What Goes Around...

I'm watching vintage Six Feet Under reruns to try to get my mind off of genocide and domestic abuse.

Second day of rehearsal. Things are going well. We only meet for three hours a day, but it's a productive three hours. And only a ten-minute play.

I love the actors. They are smart and talented and so far, extremely open and warm. Designers are great. I say I need a bleeding door and they give me a bleeding door.

No complaints really. It's times like this that I have to remember and think, yes, things really are good, recognize that.

One of my actors was actually at Michigan with me - she was a theater major and I was a musical theater major. She was much, much cooler than I was, so we didn't really hang out, and I was always a bit intimidated by her. But she is truly sweet and lovely. It is good to revisit times in your life like that. Now as a generally more confident, happier person, it is enlightening to cross paths with people again and realize just how far we have all come.

It is so strange though. My start of undergrad seems like only moments ago and yet it has been nearly twelve years since I took that first six hour train ride from Rochester to Ann Arbor to attend orientation. I wrote my speech for graduation on that ride in this purple bound journal I still carry around from apartment to apartment. Oh that speech! I thought I was so wise. Totally fancied myself Ione Skye from Say Anything. I am sure I quoted people that I had no business quoting. And on the train this woman sitting across from me on the ride wouldn't stop talking to me. She was dressed in some uber skimpy get up. I was nervous and intrigued. Who were these people? Who was I? Suddenly my life was mine, all mine.

One of the other actors at the festival, who is directing another of the ten-minute plays, actually taught me acting at a summer program I attended after that first year of Michigan. Again, so weird to think these people knew me when I was eighteen-years-old. I had to do this sort of suggestive scene in one of the plays we were working on and I was terrified. I remember sitting up in front of this class and talking about tactics I could use to pursue this action of "seducing" when I had no frikkin' idea what that even meant.

I am not sure that I know now either, but I am much less embarrassed when talking about it.

Good to know that progress has been made.

But this is what I love about the theater. Goodbyes are never really goodbyes. Eventually, inevitably, we will all cross paths again.