If you don't have a dream . . .

How you gonna make a dream come true?

I've been avoiding writing this post for a couple of weeks now, ever since it really came home to me how tough its been living without the dreams of my youth. Here's how it came down.

For about a year we've had trouble - off and on, mostly minor - with Fernando, my late grandmother's 1992 Oldsmobile, with varying levels of anxiety as a result. It being time that my sainted mother got herself a newer auto, she made to us an extremely reasonable offer: we can have her used 2001 Taurus -- I just had to go and get it. In Spokane, Washington. No worries -- she would help me drive it back across the USA, and hang out with us for a few days. Brilliant! (Irony struck when, on the thursday we began the drive, I got a message that a tree had fallen on Fernando. Noble sacrifice or despondant auto-sacrifice? You be the judge.)

Now, three days of 12+ hours driving with one's parent, no matter HOW beloved, is nothing to approach without caution. (One could suppose the same would be true of such a drive with one's offspring, were one so inclined.) Accordingly, books on tape were in plentiful supply, as well as a boxed set collection of lectures on the history of american Musical theater from a renowned scholar. I had been given this set as a present by a ballroom dancing student who knew I was a fan of the musical, and had been in musicals and what not, but for more than 2 years I had not managed to do more than skim the material. Here, I thought, would be an excellent opportunity to give the thing a whirl, and see if it was up to snuff.

It was about the end of day 2, 13 hours into a 17 hour murder mystery book and wanting a bit of a break from the suspense, that Mum and I put the first disc in, on Gershwin and his legacy. We followed that with lectures on musicals of the 40s and 50s, and then a disc on Rogers and Hammerstein, finally getting into the 60s and 70s. Even as I write this I feel emotion welling up in me -- man, oh man, I love that stuff. I eat it up with a spoon. Can't get enough of it. Not happy joyous emotion, either. More of the gut-wrenching spasm of doubt and remorse kind.

What is painful is that it was always, as long as I had a dream, my dream to be in theater. To be in musical theater, really, though I enjoyed the occasional straight play, they really didn't grab me the way musicals did. I never recall wanting to be a scientist, or an astronaut, or a doctor/lawyer/butcher/baker/candlestick-maker, or much of anything really, until I was a junior in high school and was in a couple of plays, and realized that people got paid for being on stage. Paid? It was fun, I wasn't terrible at it (I was mistaken about that in many respects, but I was 15, cut some slack, please), and I never, ever looked back.

Straight into college at UNL for Musical Theater. Auditioned for everything, took dance classes and music classes (loved them, enjoyed singing but hated theory) and acting classes (loved one acting teacher, loathed another) and generally set about a career in performing with the bumptious self-confidence of someone who has never seriously considered the possibility of failure, or the consequences thereof.

Great times. Great shows. Not every one a winner, and not every experience a positive one, but I learned and I grew and I got better. I learned that I am never going to be a singer of solo ballads, but I also learned that that isn't an insuperable barrier to leading roles. I learned that the craft of theater requires a lot more work than it at first appears, but that its good work, and fun work. I learned that a lot depends on who you know, so I worked hard to know some of the right people. And I met fabulous people, who loved life and saw it as something worth celebrating on the ephemeral stage.

Along the way I picked up ballroom dancing as a kind of secondary skill == something that could pay the bills and was sufficiently flexible in the hours that you work to allow me to continue to audition for shows -- it even got my my first Equity gig, because a choreographer knew that I did partner dancing and wanted me for a show that had some of that in it. I had moved to new york, married a sweet and wonderful lady who also loved musical theater (and ballroom dancing, what luck!) and was just trying to crack into the lower levels of broadway when the dream was dealt a killer blow. I didn't realize it at the time, of course. But the day the dream died, I got word that I had been cast in an Asian tour of West Side Story.

Woot! That was great news! Reputable company, great show that I hadn't been in before, good people by all accounts. An Asian tour would provide good wieght to the resume, and learning the original choreography to WSS would help me get into future productions. A win all around! Until the contract never showed up, and the company didn't call . . .

Remember when the Asian stock market collapsed? Turns out a lot of the tour had been financed and paid for by the governments of those countries, which no longer had any money for cultural exchanges. Now, on the one hand, this shouldn't have been a big deal -- but I had really hung my hat on this tour. It took a LONG time for me to twig to the fact that this was not merely postponed, this was never going to happen. When I Did figure it out, well. It didnt' exactly break me, and in writing this down, I kinda have to say "really? A tour was cancelled and that killed your dream?" But yeah, it was a kick inna fork to me, it was. And then, other factors:

We got pregnant. Suddenly, going on a long tour wasn't a possibility. I took a more serious teaching job, with more students, more responsibility, and more $$ on the line, so leaving that to audition or do a show meant that only really top notch opportunities could be considered. Focusing so much on ballroom meant that my auditioning skills weren't staying sharp, etc. etc . . . it was a slow death, but two years after that tour never happened, I knew pretty clearly my attempt at being a working theater performer was dead.

And, so, in many ways, I have excised Musical Theater from my life since then. I don't go to see new shows. I don't keep up with current events on the broadway/london stage. I don't listen to old shows, or much watch the classics on video. Its just been easier to ignore the reminders that the dream of my youth, to be a musical theater performer, just was no longer a possibility.

I've been trying, in many ways, ever since to find a new dream. Playing diplomacy did nicely for a while. Pursuing graduate school and a PhD has been a worthwhile endeavor, but it has rarely left me as excited as doing a show. Triathlon training and racing is awesome, wicked, brutal fun, but I don't think its ever going to be the same.

Since the advent of facebook, I have gotten back in touch with many of the people who helped inspire the love of theater in my youth, from Lincoln Community Playhouse. Many of them have stayed in theater in some way shape or form, and some have even stayed in Lincoln, and are still involved in doing the local, non-paying theater that I cut my teeth on as a teenager. That is fun, and also kind of painful to see, in a wistful I-wish-I-was-still-doing-that kind of way. Not that I wish I had never left Nebraksa. :P

J is in a summer musical theater camp, with a theme of 20' and 30's. So, he's playing with legos and singing "Old Man River" and "Varsity Drag" and "Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie" -- its cool! He's got an ear for music and rhythm that's scary good. M asks why I don't want J to take dance classes, like she does -- its not that I don't, it that I don't want to push. If/when HE wants to dance more, he'll let us know, I think. I don't want to push him, just because I wish I was able to be in a three week rehearsal for two weeks of a show again. And, you know, I do. Wish that I could do that. But I can't and, I try to be cool with that as well. I've got other commitments I've made, other obligations that I need to fulfill, and its not like theater is going anywhere. I'll have other chances to get up on the boards and entertain. So, I guess I my dreams aren't dead, so much, as hibernating.

In the meantime, I have a half-ironman on the 19th, and a couple of hundred miles to bike between now and then, and a good 40 miles to run, and 12 or 15 thousand meters to swim. I have 2 & 1/2 chapters of a dissertation to write, I have an apartment to unpack before I can do much of any of that. So! Back to that, and the musical theater can wait for another day.

"There ISNT any band, IS there Professor Hill?"

"I always think there's a band, kid."