Belated

I only realized a short time ago, than I missed the six year anniversary of this blog! Not that I had any huge plans for same. I made a big to-do about the five year anniversary last year, because five years feelings like more of a solid, milestone type of number, like to or 20. Still until this year I have tried to at least acknowledge the anniversary on the day itself. (October 7.) This year, it just went out of my head.

Which in a way is acceptable I suppose. In the end this blog isn't so much about blogging itself, as so many blogs are. It is about, of course, my adventures, opinions, trials an tribulations in the world of theatre. Local amateur theatre. Something to which I have been dedicated for quite some time now. The story isn't so much how long I have been blogging about it on a regular basis, (though six years is quite impressive for a blog if I do say so myself), but rather that through ups and downs, great shows and really lousy ones I am still doing this theatre thing.

True. As a freelance writer I have more control over my schedule than many other people would have, and hence I can dedicate time more easily to this pursuit. Yet It still makes me a bit nostalgic when i think of how many people back in my college days, (where I first started theatre) no longer do it on a regular basis.

Back then it was almost a given that everyone would go on to do it in some fashion, professional or not. And don't get me wrong, many of them have. Some to pretty decent, albeit not national acclaim. Yet the percentage of the "theatre people" from back at Marietta College that find they cannot or don't really want to do theatre these days is a bit surprising.

I don't want to go back in time. I don't want to relive my college years. But that sense of urgency, raw creative power, and 100% dedication to the craft is something I miss. Something you don't find as much of in many community theatres. (Some more than others, yes.) It is for that reason that even in the present day, during even the smallest of shows, there are those ghosts of Marietta theatre walking about with me. Even those people to whom I no longer speak are, in subtle ways, present in the far removed mist of subconscious as I walk the boards in theatres they have never and likely never will see. They don't direct or control what I do on stage of course, but I would be lying if I said they were absent. Sometimes it is pretty potent, and other times it is a mere shadow. But always in some fashion, even if only for a split second, it is there.

In the end, I am glad of it, despite some of the disadvantages to those memories. It means that some facet of it is somewhere still in me. It means that even one day if this blog ceases to be, the actor in me, unlike some people I have known, will probably never cease to be.