Senior writes Frequent Friday Based on his Racing Experiences

He paces.

Senior Sean Bailey’s tattered jeans drag beneath the heels of his bare feet as he walks back and forth on the dim stage of the little theater. He clutches a flimsy spiral notebook in his right hand, periodically looking down at the notes sprawled across the thin blue lines.

Bailey is running a rehearsal for his self-written “mockumentary” comedy Frequent Friday—“24: the Documentary” premiering April 15.

He walks over to sophomore Beth Liu as she asks a question, holding up the yellow highlighted script.

As he intuitively runs his right hand through his unshorn blond hair, he traces over her lines with his other hand. The other cast members gather in pairs of two, studying and repeating their lines, their voices becoming a continuous string of emotions.

Once a mere idea in Bailey’s mind, “24: the Documentary” is slowly taking shape on stage.

Going into his freshman year at Rockhurst, Bailey couldn’t have cared less about where his life was headed.

“I was kind of one of those kids that was like ‘f*** the world! I don’t give a s***!’” Bailey said. “I just thought I was this piece of s*** that didn’t know anything.”
Bailey was diagnosed with ADHD that same year.

English class had always been a struggle for Bailey when it came to writing.
“It’s like; I could picture anything in my mind—‘rain dropping down on a woman’s head’,” Bailey said. “But it never turned out the same way I pictured it when I put it down on paper.”

His teachers and counselors would regularly tell him he wasn’t working hard enough or wasn’t focused, and he began to believe them
It’s 7:00 p.m. on Feb. 3, opening night of East’s production of “Beauty and the Beast.”

The curtains part in Dan Zollars Auditorium. Senior Emily Welter saunters on stage as junior Nathan Are, playing Belle’s father totters towards her, pulling along his most recent invention.

The audience watches the metallic blue, green, and red cardboard sprockets turn in opposite directions on the pentagon shaped object that follows him. Golden-orange tassels shimmer as they graze the surface of the stage.

Bailey hunches down inside his creation, regulating the movements and turns, bringing the cardboard entity to life.

Just months before the show, musical director Tom DeFeo approached Bailey, asking if he would build Maurice’s invention. Bailey had had previous involvement in East theater, being cast in productions such as “Grapes of Wrath” and as Mr. Gibbs in “Arsenic and Old Lace” his junior year when he switched from Rockhurst to East, but this would give him the chance to work behind the scenes.

He researched what other theater productions had created for the invention, but Bailey wasn’t inspired.

Days of designing and redesigning occupied Bailey’s time. He had never put so much effort into anything in his life, but for once he wanted something to be proud of. Something to call his own.

Bailey thought up the idea for his show after watching a documentary on a 24-hour rally car race in southern France.

“I just noticed how they made it seem so dramatic and unearthly, but when it really comes down to it, it’s just a race,” Bailey said.

With the unconstructive negativity bounding him at Rockhurst, Bailey initiated a pursuit in rally car racing. He looked to it as a hobby, something for him to simply achieve.

Bailey changed schools his junior year, seeing more potential to expand his mind and ideas at East.

His life had gotten to a point where Bailey needed to change everything about himself. He needed to do something.

This attitude carried on when he was diagnosed with Dyslexia the summer before his senior year.

As he sat in the doctor’s office after being diagnosed, Bailey picked up a pamphlet written towards people with learning disabilities. He opened to the first page—“FAMOUS PEOPLE WITH LEARNING DISABILITIES” stared back at him in bold letters. Bailey scrolled his eyes down the list—“Leonardo da Vinci” – popped up halfway down. Bailey went home and began researching da Vinci.

“Da Vinci was capable of incredible things,” Bailey said. “From that, I realized that if I just had some faith in myself and some motivation I could do things that nobody else could.”

With the background from three years of studying rally racing on his own, Bailey began to write. He gathered inspiration from watching racing on TV and the 1977 hockey comedy film “Slapshot.” He wanted to incorporate the Hanson brothers from the film to bring three ridiculously wacky characters to his show. Bailey also poured aspects of himself into the characters, while still creating a different person for each.
When theater directer Brian Capello first saw the rough draft of Bailey’s show, he was impressed.

“It showed in the writing that this was something that he knew a lot about,” Capello said. “It was well thought out and fun to read.”

Bailey takes the audience through the 24-hour race, following a team of mechanics working against their own struggles for GM as they attempt to overcome various obstacles to win the race.

Bailey wanted more than just comedic relief to come from his show. Beneath the quirkiness and laughs, he wanted to incorporate a moral into his story.
“I think it kind of teaches a lesson,” Bailey said. “Like Da Vinci would say: Who are we to say what is possible and impossible?”

The little theater is dark with a soft buzz filling the room—the only source of sound streaming is Bailey’s fingers tapping against the desk in Cappello’s office. He looks beyond the window connecting the office and the back of the theater, twisting the grey nob attached to the dashboard that controls the stage lights.

It’s 12:30 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon. Bailey is perfecting the light set up for his frequent friday, using a technique he calls “barn doors” to offset the light to only hit the right side of the stage.

After high-school, Bailey will take a year off to really figure out what what he wants to do.

“I want to race, I want to build things, I want to act,” Bailey said. “There are a billion things I’d like to do and maybe one day I’ll eventually get everything done, but I don’t think that will happen because I’ll just want to do more.”

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To watch Bailey talk about his passion for racing, click here.