40: Yes, and...
40 years ago this week I had no plan. No vision. No destiny. My high school graduation loomed on the horizon, mere weeks away. Four years of classes, books, and avoiding homework would end abruptly. Nothing left to do but ponder what the hell came next. Except I didn't ponder that at all, choosing instead to retreat into an existential funk likely induced from having seen The Breakfast Club for the third time. Friends were heading off to college and writing the next chapter of their life. Meanwhile, I still hadn't even begun an outline of my next chapter. It was a blank page. This wasn't surprising to me considering I spent my high school days avoiding homework until the absolute last second. Winging it. Improvising. Living in the moment and responding to it. My life was an embodiment of "yes, and..."
This felt right since I was a drama kid. An actor. I also fancied myself an aspiring writer. If I could attach a dream to my future at that age, it would be one where I was a professional actor and a novelist. And that would happen, I figured. Someday. The problem is someday was rapidly approaching like the proverbial bright light in a dark tunnel and I was pretty sure it was a train that would pass me by. What I needed was something to react to. Something to happen to motivate me - in true improvisational fashion - to change, change, change. I needed a sign from the universe that would prompt me to say "yes, and..."
One Monday in April the sign arrived in the form of my drama teacher, Jo Nell Seifert, pulling me and my friend Kevin from from our English class. I stood next to Kevin thankful we weren't in any kind of trouble and listened as she told us about her trip to watch a theatre production at Southeast Missouri State. During the intermission she spoke with the show's director, a gentleman named Larry Grisvard. Dr. Grisvard had observed Kevin and I doing a comedic scene a month earlier in a district forensics competition and enjoyed our work.
"He asked where you two were going to college," she said to us. "And I told him I didn't know. Probably Three Rivers."
Three Rivers is the community college in Poplar Bluff. They had offered me scholarship to attend but I wasn't fired up about going. Nothing against the school. My state of mind in April 1985 was locked in a funk and not the fun kind you get with Kool & the Gang, Ohio Players, or Rick James. No, it was a full-on teen angst driven funk nurtured by Echo & the Bunnymen.
"Anyway," Ms. Seifert continued. "He said, 'I'll take 'em both. Wait here.' And he gave me two scholarship offers. One for each of you."
She handed Kevin and me envelopes with scholarship letters inside printed on Southeast Missouri State Stationary and signed by Dr. Grisvard. The scholarships would pay for our tuition starting with the fall semester of 1985. A scholarship to study theater. Who knew such a thing existed? Not I. 17-year-old me was ignorant and unmotivated and overwhelmed about my post-graduation existence. Those blank pages of the next chapter now had an opening paragraph. I held the scholarship offer in my had trembling hand. My world was rocked. My gob was smacked. The universe had jumped into the improvisation to yell "change, change, change!"
All I could say was "yes, and..."
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