SPIDER-MAN 2 is playing on the screen next to me, on mute, as I write this.

Personal rules in navigating risk: 1. Don’t get murdered. 2. Don’t go to jail. 3. Try really hard not to get sued.

Winnie the Basset Hound has come by for a visit. She is sitting next to me now.

There was a pocket of time in my younger life, when I was around 13, that I experienced a sort of elation. My own judgments of how I perceived myself to be received kept me grounded at home usually, but life was glittery and rich. I don’t mean to over-romanticize that time; I just remember it distinctly because I was working hard, and felt aligned with a wonderfully bright self.

Get more specific?

The Springer Theatre Academy gets a lot of credit from me for introducing “Magic.” That place didn’t do it alone, as much as I liken the institution towards a feeling of Christmas. In 6th grade, I took a drama class. The drama classroom was this tall-ceilinged space in the school dungeon with different corners and closets, and creations from past plays and students’ projects filling every nook and cranny one could imagine. Very quickly I was welcomed in - not necessarily socially, but through a role in leadership alchemized alongside the drama teacher. This middle school 30-minutes from any proper sign of civilization provided a wonderful and very real world for me: My free time could now be channeled INTO MY ART.

Perhaps, as with power, one begins making friends. I loved having friends. I never felt wholly safe with these friends, as we all wanted somethings, but boy did we have fun, and boy did we learn. As with life, time helps. They gave me more than I have acknowledged here - I wouldn’t have traded that.

However, personally, I began spending my free time stressing about social dynamics - and now, everyone’s worlds were being shared to social media, so I had extra research provided in trying to understand my fellow classmates, and their connections.

Being on-stage and in the light used to be a familiarly safe space - as someone else or was I wholly myself? And when you know you’re building to that, the rehearsal spaces, dressing rooms, backstage, even the grocery store you go to after a rehearsal ends and the coffee shop before, all become sacred. We are there to do a job. It’s very practical.

Despite its weirdness, I’m lucky to be experiencing inklings of a familiar sense of elation.

My dad took me on my own trip to New York City, without my twin brother, just me and my dad, for a week during spring break when I was 13. We stayed in a small little hotel somewhere IN all of the action. My first time to NYC was with my middle school drama club two years earlier, and we had the WHOLE* family (mom, dad, Daniel, me,) in addition to a few coach-bus-loads of other drama club members and their families, and we stayed in New Jersey. So this trip when I was 13, I thought it was awesome we were in the middle of all this city action - we got to hear the noises at night, and just walk outside to be welcomed with an adventure. We saw 4 Broadway musicals (DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS, 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE, WICKED, and a fourth that I’m having trouble remembering, (Adding retroactively: TARZAN… the musical,)) took tours of the NBC Studios and backstage at Radio City Music Hall, ate McDonalds and at Bubba Gumps, and it snowed. (Adding more retroactively: we also saw ICE-AGE 2 at a movie theater.) It was just fun. We explored and walked, and it was like I just got to be me: curious, adventurous, active, comfortable…

It’s like I carried that experience with me.

*Dustin was off at college, or had just finished his undergrad

TO BE CONTINUED.