Too Loose Too Tall

         To dance.  When it's your life and career it's a swirling vortex of mixed emotions, rejection, and continuously brewing fall back plans.  I run around New York City like a headless chicken spinning in circles of unemployment wondering what's to come of this performer's incarnation this time around.  I'm sure of only one thing....how absolutely unsure I am.  Private agent calls are starting to look no different form those huge open calls I try so desperately to avoid!  Swarms of homos lay around stretching and bragging about their last gig and how much money they made.  Everybody seems to know each other in a sickening kind of way.  I'm home now after a soul feast that consisted of a seven week regional production of Evita.  It was awesome!  After almost two months of deafening quiet in the ghost town that was Little Rock Arkansas bring on the noise I say.  Car alarms, cabbie honking, people screaming at each other, loud screechy subway conductors, turnstiles clicking and snapping in circles, subway cars blasting down the train tracks at what feels like a hundred miles an hour.  I've missed New York.  Light flashes blind me as I speed down the dark tunnels underneath the sweaty city.  It's gross.  Bring on the fucked up energy of a city that, for the most part, never sleeps.  I've been back for less that 48 hours and I've already been cut from two auditions!  If there was ever a time for an exclamation point!!  Rejection is a thing I do.  How can I take two flights to an audition, two cabs,  get all the way there and reach into my folder and realize I have no resume?!  Exclamation point!  Only me.

         I'm meeting a really good girlfriend of mine for drinks tonight that I did cabaret with %*@# years ago in Germany.  Reunions make you think about how much you may or may not have changed since you last saw that particular VIP.  In some ways I'm miles.....no.....years apart from the mess I was in my tumultuous twenties.  And in some ways I'm exactly the same confused, hesitant, doubtful gay disaster-boy I was when I came here when I was 19.  I'm still at the same dance calls with a lot of the same guys.  I still hope for a lot of the same things.  I don't necessarily need to be deeply artistically fulfilled at this point in my life and career....daddy just needs money!  My dog is dreamy but an expensive little thing.  I now have two little doe eyes watching me and waiting for me to tell her we're going to Broadway!  "You got cut?" she seems to say with her guilty huge brown eyes and cocked head....."but.....but....I need a knee surgery and a lifetime supply of Pill Pockets!" $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

           Drinks turned into desert at cafe Lalo on the upper west side.  It was a perfectly cool night.  Nichole and I sat under the sprinkled yellow lights that were draped and wrapped around every single tree.  We talked and talked and were enjoying all the remembering.  She is a fantastic dancer/singer/ actress living the same dream/nightmare I am but over in Germany.  She lives in Hamburg presently and our lives are surprisingly similar to what they were all those years ago when we were bus and trucking it around Duetschland.  Of course the details are different now.  For instance she is engaged to a guy I not only have never heard her mention before but it's very possible that I could potentially never meet him!  That's how friendships abroad seem to unfold.  She's done tons of shows since I last said goodbye to her in Hamburg on closing night of Cabaret all those years ago.  I found myself looking into the eyes of an old friend and seeing myself in a way.  Sometimes I forget that I myself am aging and only realize it when I see a celebrity on television like Madonna.  I've watched this woman grow old in the spotlight all the while doing the same!  "God she looks old and crazy!"  I say laughing and judging her unfairly as my own crow's feet harden around the corners of my eyes.  She's at least got boat loads of cash to disappear and hide away when her shit falls!  

              Nichole inspires me to travel the globe with the same fire I had ten years ago.  This girl is a German rock star in the musical theatre department.  She's known to me as "Loose and Tall" because of a humbling and humiliating audition story she told me.  Why do some directors and choreographers think it's ok to break people down in a creative environment?  She's a hard worker that I want to emulate as she redefines discipline.  Situations like this make me realize that I'm on the right track for me.....for now.... even though it feels like something inside me derailed somewhere along the way during my fucked up and blurry twenties.  Her future is as exciting as her past and I love that approach.  I want to reclaim that momentum and drive for my city.  The New York seven (12) year itch feels a lot like poison ivy mixed with mosquito bites covering my entire body!  No expensive lotion or doctor can cure this wild breakout of possible regret and undetermined doubt and the idea that the grass is greener somewhere.....anywhere else!  It's a dancer's life..........cut!