luctor et emergo

I’m about halfway through the memoirs of Eli Wallach, which was a present from my Nana. It’s a good book, nothing profound but very engrossing. I love stories of the New York theater scene in the forties and fifties, Sanford Meisner, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, Lee Strausberg, the Actors Studio. It must have been thrilling to be alive in that time and to work classics like Camino Real as they were just being made. You can sense that Eli knew the importance of the work as it was being crafted. There’s a nostalgic vibrance to the way he writes about those days.

I wonder if there’s a part of New York that’s still like that. Or how to bring it back out again. It would appear that surrounding oneself with genius helps. It really is all contacts in the acting world. So-and-so knowing so-and-so, dropping parts, stepping into others. I’ve got to remember that. Bridge-burning will get me nowhere.

Still there’s a level of skill you must demand. I face it now in my University. I want to push, to show, to open that passion and romance that was opened for me. God, Mike Toth at the last Rooftop party, scotch glass aloft, reciting the ‘band of brothers’ speech from Henry V. Rousing what was left of a debauched evening and holding our spirits to the rafters on the wings of his botched and booming delivery. That was one of the defining moments. When it became a passion and not a talent. That’s what I took from Mike, passion.

But who do I give it too? I’ve always tried to keep an eye open for someone to inspire as he did me. To pass the torch. Kate confronted me in Parker’s car while we were out getting pumpkins: I keep thinking of a man to pass it onto, it could very well be a girl. It’s true I do keep looking for a man. I should be more open. Part of me wishes that Kate could be that person to pass the obsession onto. But Kate has possession of something else entirely and she’s easy to shirk responsibility. She’ll be successful in one way or another, but she’s almost done at USM. Plus she’s as old as I am. That won’t do.

Perhaps this is not how it will go. History doesn’t have to be cicular in such small spans of time. But goddamnit I’ll be damned if I don’t try to stir some passion up while I’m still here. It’s crucial that I do, it’s important. Not just to me but for the sake of the art itself.