Post 569 - February 3, 2024
Each time I walk through New York City, it feels like a different place to me. Sometimes if I just slow down, I start to see things I’ve never seen before no matter how many times I’ve wandered through the area. Other times I will suddenly jolt myself awake and realize that I’ve been swimming around in my own head for a hundred blocks or so and really haven’t seen anything at all.
I am a creature of habit. I like to establish a routine and stick to it. The problem, of course, is that life ends up disrupting my plans and throws my schedule off.
The pandemic was the longest single time in my life that I have ever been able to keep on the same schedule. Before that, there was nothing predictable about my days at all. I was in constant motion. I saw a meme that described adulthood as that point in life where you just keep saying to yourself that things will calm down after the next two weeks. Over and over again.
These days, I am closer to achieving some sort of balance than I may have ever been before. I am fortunate enough to be working enough to cover expenses, I have time to spend writing, and I have time to travel, whether it be on foot up and down the length of Manhattan or somewhere more exotic beyond the limits of my home city.
That said, there are still not enough hours in the day.
We all choose to fill those hours in different ways. The privilege we are born into can certainly give us more options and possibly help us avoid the obstacles that block us from leading the life we want. The world, however, is filled with people who have overcome seemingly impossible obstacles to live what we, on the outside, would consider charmed lives.
Oprah Winfrey said in an interview that she became successful because she knew what she wanted, and she focused everything she had toward getting it. On paper, I was dealt better societal cards than she was, and yet I haven’t done a fraction of what she has done. Few people on the planet have achieved what she has managed to do.
The single thing that has driven me forward and is behind almost all my professional choices is my desire to travel. My mother took my sister and me to South Africa when I was five and that journey left its mark. I remember being dressed up in a little blazer for what must have been an endless flight, or series of flights, in 1967. Hooked.
A few years later, my fourth-grade teacher back here in the U.S. gave us all gold stars at the end of the year with what she thought we’d become typed across them. Mine said World Explorer.
It never crossed my mind to work for the travel industry. I was never interested in helping other people go places, I wanted to go to them myself. I’ve met very few people interested enough in seeing the places I wanted to see to make the sometimes horrendously difficult effort to get out into them. I have managed to find several fantastic travel companions throughout my life, maybe the greatest being my own mother, but early on, I realized that if I was really going to see everything that I wanted to see, I was going to have to be comfortable enough to do it on my own.
My cousin worked for Qantas for many years and has managed to see as much of the world as I have, so maybe that would have been a career that might have worked for me, too.
In Junior High School, however, I found something that I enjoyed doing as much as I liked to travel - theatre. Working on the props crew for Bells are Ringing at Eisenhower School opened a world that I immediately felt at home in. In High School, my friend Tom and I started taking the bus into New York to see Broadway shows.
When the time came to choose a college, my father and I took several trips to look at some schools scattered around the East Coast. My friend Tom decided he wanted to go to Columbia. Of course, that’s the place that made sense. It was in New York. I wanted to live there. I was so sure that was where I wanted to go that I applied early decision and got in. Tom and I went our separate ways, but New York and I have stayed together ever since.
I spent my Junior year in London. Before I went, my head was full of plans to work on shows in my British school, but the first time I started off to an audition, I realized that if I got in, I wouldn’t be able to travel anywhere. So much for acting. Instead, I spent the year exploring England and Europe with the new friends I’d made – all adventuresome and avid travelers.
Beginning with my Sophomore year at Columbia, and after I got back from Europe, I started working with professional theatres around the city. At first, I was an unpaid volunteer and then I began getting a salary. I graduated while I was working as an assistant stage manager on a small musical called A… My Name is Alice which was performing downtown at the Village Gate.
One of the women in the show who was my age and just starting out, is now also traveling like a crazy person. Tonya Pinkins who is a Tony-award-winning actor and film director, is out in the world doing anything and everything. She’s diving out of planes and bungee jumping off cliffs in some of our planet’s most beautiful places. No moss on her!
I’ve always said that I have gotten most of my work reactively. I rarely got the jobs I went after, instead, I took the ones that came to me. I turned down my share of gigs, too. After the first sentence out of someone’s mouth, I knew instantly whether I was going to do it. If the show wasn’t either going to take me somewhere interesting or put me in contact with someone interesting, I didn’t do it.
I didn’t always understand why I was attracted to one job over another, but I always trusted my gut. There isn’t anything I regret turning down. Some of the things I did weren’t all that great, but they all taught me something. I don’t regret any of them, either.
These days, I don’t quite have the passion for theatre that I once did. I still am excited to see things, I just don’t feel the pull to work on them. Jersey Boys ticked almost all the boxes of things I wanted to accomplish. I even got to meet Oprah Winfrey on the day we appeared on her show in Chicago. The need to do things again that I’ve already done just isn’t there.
The concerts I am working on are still thrilling to do and we do end up traveling all over the place to do them. There are still plenty of places I’ve never seen, and I am no less determined to get to them all than I’ve ever been.
I haven’t decided yet where I’m going to walk today. I seem to be basically over whatever bug I had. Thank you everybody for your concern over this past week. Michael seems to have managed to avoid getting it at all.
It’s cold out, but it’s sunny and the sky is as blue as it gets. I’m itching to get out there and be a part of it.
There’s some concert work to do, but the day is young – I’ll do it later.