On a personal note (which for me is usually G) I spend the last half hour of being 25 typing preview notes – a fitting ending to my year of assistant directing, which began at South Coast Rep and is ending here at Portland Center Stage. We moved the location of intermission tonight, very successfully. My parents are here in town, and they saw SAGN tonight and really loved it. We had a great dinner, too.

As Chris Henderson says in SAGN,
“You can do as you please. Me, I’m figuring to move on.”

Oh, I got a job in New York today – a low-key day job, which is just what’s needed, and I have an apartment I’m subletting. So that promise I always made to myself, that I wouldn’t go to NYC without housing and employment, has been kept. There is now nothing preventing me from going there to write, to see shows, and to have a great time.

Here are the preview/birthday notes to myself, since it’s been a week of notes:
DARA:
– Only make promises you can keep, to yourself and to others. And keep them.
– When you’re trying to remember what it was like being 25, remember that it was disorienting, unstable, confusing, but that it was worth it. All of it. Every second. There have been some years that you’ve regretted. This one isn’t going to be one of them. You did really good work this year, if you do say so yourself.
– When you were ready for a composer to come into your life and your work, really ready, you met two in less than a week. It’s the same way with all the things you wish for.
– You’ve always been a writer more than anything else. Now all you have to do is BE a writer more than anything else.
– There have been more than enough things you’ve done that were absolutely no fun. The year of being 26 gives you dispensation from all of them. If it isn’t fun, don’t do it.
– In the logging scene, please take two steps downstage. Your sidelight is being blocked by a giant black umbrella.
– Diction on “To be or not to be.”

My birthday is tomorrow, or in ten minutes. I’m sure I’ll spend another birthday in previews soon, perhaps next year, or the year after that. And I won’t regret a second I’ve given to theater, and I never have. But next year is going to be more about giving some of those seconds to myself, too. Maybe we can share them.

I’m going to finish these notes, go get a drink to celebrate, and go home to my Portland apartment overlooking the church on Alder Street. And I’m going to go to sleep in the second quarter of my life.

From a basketball point of view, being in a later quarter can only be a good thing. The game gets more interesting.