cruzin' for a bruisin'

Ted Cruz Once Ruined a School Play Because He Drank Too Much Everclear

WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 25: U.S Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) leaves the Capitol after he spoke on the Senate floor for more than 21 hours September 25, 2013 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Sen. Cruz ended his marathon speech against the Obamacare at noon on Wednesday. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Photo: Alex Wong/2013 Getty Images

We’ve recently learned quite a bit about what Ted Cruz was like when he was a student. As an undergrad at Princeton, he was smelly, inconsiderate, and mildly creepy, at least according to his freshman-year roommate. At Harvard Law School, he supposedly refused to study with anyone who had attended a “minor Ivy” like Brown or Penn. (Cruz insists that this isn’t true and offered up an old study buddy with a degree from Northwestern as proof.) Today’s Boston Globe piece on Cruz’s time at Harvard mostly contains the sort of information anyone with even a passing familiarity with the difficult right-wing senator has come to expect: He delighted in “antagonizing” liberal classmates; he learned tennis as part of an effort to get a clerkship with conservative Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, who liked tennis; he demanded that a girl he barely knew tell him her IQ and SAT score. But the Globe also dug up a “rare display of weakness for someone who otherwise seemed determined to succeed.”

Cruz played Rev. Samuel Parris in a Harvard production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” Here is what happened:

After the successful first performance, Cruz spent the cast party imbibing so much Everclear — a powerful grain alcohol — that he couldn’t make it through the next night’s performance. His fellow actors had to coax him into going onstage, but by Act III his condition worsened.

A video of the performance shows him sitting on a bench onstage, his head buried in his hands for nearly five minutes straight. After meekly delivering a line, he walked off stage in the middle of the scene, forcing cast members to improvise around the departure of a lead character. He didn’t return for the remainder of the play.

This story would be better if it were about his fake filibuster back in September.

Cruz Ruined School Play After Drinking Everclear