Meditation on Being the New Kid

Hi there!

For those of you who check in with this blog on a frequent basis, you may recognize Slant of Light Theater Company, you may be familiar with our posts and you may even remember how our AD signs off each post with (-Stacy!)

Well, I'm not Stacy. If you stop reading now...I'll understand.

I've never been great a first impressions. Let's start over. Okay, my name is Vinny, I'm the new Intern for Slant of Light and for the past month or so I've sat faithfully across the table from Stacy and performed various tasks from updating and maintaining our website, to canvassing for the company in the Milford Green to writing proposals for a new wing of the company. It has been an eventful few weeks.

I graduated a mere month ago from college in Boston where I studied Theater and if someone had told me I'd be doing marketing and researching low-cost homes for this company, I would have said "I don't know how to do any of that!" I've been told it's normal for someone at this juncture in life to be confused and frustrated, unable to say which direction they're going in. I've been working in theater for my whole life, assured that this art form would support and fulfill me. So far...well...ask me in a few years.

So here I am, a cup of coffee next to me, the radio playing in the background, in a pretty typical cafe in a pretty typical suburban Connecticut city. Am I an artist yet?

The train station is steps away...I could easily hop on that train and be in New York in the better side of 90 minutes and have all I could handle in the ways of entertainment and artistic fulfillment. But I sit here. How come?

At this point in my life I've written more cover letters than I'd care to admit, I've applied for jobs that I knew I had no business applying to and in turn hoped would never actually contact me, I've spent hours sitting on the couch, too confused to make a decision about really anything. But what do I actually know? As it turns out, I don't know much. What I do know is that I still have a great deal to learn. As the forlorn Dentist, Ben Stark, in Clifford Odet's "Rocket to the Moon" says, "What I don't know would fill a book." I've got the reams of blank paper, let's start writing.

Interning is not glorious. It is not the dream job everybody wants the minute they step off stage with that degree in hand. This isn't news to anyone. What interning is, however, is honest to God work. In a few short weeks I've learned more about working in a non-profit, about how to connect to your client base on every level, about how to deal with difficult situations with equally difficult people. 4 years in college were not a waste, but they certainly weren't a substitute for this.

So I'll sit on my side of the table, putting in the unpaid hours, getting little in return. Merce Cunningham famously said of dancing,

"You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive."

I think the same can be said about theater. At the end of the day, I don't have something physical to take in my hand and feel proud for having created. My work is ephemeral and fleeting, it is supportive and important, but it lasts only a short while and then goes. But it's what I have to do, and it's all I know how to do. So at the end of the day, it really isn't work at all, it's too satisfying to be work.

So I'm here, ready to learn. Let's fill up that book.
Vinny