As I start to write this, I find myself with absolutely no motivation to do so, other than an understanding that anniversaries have some sort of meaning—even if this is the anniversary of something that I’d prefer not to celebrate.
A year ago I was onstage for the last time. I remember going through the motions but feeling absent from my body, watching myself perform while thinking, “is this the last time I’m going to get to do this?”
I still hope that that wasn’t the last time I get to sing that song and play that character, and with any luck our tour will be back out on the road before the end of the year.
But still, it’s painful and bizarre to look back at a year gone by. At times it feels like a month; at times it feels like a decade.
It has been a decade since I moved to New York with dreams of being a professional actor. My goal wasn’t to be a Broadway star or anything; I simply wanted to be able to support myself solely with acting work.
At first, that seemed like a lofty goal—I didn’t get enough work to support myself until years into my NYC life, relying mostly on jobs in food service to pay the bills while mustering up the strength to go to auditions the Monday morning after the dreaded (yet lucrative) brunch double.
I remember those days fondly, especially this year, when I would love to feel safe walking through a crowded restaurant, balancing an armload of impossibly stacked dishes and winking at kids who wonder aloud, “how do you do that?”
“Magic. And experience. Mostly experience.”
After a year away from the gym, the idea of one-handing thirty pounds of cheap ceramics and half-eaten waffle scraps gives me anxiety. Then again, a lot of things give me anxiety these days.
Walking past other humans, running into the grocery store, setting foot outside of my apartment door into the unventilated stairwell—these things that I took for granted 365 days ago are now calculations on an ongoing risk assessment chart that includes “when can I meet my not-so-newborn nephew?” and “will I kill my parents with a hug?”
My faith in my fellow humans, which used to be unswayable, has been splintered by the selfish and the seditious.
My understanding of America as a land of opportunity has been tainted by a rapid rise of anti-Asian hate crimes and answerless nationwide pleas for police accountability.
Even now, as a trial ramps up for the killer of George Floyd, I have little hope that justice will be served. I don’t know that I believe in American justice anymore; too much has been revealed for me to pretend that our country has ever protected anybody but the powerful, except in cases that are so rare and notable that they’re made into blockbuster Hollywood biopics—and even those profit the powerful.
There’s so much to have lost faith in over this past year that it can be hard to find the silver lining.
And yet, there is always hope.
I see it in the faces of friends when a warm day grants the gift of a visit—albeit a distanced one.
I hear it penetrating my window as the city slowly awakens from the most isolating winter any of us have every experienced.
I feel it when I talk to my 2-year-old niece, who’s only recently begun to pronounce the “s” in my name, and who’s only begun to come to the understanding that the world also revolves around little brothers.
Some of us have gone into new fields; some of us have gone back to school. Some of us have found ourselves in our families—or our families in ourselves—and some have realized that friendship is more important than we ever gave it credit for.
We’ve come so far, and we still have so far to go. And it’s hard to remember when cooped up in our homes, feeding our neglected sourdough starters and halfheartedly attempting to restart a doomed workout regimen—but when all is said and done, all of us will have come through this together.
When this is finally over, we’ll return to life as we remember it: the restaurants and museums and dive bars and crowded trains and too-fast taxis and whole-faced smiles and everything that we’ve left in the past.
It’s all waiting for us in the future.
I can’t wait to jump onstage and embrace it when we get there—I don’t know that I’ll ever let it go.
This past year has been a hard lesson for us all. We’ve grown up with our parents telling us not to take anything for granted but of course we do. What you’ve written is so true Sam, and I hope in the near future we will be able to experience the basics again. We need to meet those new family members, we need to see our elderly relatives, we need to be able to celebrate and to comfort one another.
My wish for you and all in your field, is that you’ll soon be on stage to continue where you left off, looking at a packed house. You deserve that and we deserve it.
“Magic. And experience. Mostly experience.” This answer to “How do you do that?” contains words to live by. As a wizard, I’ve discovered that that’s the deepest, truest answer to “How do you do ANYTHING?”