Didn't take long to find me, and are you gonna stay the night?

In high school I did theater (of course), first as minor roles in the chorus in the spring musical at the community theater company at my church, then I went over to the youth-written theater company at the local arts center which I did for two seasons. At the time, I often checked my favorite books out from the library over and over again, not necessarily because I didn't want to buy them, but because I didn't know where to buy them, since the only bookstores I could venture to at the age of 14 were the small chains in shopping malls that didn't have much selection beyond paperback bestsellers and genre fiction. My two favorite and most frequently checked out books were the hardback version of Peter Hedges's What's Eating Gilbert Grape? (which I read because of a review in Sassy magazine, thankyouverymuch, and way before it was a twinkle in the eye of moviemakers; years later limenal found me an exact copy via the magic of ebay) and The Way We Live Now, a collection of american plays and the aids crisis, or some other similar tagline.

My favorite was William Hoffman's piece entitled "As Is" and for my audition for the theatre company, I performed a monologue I pulled out of it and prepared. Actually, wait no, I'm getting it wrong. It was a monologue I prepared in the first session of the company, and then when I auditioned for the second session, I decided I needed to do some formal traditional piece to show I was a serious actor (omg, I've totally forgotten that at one point in my life I really wanted to do that), so I prepared some other monologue from some other play that I can hardly remember now. Not Tennessee Williams, but maybe Thornton Wilder? I dunno, something kinda dull and white and from the american theater canon. So at my audition I did this one, and my director from last session was in the audition and said, hey, can you also do that other monologue from before? And I started to freak and then I did it. Because I knew it, I knew all of it, and I probably didn't do it exactly or perfectly but pretty damn close, because I used to sit in my room with that library book open reading it over and over again.

I'd like to say I could still perform it, but it's been nearly 15 years. However, the first line pops up in my head.

I've been thinking about dying lately.

It's a simple line. Though if you google it, only a few pages come up. Mostly it's not just the words themselves, but the inflection and how I specifically said them. The rest of the monologue goes on to talk about where they want to be buried and how he imagines being on a hill and having an apple tree grow out of him and then people could eat off the tree, but it would probably have worms.

I was about to write I HAVEN'T been thinking about dying lately, but then I was like, wait, that's not true, I just spend 2 hours thinking about dying because I saw the movie The Constant Gardener which is not really that great of a movie as far as story or thrills (since it's supposed to be a thriller). It's lacking several things. But in the midst of it are some moments where I probably did blubber a little, when it traces the history and trajectory of the main characters relationship/marriage along with the (weak) trajectory of the events she uncovered which lead to her death. I'm not giving anything away. It's in the preview, it's in the first five minutes, and to spoil it some, you don't really leave the theater much more illuminated than what was given out initially.

But anyway, yeah. All this to simply say, I've been thinking about dying lately.