Samuel Taylor

From a letter to a dear friend. It serves as an update of sorts. Written last night - today I am in a hotel room on the west side of Manhattan. Mid 70s.

—

Today, I lost my phone in a cab, took all of my stuff to the storage facility - only to discover that they closed in almost no time, and so had to rush to make the next run - only to discover that it almost would not all fit in my tiny storage space.

It did, of course, and the cabby brought me my phone, of course, and I have arrived at this moment of my life with a relatively clean and empty apartment having only lost some fifty dollars to the day’s tribulations.

Tomorrow I get on a plane, and it hurtles through the air at almost unbelievable speeds across preposterous distances, impossibly high in the beauteous heavens. I will probably sleep through most of it, but it won’t be because I don’t care, or don’t appreciate the wonder of it; it will be because I am drugged - because doing all of these unbelievable, preposterous, impossible and beauteous things at once is hard on my body, and I sometimes vomit if I do not drug myself. I land in the biggest city in the country and begin living in a hotel called the Belleclaire in the east 70s.

On November 3rd, everything happens at once. I turn 25, and join a union which promises to reconfigure my life. I begin rehearsing The Spy, and begin also holding my breath for the election.

On November 4th, the world will breathe for the first time in it scarcely remembers how long, or it will choke and sputter on the metallic taste of its future.

On November 9th, Hunchback is over, and the party closes down. I shall dearly hope on that day that it gets picked up, as has been rumored, for a national tour sometime in the future (which is where people wear funny silver outfits and no hats). Also, I will move to Brooklyn. Possibly Bedstye, which is the place where the black people come from.

On December 10th, I get in another airplane and sleep confusedly but contentedly through some more pretty amazing shit. I will step off the plane in the place where the white people come from, and remember all sorts of things about cold. I will live in a studio apartment furnished by the the theatre that trained me, contractually obligated to include at least the following amenities: a bed, a desk, a bathroom, a stove, and a window. I am given to understand that it also likely contains much swank. I will traverse the street between my studio and the theatre a few times a day, performing The Spy, and rehearsing Henry the Fifth (which has men in it!). When I can I will walk a long way in the cold to the best breakfast spot ever created, ever, anywhere, and eat. I will fel happy there, and complete. Sometimes I will go to a punkrock bar to drink, or to rock. I will share ambiguous times with girls that I used to date, and I will try very hard to regain that fanatical level of focus, the hallmark of conservatory college. I will need it if I am to perform one play well and rehearse another with intelligence and feeling.

On January thirty-first I will climb aboard a bus, hoping desperately that it has a name - like The Stumbling Mathilda, or Destroyermax. Where I will be and when is, from then until May 17th, posted for public perusal on the internet. This is one hundred and six days of deep mystery and promise.

On May 17th, someone will crawl off of that bus and stand blinking in the weather.

From tomorrow til the end is two hundred and eight days.

      

Oh, man. This is a month out of date. The following happened on Labor Day eve.

Burn burn burn. Something to write home about, as they say.

The garage behind my house burned down last night. The friendly neighborhood fire department got there in time to stop its advance across a fence and up my back steps. I owe them great gratitude. Nobody was hurt.

My neighbor suspects arson, though why anyone should torch a totally unoccupied garage is beyond me. Psychotic kicks, I suppose. He saw a young kid looked up to no good (bleached hair, gold chain, hard looks) walking from the alley to the street down the gangway between our houses just before the blaze went up. That doesn’t make me feel so good.

The color and light of a large fire is, of course, stupefying. The picture I took does nothing to capture the fear and the awe. I took it after the hoses had begun and the fire was hissing in a retreat whose speed amazed us all.

I was surprised at the clothing that I put on, sharply aware that I might flee my apartment and dimly that I could lose it all. Cowboy boots and jeans. In my bag I threw my computer and my little bear, Fuzzy. I’d like to think that acting journals would have been next, but who knows. Some part of the brainself deeply inaccessible to analysis takes over when you really switch on in the face of danger.

Not that I was in danger of death. By the time I got hip to what was happening outside my window, the fire department was already there displaying great mastery over the elements.

I was totally shocked at how fast the building went up, and at how fast the firefighters took the fire down. I had been sitting on my porch calmly stealing internet to watch Barack’s convention speech, and wandered in to bed. Time from shutting the door behind me to the Great Fear and Heat was maximum ten minutes.

Afterwards, in half-sleep, I had all manner of feverish dreams about going on tour, coming home, and seeing some of the Ladies from my past.

The smell is sweet and gives a headache. They say it will linger for weeks.

Happy Labor Day.

      

This is the googlemaps itinerary for the Acting Company / Guthrie tour. Maybe a better version of this with notes on what theatres we will be playing will come along, but until then, this is the googlemap of our tour. Because it’s got so many destinations, I had to split it up into two maps. For various reasons, I split the two maps at the point when we play in Santa Fe.

