn't think I should have been there because I was just the flutist**. And it lasted _forever_. Long enough for me to have two complete emotional breakdowns right there in the middle of the room with scads of people either trying to ignore me or asking if I was okay***, like people do when there's a crazy chick bawling into her French toast in the middle of a party. I was exhausted, it was late, and I just wanted to go home. So, when one of my sister's friends asked if I wanted a ride home, I didn't ask questions, I just jumped at the opportunity to get out of there.
It didn't dawn on me until we got to the car that it wasn't his parents who had come to get him, it was his older brother. Much older. Like, he graduated at least a couple of years before I even started school. And he was a creepoid. Like, Jonathan/Warren/Andrew level creepoid. Only less intelligent, less ambitious, and, frankly, scarier. I had to move several fast food bags - most with god-knows-how-old food still in them - just to have room for my feet on the floor of his station wagon. And then, once in, I discovered that there was only one seatbelt latch in the front, so I had to be buckled to him.
Let me say that again. I was buckled TO this guy. My seatbelt was threaded through his and into his buckle. I would have had to have leaned closer to him to have been able to get away from him if I had needed to.
It was already 1 AM at this point, well past my curfew. Or it would have been past my curfew if I had HAD a curfew. I never did anything, never left the house, never went places with friends, never pushed the boundaries my parents never had to set. It's not that I was an angel child; far from it. I just chose to rebel at home by being snarky or staying online way too late or refusing to come out of the basement and be social with my family. Every once in a very long while, I would go to a movie with friends or out to dinner with the guy that I was technically dating. And here I was at 1 AM, at least an hour from home, buckled to a much older guy that I only knew enough about to be extremely frightened by. Assuming he for some reason decided not to rape and kill - or kill and rape; I was pretty sure it could have gone either way - me, my dad was probably sitting on the front porch with a shotgun, ready to ground and/or kill me, and probably my driver, as well, once he saw that it was the creepoid from down the street instead of bratnatch 's mother, like it was supposed to have been. My parents would think I had deliberately led them to believe that I was just going to spend a couple of hours with Mags and Brittany and Molly and Mirm so that I could instead stay out all night doing unspeakable things with all of those..._theater people_.
There was another guy in the car, one of Kelly's other friends. Nice enough chap, if a skosh odd, who I was initially happy to see, in so much as I figured a witness' presence would keep me alive at least until we dropped him off. But, since his house was in the middle of the bloody Ranch Club****, every moment he was still in the car was another moment further from my home and closer to my being grounded for all eternity.
I was absolutely petrified. Tensed up, touching as little of that filthy car as possible, staring straight ahead, only speaking when directly addressed, trying not to look at the clock as much as possible...which of course made it impossible to look at anything else. And my driver, being a creepoid, noticed my discomfort, commented frequently on it, and spent the entire ride when he wasn't singing along to the CD he had chosen for the trip trying to play Let's Get Robin to Loosen Up. Anyone who knows me knows that this is the best way to make me even more uncomfortably determined to be uncomfortable, and these poles were definitely in the right-half plane. Then, to my horror and by the universe's gleeful confluence of unfortunate events, the clock ticked over from 1:59...to 3:00.
IT WAS FREAKIN' DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME.
It was Daylight Saving Time, it was 3 AM, I was in the middle of the Ranch Club and only going deeper into it, I was BUCKLED TO A TWENTY-SOMETHING CREEPOID, we would soon be getting rid of the last witness who wasn't related to the soon-to-be murder/rape suspect, and my parents were going to SLAUGHTER me. How in the WORLD did I get in this position?! These things didn't happen to nerdly, reclusive Good Girls. My only truly bad choices were not asking for a little more clarification here and there and not going back into the IHOP when I saw who the driver was. It's not like I had consciously decided to go have fun all night just because I was a teenager and wanted to raise hell in an IHOP. It's not like I had fun AT ALL. I had had a truly miserable night, and I was going to get grounded for it.
And the soundtrack to my night of horror? "Once More With Feeling." Sarah Michelle Gellar, Anthony Stewart Head, James Marsters, and the Creepoid singing along with all of it. There's nothing inherently sinister about the music, but neither is it particularly happy. The singing is not exactly top-notch******, there is a distinct preponderance of minor chords, and all of my mental images of the show at that point involved gothy-looking teenagers brooding and smouldering at the camera*******. Combined with the fact that I honestly thought I might die that night, it absorbed the atmosphere of menace and danger and came out sounding twisted and unsettling. It looped at least twice before I got home that night, and "I've Got a Theory" was repeated several times with the Creepoid singing with particular gusto during Anya's interlude, cementing that song especially in my mind as Unpleasant and Panic-Inducing.
When I finally got home sometime after 4 AM, I found that my father had gone to bed several hours earlier and my mother had fallen asleep on the couch just as she did every night when I was in high school. Her only comment when she let me in the house was, "Huh. It's a little later than I expected you. There's leftovers in the fridge if you want them. I'll see you in the morning."
And that was the last I heard about it from my parents until a year or so later when I told Mum how freaked I had been that night. "We figured, you're a good kid and you deserved a night of teenage shenanigans," she explained. My parents had to grant me permission to be a rebel, and I squandered it on being miserable and worried...just in case there was ever any doubt about my Willow-ness.
* Which originally starred Harry Groener, aka Mayor Richard Wilkins. Which just goes to show, Dirk Gently was right.
** It's weird, the relationship between a pit orchestra and a cast. At least techies are _seen_ by actors and are in the same sorts of classes and whatnot. I'm half convinced many of the actors thought they were singing and dancing to a recording.
*** I agree so completely with Buffy and Cordelia about the senselessness of this question, especially when asked by people who don't actually know or care about you and are therefore obviously just asking so as to make it seem to themselves and others that they are Good People who Care.
**** For those of you lucky enough to have not experienced the joy that is the Ranch Club, this is NOT, as you might imagine, a posh gated community, but instead a snakes' nest of twisted roads and low-income housing****. If you don't know exactly what you are doing when you head in there, there is every possibility that you will never find your way back out. Ever.
***** To be fair, there are some livable areas on the outskirts, but the middle is not anywhere I would want to be after dark.
****** With some obvious exceptions: Emma Caulfield and Amber Benson (ESPECIALLY Amber Benson) are surprisingly good, and Anthony Stewart Head could sing Hallmark greeting cards and have me all melty.
******* Seriously, what the HELL is up with all of those publicity shots of them in all black? Willow spends most of her time in Muppet-skin sweaters, and I don't think Xander owns anything that isn't plaid or Hawaiian print.