On: Surroundings (Stinky Cheese Man Tech - Day One)

Today is my director's birthday. I pretty much adore this woman, so I was thrilled when she invited me to join a small group of OCT people for a drink to celebrate after tech.
My director chose Higgins bar, which I immediately recognized as a fancy place because the people who run ART took the Artists Director candidates there when the were in town. Not a place I would ever go with my friends, since none of us can afford it.
I am in the last group of people to reach the bar, because I stayed to clean and lock up at the theater. When I get there, I am undeniably the "one thing not like the others." Everyone else at this gathering is at least fifteen years older than me, and they have all known each other for a minimum of ten years. Someone made a joke about owls and tootsie roll pops and then said, "That's not funny to anyone under forty!" and I was the only one who didn't laugh.
At one point the conversation turned to what everyone was doing the morning of September 11th. My director had just flown back from working a gig in San Francisco, my music director was on the tread mill before work, an actress in my show had been up all night, drinking and knitting with a friend who's brother-in-law died that morning.
They were all so swept up in remembering that I did something I hardly ever do: I withdrew, I observed, and I did not speak. I watched this group of people interact and I thought about how extraordinary it was that I was there at all; how marvelous our profession that it allowed me to be. I thought about my friends, and how few of them are my age. And I was proud of myself for a moment, proud of the people I choose to surround myself with. Proud that my director asked me, along with a few of her closest career friends, out to celebrate her birthday and all the fabulous years that have made up her life. I hope that when I'm having a birthday when I am old enough to joke about being only 33, I can bring a young woman along too and show her what it looks like to be a grown up in the real world.

(And: for the record, I was twelve when the planes hit the towers. I remember waking up in my middle school bedroom to the news blaring from the radio, as opposed to the music I usually had. I went to school anyway, though I had no idea of I should.)