View Larger MapSanta Fe!

View Larger Map

Pretty exciting!

Meta: Not having had regular internet access in four months has curtailed my digital persona. This is massively out of date, and is out of chronology with July’s post, poted below. Just trying to keep the record straight.

So there are pretty big things afoot.

Narratively:

Since we last left off, I’ve gone to NYC for an audition (got it, more on that here), hung out with some crazy asian lawyers, reconnected with some friends from high school and college, gone home for a wedding of one of my best friends, visited my folks, had my tarot cards read, came back to Chicago and booked an understudy gig at Lookingglass, got a raise at the bike shop, quit the pizza shop, went to six flags with my swedish roommate, Ian, and (maybe?) a Girl, and now - just now - got back from a weekly fire spinning practice session in my neighborhood.

So much for the factual narrative.

Thematically:

I’ve been working on relaxation a lot lately - and it has taken a surprising amount of work. My dad once said that the Albuquerque Academy was training us all to be overworked and stressed out adults. Something to that. This last year and a half of my life has been so massively exciting and rewarding that I have a hard time reconciling it to the awful dark times of the summer of 06. In particular, since moving to Chicago I have had an awful lot of fun.

Now fun, see, this is serious stuff. And maybe now, having had so much of it, I know a little more about it. There are, okay, at least two broad categories of fun. One is an adventure, excitement-based fun. This, I think, is my strong suit, generally speaking. And many people, I think, would agree here. A strong and unapologetic enthusiasm for life. (Cut to thevideo.) I understood my move to Chicago as a big adventure when I did it, and it certainly has been. Arriving with a duffel bag and a plan, I have succeeded in all of my turn-of-the-century-young-man-as-immigrant dreams. Adventure. Excitement.

Which is also tiring, I have discovered.

The deep wellsprings of enthusiasm have dried up. Which is not to say that the spending of them wasn’t rewarding, or that I am not richer all the way round - only that I need to read and look at clouds for a while.

Having my tarot cards read was one of the most educational and helpful things I’ve ever had done to me. Very little of it was prediction oriented - it worked much more like a big and loosely narrative rorschach extravaganza. And rorschach tests are pretty useful.

Change, recycling.

Narratively:

I’ve been playing pool and learning to ride a unicycle.

Lotta, the Swede that lived in my house for four months, is gone, and I don’t even have a picture. Silly, that. Kelley, the original Chicago roommate, has gone on to live with her boyfriend in Minneapolis. Ian, a friend from Albuquerque, is moved in, though I haven’t seen much of the Traveling Man so far. Montana, New York, DC.

I avoided getting involved with a girl who, in hindsight, was a poor match (didn’t see why preplanned housing developments might be horrific), and then bungled (mostly?) involvement with another, who might have been a better. They had the same name, but pronounced it differently. Odd. An old friend from home continues, problematically, to haunt my imaginary lovelife.

I had to go on for one of the actors I’m understudying at Lookingglass. During previews, a week before my contract was originally to even begin. Kaboom.

I built a table and am spending a lot of time at home. My mother says that the clinical term for it is regression in service of the ego. Meaning that I’m staring at the walls and recharging. I’ve also had Ratatat’s “Classics” on repeat for about three days.

My brother is getting married! Congratulations!

I’m thinking of visiting home again before the tour, looming large on the horizon.

Thematically:

The last week or so has seen me in a bit of a funk.

Change in roommates, an accompanying change in furniture and decor, wonderland’s radical upheaval of reality, new music, and a new weekly rhythm all has me forgetting everything past two months. Chicago is new again.

I like to think of my time onstage as an understudy as my time down the rabbit hole. More literally, through the lookingglass. I got six hours of rehearsal. It was crazy, and its memory is precious to me. I don’t think I have ever been much more focused for so long a period in my life than the 48 hours before going on stage, or much more happy than when toasted to by the actors in the lobby after the show.

One day, wonderland, the next, Mitch and his girlfriend: “Yeah, she’s looking for a bike. You know. Just something basic.” …Is she.

In the days after Loookingglass I let the momentum die out on the interesting girl from Six Flags, my brother got engaged, and I received some troubling text messages from my good friend and ghost-lover. A bit of a funk followed. There was much reading of novels, and much drinking of liquor and coffee, both at home and abroad. So I’m drying out for a week or so - trying to reassert at least some kind of chemical / nutritional balance. We are our bodies, after all.

Listening to Ratatat all day in a scrupulously clean apartment, I am reminded of the strange and isolated weeks in my parents’ living room after Ava gave me notice, playing Final Fantasy six hours a day and eating Posole. Not in its heartbreak - not at all - but in the strange feeling that some great finger was taking all week to very slowly push some hidden reset button.

I am excited to see what comes next. I don’t always feel liberated by the neverending newness of life, but I try. And sometimes I do.