It's been a week. Everything I had been holding back came busting through in a highly physical fashion. My skin has broken out, and I have been developing a nasty, big cough. I am almost done, but not quite. This mid-life crisis, or whatever it is I have felt comeplled to put myself through is only in a holding pattern.
I married my brother and his wife in August, siumltaneously directed GLTF actor-teachers and a production of Hamlet, went to Chicago and London to perform I HATE THIS, and have been training from the NY Marathon (put in 15 yesterday) which I will run - oh, yes, the plane tickets are paid for - in two weeks. After that I just need to marry a Catholic and a Jew and I can call it quits.
I am picturing myself, sitting in a stuffed chair in Athens, Ohio after polishing off a sizable amount of Thanksgiving dinner with a large alcoholic beverage in my hand, plotting exactly how many pounds I will enjoy gaining over the winter.
The last two perfs of IHT were so satisfying, I cannot tell you. There are already proposals in the works for future performances, but nothing on the calendar yet. It has been a long time since I haven't had on in writing. It is my hope that what I learned, felt, came away with the past two weekends will stick with no me, no matter who is in the audience. The last few medical conferences, I wasn't sure if I was an educator, a survivor, or just a pro making a couple bucks off the worst experience of my life. It's places like SANDS and at the conference that I felt like something else, not quite a missionary, not just another victim. I crafted something immediate out of the askes of awfulness - I couldn't have written this piece now, I wouldn't have the nerve to. But I can still play it, and it's that bridge between the raw anger of then and the distance of now that has turned it into something better than it was even when I started.
Enough analysis. I write too much about my own work, I start sounding like Arthur Miller.
1 comment:
i am so behind. or such a behind. whichever. i have just caught up on your blog and find myself fascinated by this process by which you have become "something else, not quite a missionary, not just another victim." so curious that you could not write the play now. we'll have to talk about it some time.
a couple of posts back, you brought up our first meeting - it seems like about three lifetimes ago, doesn't it?
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