almost died...

In my scene study class, I am playing the Infant of Prague. The lady I am in the scene with is a master seamstress, so she threw together the costume. I would rather have gone with no costume, and by that I do not mean I wanted to be naked, 'cause, just no.
I just wanted to have some items that made it clear I was who I was supposed to be. A crown. The little ball thing. Maybe just a robe with some beads on it. No big deal.
She went with kind of a big deal and made a small monstrosity of a costume. I am going to ask Jenn to video the scene presentation night next week and I will present the video here. Both so you can marvel at the enormity of my talent, and also so you get a better understanding of just what this costume looks like.
Pictograph-man will model a facsimile.

See how the costume is all puffy? It should be very clear from the above. Well, it's puffy. Trust me. It's puffy because it is hollow and filled with newspaper to keep it from collapsing. Only, it isn't filled with a small amount of wadded up newspaper so that AIR helps to keep it puffy. She just kind of filled it with newspaper. Flat newspaper. To get enough volume to maintain the puffy, she used A LOT of newspaper. It weighs about 25 pounds.
25 pounds is not a great amount of weight, I know. But it's all in the bottom of the costume. It's weird to have extra weight down near your knees. Couple that with the fact that my lower legs are sticking out of a restricting hole about a foot in diameter, and the whole thing becomes significantly cumbersome and difficult to manage and it throws my center of gravity off.
At one point in the scene, I need to step onto a riser, really a couple of wooden cubes, maybe two feet high, because my character is vain, and is showing off his costume.
I don't remember what happened, but I lost my footing and went off the cube. Somehow, my feet got over my head. I really can't build, in my mind, a sequence of events to get me there, but Pictograph-man will demonstrate the position in which I ended.

See where the head and back of the neck are there on the ground? That was my impact point. All of my 205 pounds came down on that small area.
There was a lot of crunching and cracking on impact and I had a second of total panic as I waited for complete numbness in my limbs or massive pain.
Neither came. I'm a little sore today, but that's it.
What makes it scary, for me, is how fast it happened. I know how to control a fall. I know how to do a Chevy Chase kind of trip and stuff. Later in the scene, I fall backwards over the same riser I had stepped on to and I know how to do it to avoid injury.
If Fate had decided I was going to come down, exactly on the top of my head, surely snapping my neck, there wasn't anything I could have done about it. It was like, blink SLAM! I'm not superhuman. I'm neither Neo nor SpiderMan. I can't control time. I'm soooo mortal.
Gah. I need a good shot of delusion.

I remember when I was a teenager and me and my friends watched Faces of Death. When it was over, I remember thinking that all this time, we humans were walking around thinking we could withstand a lot of damage, but that we were really made of marshmallow and pipe-cleaners and that we could be torn apart by a billion different actions the world could commit in an instant.
It took some significant encouragement to get me out of the recliner I was sitting in.
Falling off this riser was a similar experience.

At the end of the scene, the woman points a gun at me and shoots me several times.
It is shocking to have a gun pointed at you.
It is off-putting to have it go off with loud report, while it is held by some person you don't really know, you haven't had time to investigate the gun for safety and wouldn't know a safe gun from a dangerous gun in any case.
After she shot me, I stumbled backwards and went off the stage into the seats. Again, without really meaning to and with little control.

I feel like I faced Death twice yesterday and count myself lucky to still be walking.