Back to the City

Well folks after 2 long months I am finally back in the city.  When I got back from Rhode Island I had a whopping 12 hours home before packing my bags and getting on a plane for Arizona.

The bf and I got to take our first real long vacation together.  Now I am between jobs right now so I could take as long as I want, but he is now full time at Apple so it’s a little tricky for him to take a vacation.

We flew out to AZ and spent the first few days just relaxing by the pool.  We both tried (and kind of failed) to get really tan, met up with friends and family for lunches and dinners, played with the dogs, sang by my piano-it was a rough couple of days.

Then that weekend we got to head up to Mormon Lake (about an hour southeast of Flagstaff) for my family reunion.  Our family reunions are no joke, they come every 3 years and I had to miss the last one.  I didn’t want to miss another reunion and what’s more I was really excited to bring the bf to this epic occasion.

The reunion was fun, it was actually pretty tame by our standards, and the boy made it out alive.  I think that means is one more group of relatives for him to meet and then he is fully inducted into the family.

Being home is such a joy for me, but I did have a stunning realization this last visit.  I have now lived away from Arizona longer than I lived in Arizona.  All my friends are gone and so much has changed in that state, I actually felt like a visitor.  There were a number of days where the bf asked me what we were gonna do, and I just pulled a blank.  First of all it AZ in July-ergo there’s nothing you can do outside-and also I don’t know what there is to do.  I just wanna see my family and my plans end there.

We got a full week there, which was nice.  Not enough for me, but it was good to have a full visit with so much family.  Living on the opposite side of the country I really miss them and wish I could pop over more often.

After that we made our way to DC to spend a week with the bf’s family.  The visit started out quite funny, because his dad’s car broke down on the freeway while taking us home, and I had to joy of cramming into what we will call the “back seat” of the tow truck and sit as my legs fell asleep during the half hour trip to the shop.

We wanted to make sure we were in DC because it was the bf’s birthday!!!  The boy turned a happy 24 (I’m now dating an older man) and we got to celebrate it with his family.  Our trip to DC was MUCH busier than the AZ leg mostly because we went to see so many people who weren’t particularly close to us.

We drove 3 hours to visit his grandma, about an hour to see our friend in a show, and about an hour to visit my younger brother in Quantico.

Catch up on the younger bro.  America’s favorite son decided he wanted to spend this summer in Quantico Virginia attending officer training school.  The boy is crazy.  The summer has been a little rough for him.  First of all he’s in Virginia in the summer…not pleasant for AZ boys who grew up without humidity.

Also there’s the fact that most of the people around him are crazy!  He is being pushed to his physical and emotional limits every single day and it’s started to take its toll on him. I’m incredibly proud of him for being able to make it this long, and he’s almost made it to his graduation (2 more weeks).  I loved getting to see him, and I think that he needed to see our faces just as much as we wanted to see his.

I was disappointed we only got a day with him, when we left the bf and I felt horribly guilty that we couldn’t take him for at least a night, or spoil him in some other way, but we had to head back to Maryland to drive to the bf’s family’s cabin in western Maryland.

Time seems to stop in this cabin; I don’t know what it is.  Those days flew by in a flash and I don’t think I did a single thing but read, eat and sit on a boat.  It was wonderful.  It was the perfect way to end our 2 weeks.

Now we are back in the city and back to reality.  It’s nice in many ways.  I have been away from home for such a long time.  I’ve been living out of a suitcase and I am ready to return to normalcy.  Now the question becomes what is normalcy?

I actually in many ways feel like I have returned to the exact place where I was 1 year ago.  I am jobless (until August 22) and looking for an apartment.  I hate apartment hunting, but at least this time I have a place to launch from, and don’t have the pressure of trying to find a job haunting me.

Well that’s all for now folks.  This was an incredibly abbreviated report of my break, but I believe no one needs much more detail.  You might remember that last year around this time I also had a lot of free time, and that made for a lot of blog posts about a lot of feelings.  You have been warned.

