I've been involved in community theatre in my hometown ever since I was a little girl, but I never had to do a stage kiss until I landed a leading role in "Hairspray Jr." about two years ago. The closest I had ever come to doing one was fake kissing someone on the check, but never on the lips.

The director for "Hairspray Jr." respected my wish to save my first kiss for someone I actually wanted to give it to, but since a kiss between my character and one of the leading men was required for a song, we decided to do a stage kiss, much to the disappointment of the assistant director, who actually wanted a real kiss.

(For those of you who don't know how stage kisses work, one way to do it is to place your hand on your partner's face like you're caressing it gently, but resting your thumb on their lips. When you go in for the kiss, your lips touch your thumb instead of their lips. There are other ways to do a stage kiss, but this is the way that we did it for the show.)

Anyways, I was a bit worried at first to do the stage kiss because the boy I had to do it with was a bit of a player. Over the years that I've known him, he's dated at least forty different girls, no joke. (Although now that I'm thinking about it, it's probably been more than forty, because our class has over 450 students and he goes through girls pretty quickly.)  I was nervous that he would try something, but luckily he didn't. We got along, and he always seemed concerned about if I was comfortable with something we were going together. We actually made a pretty good team.

But then.

On the closing night, one of the younger girls in our cast shyly came up to me and whispered in my ear that the boy was going around and telling everyone that he "was going to put the moves on me" and actually kiss me. During our stage kiss, he was the one who had to hold my face and place his thumb on my lips, so he had control over if our lips actually met or not.

Needless to say, I was MAD. He knew that I didn't want to actually kiss him and that I valued first kisses. Besides, I knew that his girlfriend, a legitimately sweet girl who actually liked him a lot, was in the crowd that night. She would be so upset if it was an actual kiss.

And so I hatched a plot. The stage kiss wasn't until the second half of Act Two, so I had a while to plan for the moment. When the time came for the kiss, he took my face in his hand like he was supposed to, but he didn't put his thumb over my lips. Right before his lips touched mine, I folded my lips in so all he would get was skin, and I stepped on his foot. HARD. He almost squealed like a pig, but he managed not to, staying in character as he pulled away, a look of confusion and shock in his eyes. The crowd, of course, went wild over our "kiss", while the ensemble girls behind us who knew what my plan was giggled wildly. It was amazing.

After curtain call and strike, the boy texted me, apologizing for "the almost-kiss", saying that his thumb just missed. He also told me that he was also saving his first kiss for his girlfriend, and that he was planning on kissing her at the Winter Ball next weekend. I told him that I believed and forgave him, rolling my eyes as I sent those texts. The very next day, he broke up with his girlfriend and got together with the girl who played Amber.

The moral of this story is to not let douchebags "put the moves" on you, and if they try to, make them regret it.