The Official Salvage Vanguard Theater Blog

So, back in December I had the honor of being asked by Ballet Austin to be Mother Ginger in the Nutcracker, joining the ranks of such local celebrities as Kirk Watson, Lance Armstrong, Robert Rodriguez, and more. How completely cool! I had finally made it!

So, my gig was a matinee for 3rd-graders, making it even more of a “hey I’m doing something really special for my community today” kind of thing. I picked up my daughter Piper from school so she could be backstage for her daddy’s big moment. And away we went–and only five minutes behind schedule.

Ballet Austin had arranged for all the Mother Gingers, who, I will remind the reader, are all volunteers, to have a extra-special parking space right in front of the theater. Now, if you’ve ever tried to park on the UT campus, you know that having reserved parking is pretty much a must. And having it right in front of the building means that you don’t have to waste time hunting down a parking space. Which means that it’s okay if you’re five minutes late.

So, I pull up to the intersection to make a right to go to my special parking spot when a campus cop stops me and tells me I can’t go there. “But I’m Mother Ginger,” I say.

He says, “I don’t care who you are, you can’t drive down there.”

“But I have a special parking space.”

“Look, you can’t drive down there.”

“Seriously, I’m running late. Ballet Austin told me to park there.”

“Do you have proof that you can park there?”

I didn’t. He told me to park in the garage two blocks down.

Now, to park there would have meant that I wasn’t going to make it to my entrance. So I decided to pull around the cop, park in the special spot, and get the Ballet Austin staff to vouch for me, figuring that that would take care of that.

How wrong I was.

Indeed, the Ballet Austin staff vouched for me, but the guy told me that if I walked in the theater without giving him my license and registration, he’d cuff me in front of my daughter. I couldn’t believe it.

So, I gave him the info he needed and he gave me a ticket that required me to appear in court. Not a traffic ticket or parking ticket, but some other kind of ticket for which I needed to make a plea to a judge.

Long story short, I appeared in court this morning. I was so stressed out that I was on the verge of tears–I couldn’t even talk to the judge without my voice breaking. It was weird.

Anyway, the judge decided that while I was technically guilty, I had also acted within reason. So, while the maximum fine could have been $500, he slapped me with the minimum, $1, and 20 hours of community service for a nonprofit. Fortunately, I’ve put in thousands of hours of community service with this little nonprofit theater company I work for, so I got off pretty well, I guess, other than the total stress of having to go to court.

Oh yeah, and I was convicted of a Class C Misdemeanor (Failure to Obey an Officer of the Law), so now it’s on my record and I’m a convicted felon.

The moral: don’t do anything nice for kids unless you plan to pay for it.