Take What Is Yours

"I will be dead to myself, alive to the outward world. I will observe and participate in an imaginary world. I will wake up with my heart full of dreams. Sweet poison of an empty theatre..."     - Boleslavsky's "Acting: The First Six Lessons"

Hello again. I'm all gradamutated, as my friends tell me. I'm a mutant "adult" now.
The ceremonies were wild and incredible and startlingly lonely, being my only friend in a sea of purple. I had Commando and my parents there, and then Unicorn came to the Radio City ceremony, so afterwards I had lots of love and fun, but doing the graduation thing itself was surprisingly solitary, simply because I was one of two graduates from my studio, and the other girl isn't really a friend of mine. But it was exhilarating, and still doesn't feel real. I bet it won't feel real until August, when everyone goes back to school and I'm still off working and auditioning. Then these wet and paper-thin wings that have just cracked free will finally be dry enough to use.


Needed some space to myself, and it feels deliciously good to be home (and by home, I mean this wreck of a city that I belong to, now). I'm infected by this place, and I don't ever, ever want the cure.

I'm interning with my dear friend and incredible teacher Ken Schatz this summer, and, with any luck, will be continuing to work with him indefinitely from here on out. I'm taking his acting class in July, and will be assisting in the production of a trio of one acts starting this summer. It doesn't go up until the fall, but the process begins months in advance. I'm finally going to get to see how it all happens, the workings of making a production go, the process, which, until now, has been some cloudy mystery off in the distance. Unfurling the wet wings on my back so they can be seen.

Hanging with Ken also gives me the bonus of being exposed to some seriously incredible theatre. He somehow has a distinct knowledge of important and meaningful theatre, art that wants to be something, art that is made out of scraps of soul and life and sewn together with words and given as gifts to a listening public. I was fortunate enough to catch Erica Fae's Take What Is Yours the day before it closed. It's almost impossible to describe, aside from saying that, yes, this is the kind of theatre that needs to be happening. This is art that matters. This is relevant and powerful and striking and it is real in every sense of the word. Have a video.

Got some reading done today, hopefully more tomorrow, maybe I'll see some friends in the city too. Still working on sculpting my hair into some fun retro things, just to defy the pin-straight curtain it has always been. Working on embracing me, finding out where I'm going, what I want, how much I want, because I want so many things, now. It's all there to be taken, it's just waiting, and I don't know how to get it all yet, but hell, I will find out.


I love you all. Share love. Love is warm and wild. Love is cool and peaceful. Love is silence, love is music. I feel so much love I don't know what to do with it, sometimes.

Inappropriate revelation of the day: Painting your nails is awesome. Having your underwear ride up awkwardly with wet nails is far, far from awesome.

Empire

I just emailed my final paper of my college career. There's lighting cracking the sky every so often, and the Empire State Building is lit up purple tonight in honor of the graduates from my school.

This can't be real life.

I'll be an official graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts at the New Studio on Broadway tomorrow afternoon. Ready, set...

Live.

Trial Run

I think I like the way this style is working out... Day two, commence. Pictures to come, maybe.

Dreams

I had a "business" meeting yesterday, discussing the nitty gritty of how the business of the business works. It was incredibly enlightening and educational, and I'm so grateful for it. I'll share those agent-style tips in my next post, but for now, this is about the gut feeling and realization I had. I felt a bit naive and wounded afterwards, only because I've been struggling so much about graduating and where I fit in the real world, am I ready, can I do this, do I really want to, et cetera.

I felt naive and hurt because I realized, for the first time, really, that all of these dreams I've got, all those dreams I listed in a recent post, everything that I want out of my life, I realized that I probably won't get to have them. Not all of them. That I'm going to get old and there will always be something I haven't done. It's not that I'm giving up, it's just that I don't know if there's enough time in one life. And that's something I've never come to terms with before. I don't want to feel this way. I want to believe that I can have everything I dream of. Isn't that what my generation was fucking raised on?

My last academic acting class, my last academic voice lesson, my last dance classes, my last scheduled Wednesday, it's all just hitting me in a way that makes me feel like I'm being edged out of a circle I never had a place in to begin with. All of my friends, my classmates, they're looking to the next year, ready for new opportunities and the safety of guaranteed housing and organized schedules, and I don't know what direction I'm looking. I'm looking down a road and I don't know what road it is, where it's going, I can't see potholes, I can't see turns, or doors or whether it just stops completely. I'm floating in space and I really, really don't quite know how to move forward.

It's been a day of being pushed away from anything inspiring. Cancelled appointments, a miserable dance teacher, professionals who are anything but, elitism, and then just plain exhaustion and sickness. So it's been a trying sort of day, but through it all I managed to somehow build myself back up in a moment of quiet, and it gave me a little more strength to make it through my last, 3 hour class post-studio. Which I'm currently typing this blog in. So clearly I'm utilizing my time well.

Later I'll fill you in on more important things, like the technicalities about agents and how I'm going to attempt to conduct myself in the next few months, just to really chronicle the very awkward struggle of a post-grad actor alone in the real world for the first time. But now it's just making it through to the end, and thinking too deeply on the nature of dreams and aspirations.

I don't want to give up.

Henry Rollins' Letter to a Young American

If you don't do anything else today, watch this.

