A tell-all exposé about my close encounter with People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive

A blatant piece of click-bait that will nevertheless deliver

In honor of my 20th year running the very small theater program on the very small island I call home, I’ve decided to finally share (in writing; my friends have heard this story plenty of times in the last 26 years) a shocking, eyebrow-raising, gasp-inducing tale from my first year of college.

CW: Blood, tooth stuff, bad theater

It was 1998. I was a freshman at an institution of higher education whose name is also a color. My mission in life was clear: double major in theater and biology, then move to New York City and hit the big time, or become a research scientist if that didn’t pan out. I auditioned for the first play I saw advertised. It was by Tennessee Williams, about whom I had a whole complicated thing. It wasn’t one of the good Tennessee Williams plays, though. Nobody would be yelling STELLAAAAA or talking about blue roses. It was Camino Real, which you may never have heard of, because it’s not great.

But I didn’t yet know that. I auditioned, got a part as a sort of background extra street urchin, and talked my way into composing some music that I would then also perform live during the show. I was 17, arrogant, and eager to prove myself.

We rehearsed. The director was faculty member, a theater icon whom I worshipped and feared, and who had a deep paranoia of on-stage injury. Like most casts, we bonded somewhat over our shared and puzzling experience with the Casablanca-like script, laden with archetypical characters and fantasy violence. I sang, played the trumpet, played the recorder, and did at some point fall asleep onstage because it was my freshman year of college, and between my 8 a.m. chemistry lecture and my general excitement at no longer living in the woods in Maine, sleep wasn’t a high priority.

We were scheduled for an eight-day run, two long weekends in late autumn. We had good, though probably slightly confused, audiences. I felt I was part of something, that this might be a stepping stone into the glamorous acting career (or gritty, bohemian life as a waitress) I had imagined.

During the first matinee, at the end of the second act, I sat on the edge of a platform, honking away on the trumpet as a hectic bit of stage action played out. Towards the end of the scene, a sophomore in the cast, tall and broad and wearing a black lacy dress, had to roll across the stage. We had done it dozens of times. But on this fateful day, one or both of us must have been a few inches off our blocking, because all six feet three inches of him smacked right into the bell of my trumpet.

I heard a crunch. I tasted blood. I spat - a shard of tooth landed next to me on the stage. Two roads diverged: I could cry, scream, run off the stage, and invest myself fully in life on the big end of the microscope, OR I could prove what a macho little theater kid I was, and keep playing.

I kept playing. My lip swelled in the trumpet mouthpiece and my tongue ached. Mercifully, the act ended moments later. I ran down into the green room to find the stage manager, a student. I was briefly the center of attention.

“Here’s the plan,” the stage manager said, handing me a cold pack wrapped in a towel. “Ice during intermission. Go out there and play act three. And NEVER tell the director that this happened.”

I assessed the damage. My left frontal incisor was a jagged spike. My lip had split and had bloated to the size of a blackberry. My tongue had a line of blood from where I had bitten it. But I was young, I was strong, and nothing would get between me and my dreams.

I played the third act, buoyed by the sympathy of my cast mates, the social capital I believed I’d scored, the smell of the grease paint, the roar of the crowd. In the three days we had off before the next show, I got myself to a good dentist and got a very convincing fake half-a-tooth. My lip and tongue healed enough that I could make out with the red-haired fellow trumpet player I’d been tailing in the marching band and play the next long weekend of shows.

Several years later, during which I finished my theater degree, left the biology department for the music department, moved to Boston for lack of a better post-graduate plan, and sold my soul to rock ‘n’ roll, I saw a familiar looking face grinning from the cover of Boston Magazine.

“Son of a gun,” I thought. “That’s the guy who knocked my tooth out.”

It was John Krasinski, at the very beginning of his meteoric rise to “The Office”, A Quiet Place, marriage to Mary Poppins, and now, People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive.

Congratulations, ya big lug.

We’ve come a long way since that production of Camino Real, the first college play for both of us. We have vibrant lives in the performing arts, attractive and talented spouses, and the respect and admiration of our audiences. His is just exponentially larger.

My close encounter with fame might have left me with a broken tooth, but it also left me with a good story. Mazel tov, John Krasinski!