March 7, 2011
I moved to New York City in August 2010. My life before New York was something I’d grown completely unsatisfied with: I had moved to Connecticut for graduate school in 2001, had weathered two recessions in the relative security of academe but could see the writing on the wall for the doom of that profession and so had, via my teaching assistants union, begun to work for our international union as a communications staffer. This had given me a way out of Connecticut, though escaping the cultish environment of the union would still take a few more years.
The person I was back then was very unlike the person I am now. I wasn’t very much fun those first nine months in the city because I was just so afraid of everything. Bars scared me; too many strangers. Clubs scared me; too dark and too many unknowns and unpredictable scenarios. I was happy to be in a new place but petrified by what that freedom actually meant, and I had yet to find any place to belong or feel at home in.
I worked on 7th Avenue back then, around 27th Street. I remember sitting in my dreary cubicle that Monday, when I got a message from my best friend Matt, asking me if I wanted to go to a show that evening. No, I said, I really just want to go home and hide from the world. It’s the show John (O’Malley) is working on, he said, and he got us comps. Well what kind of show is it, I asked? “We’re gonna, like, chase sexy dancers around a warehouse.” Oh god that sounds so stupid, do I have to? “Just come with me, if you hate it you can leave.”
So around 7pm I walked over to 10th Avenue and the block was so dumpy back then – junkyards, warehouses, not much else. I saw a small line of people gathered at the address I’d been given, so I approached and was handed this card:
I don’t remember anything about checking in or what it was like seeing Manderley for the first time, though I do remember Maximilian being there, giving a short speech and then we were taken to the elevator. I remember getting off the elevator on 3, and taking far too long to explore an empty Macbeths bedroom before, I suppose, figuring out I should investigate the other floors.
I’ve told this story often, though: at some point I came across an extremely attractive man moving quickly, so I did what it seemed like many others were doing: I followed him. We were in the 2nd loop by now, and I had realized it was a loop; but my target soon was running down High Streeet and through a darkened door and it slammed in my face and, to my surprise, was locked.
Oh, there are secret things all over here, aren’t there?
So I picked up his trail again as soon as I could, and stuck as close as I could. Including when we stumbled down all the flights of stairs and I wondered, should I call for help? Is the performer injured? But I stuck to him like glue and when he again approached that darkened door I was close enough to get inside.
And so the highlight of my first show was seeing Luke Murphy in interrogation.
After the finale I reconnected with Matt. We had, of course, seen completely different shows. As we exited we saw John. “Did you get any one on ones,” he asked? One on whats? “Well, I had one where the man in the lobby took me into a room and started putting on makeup.”
No we hadn’t seen anything like that. We immediately set about buying tickets for later in the six-week run. And we wandered the streets for a couple hours after that, comparing notes, feverishly reconstructing what we had just experienced.
Obviously I did not sleep that night.
So much of the time you don’t know when everything has changed. You realize it long after the fact and in retrospect. Not this, this I knew was a fundamental shift. I’d never felt my senses at full alert like that, my mind racing trying to make sense of something so visceral. The music rang in my ears for hours, days later, and I knew when I came back, I’d need a plan.
