2002-04-15 12:38 p.m.
Georgia: last thoughts

"I don't need your heaven

I don't need your religion

I am in the place that I should be"

Back in New York, I thought life, job, relocation to the land of the data entry goombas would dull me, leave me angry and immobile, but instead, my mentor's words are sitting with me and filling my eyes and mind with fire.

We were talking yesterday over candy bars in the theater building at Emory, and I asked him a strange question: in all of the time I was acting, was I any good? A strange question to pose to another, to be sure, but also a strange one to pose to my teacher, who encouraged me over the years in school to keep pushing myself and developing, who, no doubt, had something to do with my being cast, at least sometimes. (Another teacher — who I won't name — felt that I'd never be cast in anything (or that I'd ever act again), so he cast me in an experimental workshop show, where the cast wrote/improvised the play with the directors in rehearsal. That play was my formulative theater experience, and the reason I can never let go of this medium. Shows what he knew. For the record, "30 Below" put that experience totally to shame.)

My mentor had an equally strange, but fitting answer: he said, "you were good, definitely; your acting was up to the task...but there was always something missing. You could see it in your eyes when you were on stage, that there was some part of you that wasn't engaged, that all of you wasn't in the part." He went on to explain that I always seemed as though I needed to be more involved in theater than that, writing, producing, directing, guiding the show from a different role.

I smiled. A lot. He's always been an astute observer.

I gave him the long pitch for the play in my head. Whenever I'm up to something he's intrigued by, he gives me this fatherly, bemused smile, as though to say, "'bout time, kid. Knew you'd do something like this eventually. Good job." He even read into the play a few layers deeper than I'd already planned, and, like ivy, the vines of these characters are wrapping tightly around my heart, and they're not going to let go until they're written.

He's always been a wise and encouraging man to everyone I worked with in school, and I can't stop smiling every time I remember how I glad I am to know him. He's taking a sanity leave of absence from his responsibilities of past years; I hope he gets the rest that he needs.

I didn't really want to come back to NYC, but it was necessary. I need to be here. My characters, my life as it's been these past years, it's all here. I'm going to be living with the ghosts of D & Rachel for a while, but they're good company.

Atlanta's comforting and warm and a place I love. I'll be back someday, and it'll mean something new.