But enough about me. What do you think of my…?

I put out a call for subject matter last night. I was looking for one good worm to go fishing with this morning. Within minutes, I caught some really big rocks: follow your bliss, friendship, and the meaning of life.

Well, I did ask.

But before I had time to clip on my caribiner and start chiseling at one of them, I got a message from a (younger than me) friend saying she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer, and suddenly that begged all three questions in one. I remembered what Rose Nyland said when she found herself telling two St. Olaf stories at once, “I’d like to see if I can handle it!” So cover me, kids. I’m going in…

Katherine Alice Thoman, NYC 1980

On Sunday I closed in a play that was my first full production in thirty-one years. I had performed and studied and auditioned and teched and all that fun stuff for about ten years, well into my twenties, but no full production start to finish with ticket sales and a run lasting more than one performance since 1979. By the mid-‘80s, I had met someone, gotten a job, and let my theatrical wheels go off in a ditch. I rationalized it as “growing up.” This is the follow your bliss part of the story because today I feel like I’ve turned back the clock on my dreams. I’ve been granted, and have accepted, a second chance at my first love. If anyone ever tells you it’s too late to do something you can’t stop thinking about, show them the door out of your life. Doing the business of your dreams is as life-affirming a pursuit as there is in this world. If you haven’t started yet, right now would be the very best time. You can finish reading this essay later. (Clue: It’s not about the money.)

Now that was REALLY boring!

The kinda fun, sorta perplexing, and occasionally annoying thing about being a blog writer is that you never know who’s reading unless they’re part of that two percent who chime in regularly. Sometimes that means you forget there are other people out there… well, not really forget, but write like nobody’s reading… and it’s not until you get the smack up the side of the head that I got this week that you remember: You. Are. Not. Alone. (Insert eerie music here.)

After a couple of semi-incendiary essays last week (this one and that one, for those of you who fell behind a couple of installments), I decided to write about the fabulous, colorful, gotta-have-it-and-never-wanna-lose-it theater, my heart and soul, my reason for being, the very air that I breathe. I had been to a play the night before, had inhaled some greasepaint, and was reminded by the empty opening night seats how desperate local venues can become during difficult economic times, and thought it might be a good idea to pen something supportive and encouraging to help fill some seats. I expected to hear back from my actor friends about their local show dilemmas, from my political friends about cutbacks in all things artistic and/or non-profit, and from my family asking, “So when are you going to be in a play?”

Everything in its own time

My headshot c. 1980

“You are a character actor trapped in the body of an ingénue. You won’t be ready to work in this business for thirty years.”

With those words, my acting teacher, Elizabeth Dillon, whom I adored, dropped the curtain on my dream. It was an ordinary Tuesday night in the windowless basement room that we called rehearsal space in HB Studios on Bank Street in Manhattan’s West Village. It was March 1980, I’d been acting for seven years, and I had just turned twenty-two.

Then she turned to the whole class and said, “If there is anything else in the world that you are interested in, please do it. To be an actor, you must be obsessed. You mustn’t be able to think of anything else. It is too hard to do if you aren’t completely focused. Totally, completely focused.”