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Cut by the long shadows of skyscrapers, the Manhattan sunrise sprayed out onto Broadway, flashing on the windshields of speeding taxicabs as they raced across 8th Street like a herd on stampede.
From the subway tunnels, women in slacks and men carrying newspapers and Starbucks’ cups scurried up the stairs and onto the sidewalks, prancing through crosswalks and diverging in all directions.
It was not unlike my first day in New York, back in 2006 when I’d come to Manhattan for a pit stop, working through early winter to raise enough money to get back on the road, back on my motorcycle and across the forty-eight states. Just as then, it was autumn and just as then I was excited at the prospect of a new job where I’d learn new things; where I could give-in to my fantasy of becoming a new person, evolving somehow to accrue a new skill-set, a new peer group, a new life even.
Once again (and for the first time in about eighteen months) the world seemed exciting -- a big, wonderful place of which I knew too little. I’d been twenty-three back in the fall of ’06, and now, at twenty-six, having lived and worked and struggled through every state except Alaska, having fallen in love, having moved to the west coast then back again, having married and divorced, having written a novel, having almost taken my own life out of despair, having labored at the hands of twenty-six different bosses, and having gone through a myriad other experiences… I finally felt like myself again: curious, excited, glad to be alive.
It was a bit of an early morning for me. I’d woken up at five-thirty, early enough to take a walk under the light of the full moon, and early enough to exercise a bit before hopping the subway from Queens into Manhattan to show up at my new job. A few days earlier I’d been hired by the Public Theater(the off-Broadway staple perhaps most famous for its production of the hit musical A Chorus Line) to drive their twenty-four foot truck and assist with lighting, sound, scenery and props. I couldn’t wait to start.
After a year-and-a-half of steady anxiety regarding my first novel, I was finally finished with all the writing and re-writing and was now again able to focus my full attention on the rest of my life. Now I was free to have a bit of a social life, to travel again, to breathe easily, and to finally take a job interesting enough to keep me stimulated. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been working over the last year and a half. In addition to toiling over the pages of my novel each day, I’d written for a legal publication in San Francisco. Then I’d driven a commercial van for a beverage company doing deliveries and promotions. Those jobs hadn’t interested me much though. They were just things I was doing to keep myself fed and alive while I painstakingly finished the book I’d started as a undergraduate in 2005, the same book that had set me atop a motorcycle to scour the nation as research.
My new job reminds me of those I took back then. I applied at the Public to learn about the theater from the ground up. Because I want to know how it operates, how a show tours, what it takes to get a play up and running in front of an audience. I also want to meet people, not business contacts or people to sign my paychecks but real people who do something they are passion about. I knew I would find such people in the theater world.