Part One:


Part Two:

Normal

The real concept of my imminent graduation didn't sink in, really, until today. I thought I knew for sure, and I thought I felt it in all of my heart and body, but today was the last of a few of my classes in Studio, and it really struck me, for the first time, that this is it. This is REALLY it. Done. For good. No more. After the 7th, that's it.

And now I feel like I'm floating in this strange in between - I'm not really a person, in this limbo, but I'm stuck between student and exposed, inexperienced young adult. My last steps in the bubble of studentness are just about past, and I'm not in there with my classmates anymore. An outside observer of everything. I don't quite fit in anywhere yet. And I'm very, very uncomfortable being so unsure. I can't stay where I am, but I don't feel like I belong out there yet. I'm scared.

In other news, we sang the Overtly-ture from the Jerry Springer Opera today. Enjoy.

Revelation at 9:34pm

There are people who I was good friends with not two months ago who now hardly talk to me, and I'd say it's just show alliances fading, but the "group" I was a part of is still a "group," just without me. I just really realized it today. I don't think I'm a bad friend. I'm not. Everything that's happened inside of my head for the past two months has done something to the way I affect the world around me that I'm not seeing.

Sometimes I wish things were very different.



Also, Ludo. Rock on, geeky angsty boys. Rock on.

View From A Fire Escape

Once school is out for the summer, I swear I'll be back on track. It's just been a really, really tough semester, and I want to share all of my battles and bruises with you, but I have to make sure I get through first. I am 14 days away from being completely done with classes and 23 days away from my commencement ceremony.

It's been a never ending stream of circumstances and things trying to bring me to my knees since January of this year, and a few times I've fallen pretty hard. Getting back up when you feel alone is so incredibly hard, but the days keep spinning through and I keep waking up every morning, so I know I'm still moving forward, no matter how awful things seem. There were a few weeks that pushed being some of the darkest I've ever known, and the lingering effects of that are making me jumpy, sometimes. I'm not going to lie, I'm fucking scared to death of life after graduation, but it's the thing I want more than anything else in the world right now.

I've pushed NYU and the bureaucratic system that runs it for help at every turn, and I've received almost none. So there's a lot of disillusionment and frustration, but also this raging, feverish senioritis that's about to put me over the edge to a degree I've never known. I've been so warped and by the past few months that my dream life is worlds apart from what I ever imagined it would be, and it's scary that I don't care.

If I could wake up one morning and have the life that, in this moment, would be perfect for me, I would live in a West Village apartment over a bar/brewery I co-own and run with Commando. It's a mix of classic Irish and geek culture, with a back room for a game cave that doubles as a cabaret space. I write plays and books and paint. I perform in meaningful, artsy shows that start downtown and move to Broadway, and maybe I'll write a few too. My art and the bar will pay off all debts and I can pay my parents back for everything they did for me while I was in school. I can afford physical therapy and a psychiatrist who actually helps. There's a medium coat tabby named Chell, and a rotund little Scottish terrier named Wheatley. I have a tattoo. I don't cry anymore.

So, yeah. I'm scared, but I need my own life. I need to start being able to try. I want to rely on myself, and be self sufficient. Going to class every day is so hard, because I just feel like school is making me unhappy more than anything else these days, and that's not a healthy way to feel.

Fourteen more days. I have to push and dig in to finish it all. So I spend way too long typing a blog instead of memorizing my final scene. Whatever. I needed to express. I needed to do something for myself. And for you - I've neglected my readers (if I have any left... sorry, guys), but once I'm out, I'll be back. Different, but back.

Counting down.

zzzz

Going to bed already? I shouldn't be this tired...

Vibrations

Sorry I've been gone for so long.

Caesar is finally over - it literally took up every waking second of my life, along with academics and studio and bureaucratic, departmental bullshit and sickness and too many things to list. I had a couple of breakdowns, I might have cracked and been put back together a few too many times, and the hairline fractures are starting to show in my brain.

But it is over, it happened, I lived, Brutus beat Caesar, Brutus beat him(her)self, and it was a wonderful experience and I love my Roman ladies and I'm glad I got to play him. But then I got to sleep and start recovering. Spring Break. Woo. Went to Boston for St. Paddy's - excellent and so fun. I do love my Irish darling, Commando. <3 What would I do without him. Go nuts and eat crappy food, that's what.

Been having consistent nightmares for about a week, now. Lots of disasters, floods, massive destruction, submerged planes with rotting corpses in windows, trucks jack-kniving into storefronts, murder, the works. Half of Boston underwater. Even if I can't remember, I've woken up in a startled, groggy panic a few times. I've never been one to dream much, and nightmares are usually few and far between. These are disturbing enough to make me nervous to go to sleep. I've never felt that way before. They're robbing me of rest. I wake up feeling exhausted and nervous.

Hoping it's just a phase, and the lingering edge of the damage Caesar did will soften and fade. I feel like I'm overreacting, my brain is not happy with me, but inside, when I just sit, I can feel how paper-thin something is, how the visible shaking that accompanies anything even remotely stressful is just waiting to come out again. I'm afraid something broke. I'm different. I've been more anxious. I cry more. The fact that NYU isn't making it easier and still screwing with my potential ability to graduate isn't helping.

But I'm alive. Harlequin is still alive, and tomorrow is a new day. And right now, I'm going the fuck to sleep.