One of the rules that I follow on this little jaunt is that, no matter my feelings towards it at the moment, for every place that I visit, and every set of rooms that I rent, at some point in my life, for some reason, I will think about that place as someplace I'd like to be. And the challenge is to imagine that, and be transparent to your life at that point. Life, in a way, is a sort of crossing of these points of experience, and the point is to make the connections between them as strong as possible. Desire animates those connections.
Thinking much about the city. At the most basic level, I'm still, and perhaps fundamentally, an actor, usually in NYC, even given the subsequent credentials and travails. So those long mornings waiting in lines before dawn with an egg and cheese with pepper sandwich from the cart and a small cup of coffee with an inexplicable Greek bas-relief on the side (my favorite cup was from a diner in Inwood -- it had some lines from Poe), as the actors wait for the audition studios to open -- a present moment is intending towards precisely that.
Before the city, I was in the first MFA class of a national-caliber program modeled on the legendary first curriculum at J-----d, and our first class was as messy as theirs. I stayed out of it and haunted the theatres, but the others had long meetings into the night discussing the difficulties. I kept my own counsel until the mandatory exit focus group, but generally went along with the views of the others then. Support levels were very low and oddly timed, and the most intense areas of the curriculum seemed to have the least distinguished faculty. I found some good professors, though, and tried to work with them as much as I could. Had some good roles, genuinely trained rather hard for a number of years. Learned the art. And things with the program changed afterwards.
But only a few of us went to the city, and I think I was the last one standing. We were the genius fiascoes of the beginning, and the road afterwards was self-assembled. Very few chances at the beginning in the city (aside from a few readings). Eventually, I built up a cycle of fairly steady and rewarding off-off work (paycheck=subway fare) for several years. But then an ensemble member (and fight captain) put a barbed trident through my foot while I was halfway through a shoulder roll, rehearsing the title role in Spartacus. And the dot-com crash TKOd the day job. So, without in the slightest bidding farewell to my muse, I headed off to law school to try to get a bit of stability in the city.
Which is where the tale would leave the place and time towards which my thoughts are presently directed.