It’s Only For Now

Total Black: $1,243.57
Total Red: $230,820.71

I worked tonight at New World Stages.  Saw Avenue Q.  I mentioned in Cutting Costs, Corners . . . and Concerns that the last Broadway show I saw was over a year ago, and it was also Avenue Q.  I guess the show went off-Broadway at some point.  Haven’t really heard of that happening.  But at any rate, it’s a great show, but an especially pertinent one now with the economic climate where it’s at.  The show centers around a hodge-podge collection of characters (people, puppets, and monsters) living so close to skid row that they can only afford to live in Manhattan on fictitious Avenue Q.  It’s a great quarter-life crisis show with twenty- and thirtysomethings wondering what they should be doing with their lives.  The show struck me much more than it did last year.

The opening song is “It Sucks to Be Me” and features each member of the cast highlighting why her or his life sucks.  But by the end of the show, you’ve been pulled through every emotion imaginable only to arrive at a happier place than where you started at when you sat down to watch the show hours earlier.  The finale, “For Now,” reminds us that everything is in life is temporary.  That sort of time-in-a-bottle theme has always affected me.  One of my favorite plays is The Shadow Box by Michael Cristofer in part because of the final scene where each cast member accepts the temporariness of life. 

I’m definitely in a different place a little over a year ago when I saw the show last.  But in an odd way, I think I’m in a better place.  Sure I have less money and more debt, but I’m also freer than I was last year.  Back then I worried ceaselessly about my job, about my debts, about my sleep schedule and eating schedule and whether I got to work too late or too early and whether I should take a car home or not or stay late and order food and get fat or leave early and try to get in early the next day . . . and on and on and on.  And all that worrying didn’t bring me anything worthwhile.  I certainly don’t have anything to show for it—except perhaps a few feet from a crow.  So, the show tonight left me feeling better than I have felt in a long time.  It was a good reminder that all this debt—it’s only for now.  It’ll be gone soon enough, if not by 8/9/10.

I finally heard back from CHEST.  I didn’t get selected for the position.  There was a moment during the interview when I mentioned something that got the interviewer to pause.  He mentioned a related idea he had and said that he’d need someone for that position in a few months.  In all honesty, I felt at that moment that he had filed me away for later.  The interview went well, but I didn’t get the impression that he appreciated the added value a professional would bring.  I have to answer to a higher authority—the bar association.  I certainly wouldn’t put my license in jeopardy, so hiring me would have meant not having to worry about my behavior “in the field,” as it were.  But instead they probably went with some college twink boys.  So be it.  It does suck because there’s not many chances to find reputable work in the wee hours of the morning.  But some other gig will surface.  Perhaps I didn’t get that gig because I’m meant to be a bartender on weekends.  We shall see.