Jumping into the pool…incase you couldn’t tell

Ahhhhhh the house by the lake

Goodbye Dolly

I have not updated in a long time and I think that this might become a theme for when I’m doing a show.  Whenever I get these contracts to do shows out of town it feels like I go off to summer camp for a month or two.   I keep thinking to myself I need to update, but then I decide I’m either too tired or too busy.

Anywho, I have spent the last month in Narragansett, Rhode Island performing in Hello Dolly at Theatre by the Sea.  I think I can say with almost full certainty that it has been one of the greatest theatrical experiences of my life.

First of all, I was performing in lovely Rhode Island, right by the beach.  This last week has been a little toasty, but for the most part we had gorgeous weather.

Second of all I got to perform in a show with a Tony Award winning actress.  That’s not something that happens everyday.  Watching her process as she learned and grew in the part was education and thrilling.  It was also inspiring because she was such a beautifully warm person who cared so much about the cast.  This is a show where everyone supports the leading lady, and everyone loved supporting her because she was so wonderful on and off stage.

Lastly I had a wonderful cast to bond with.  Again, shows are a summer camp-like experience and so our relationship as a cast is kind of like a dream.  We spend enough time with each other to grow really close and little enough time to get on each other’s nerves.  Not that I’m saying we would have gotten on each other’s nerves, but the option never really existed.

I met some pretty cool people and made some really nice friends and it’s always really sad when you have to finally say good bye.

Over the years I have learned how to say goodbye, I’ve had to do it often.  For that reason I am pretty good at keeping a level head when things come to a close and it’s time to hug it out.  (I know I get nostalgic and post a weeping blog or two, but in the moment I’m usually one of the very collected ones).

This show did something to me.  Last night we had our closing performance and it was going fine.  Then we got to the big number, “Hello Dolly” where all the ensemble lines up for Dolly’s big entrance and she gets to come down the red stairs in her gorgeous red dress.

Well that moment hit our leading lady a little hard last night and when she entered she couldn’t keep the tears from flowing. There were moments in the song where she had to collect herself and there was not a person on stage who was not immensely hit by the moment.  I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.  It was a true moment of theatre where what we were doing on stage was exactly what the story called for.  Every ensemble member was beaming at the sight of her, there were tears we were all so happy, nothing else mattered and it almost felt like the audience wasn’t even there.

Then during our curtain call, our leading lady entered to her standing ovation and then turned to take a bow to us.  Something about it all was too much and that’s when I started crying, and I know I was not alone on that stage.

Some of the cast had to leave immediately from there, so we had to begin our goodbyes, and throughout the night more and more people kept leaving, and it hit me in the stomach each time one of them did.

My roommate had to catch a real early morning flight and we didn’t want to do our goodbye last night so he even woke me up at the crack of dawn for our moment, which thankfully I was half asleep for otherwise it would’ve been much messier.

And now I’m on the train back to the city.  I’ve been a mess of emotions all day and I think it’s going to continue into tonight.  Thank goodness I have a vacation starting tomorrow (going to AZ with the bf!)

Also, my family got to come out to see my closing weekend of Hello Dolly!  It meant so much to me that they came out to see the show, even when I’m in the ensemble they are right there.  That certainly added to all the emotions of the weekend.

Last week my bf and his family also came to see the show, I swear I am the luckiest guy in the world sometimes.  I have just been surrounded by love this week, and all while I pursue my dreams.  [disclaimer: I am operating under very little sleep so as I become more profound forgive me if I also become less intelligible]

All in all I had a really wonderful time in RI, I wish it could have been longer, I wish that it never had to end, but it was a party and it was time for us all to go home.  The theatre community is pretty awesome, one of the reasons it’s hard to say goodbye to people, but at the same time I know that I’ll be seeing a lot if not all of the people soon sometime down the road.

Edit:  So I wrote the first part of this blog while I was on the train back to NYC.  Now I’m back in the city and I have to say it’s amazing how short this experience felt.  Stepping out in the city it felt like yesterday was when I was getting on the train to Rhode Island.  This month passed in the blink of an eye!  I swear.

I’m really sad to be home, I’m already missing my Dolly cast, but happy things fortunately on the horizon!