"...and I was wondering if every Dairy Queen blizzard must suddenly seem a little sweeter."

I just Googled myself (Oh please...act like you've never done it...) and discovered that this blog is the third thing to come up. I feel like that puts some pressure on me...

I would be remiss if I didn't mention my favorite piece of media this week, which is where my headline comes from. Slate has been incrementally covering my favorite show, Friday Night Lights. Incidentally, you should ALL check it out. It's wonderful television. I'll let you borrow season one if you want... Anyway, I digress. Even though one of the people covering it is Emily Bazelon, who I have SUCH a nerdy crush on, I've got to say that Meghan O'Rourke has taken the cake for a beautiful paragraph she wrote about the most recent episode. I'm going to quote it here, but I feel very strongly that you should go check out the piece which is located right here and is called The Joy and Melancholy of Being a High-School Senior.


Meanwhile, everyone is growing up and preparing to move on. Somehow, this episode really caught the flavor of senior-year joy and melancholy: the way that suddenly you feel adult, replete in the new sensations of independence, and at the same time feel the pangs of change. A new life is just around the corner for a lot of these people—even if it's just the new life of being post-high school in Dillon, without a job. I spent this past week in West Texas, a couple of hundred miles from the real place that Buzz Bissinger wrote about in Friday Night Lights; the seniors in town had been getting their acceptance letters, and you could feel that same sense of nervy excitement around them. Things were going to change. I remember that feeling, and I was wondering if every Dairy Queen Blizzard must suddenly seem a little sweeter.

People often ask me about my hometown. About why it means what it means to me, and, somehow, this paragraph encapsulates everything about home that I love. It makes me ache for home and for the simple joys of a life well lived. While you're over on Slate, I'd also recommend her wonderful series on grief called The Long Goodbye.

What does she say is the best thing to read while grieving? It's obvious, isn't it? Hamlet.

Hamlet is going well. We're about a week away from tech, which always shocks me when it happens. Especially this time around, when, even though I only missed one day, I feel like I'm coming in mid-stride. I'm incredibly busy, driving from day job straight to rehearsals on many days, not having much time to get anything other than fast food to eat. But this week is going to be a cake walk compared to next week. What's so bad about next week, you ask? Well, I've got Kidstuf rehearsal, inventory at my day job, Hamlet tech-ing and opening AND, to top it all off, Atlanta Unified auditions.

I'm excited about Atlanta Unifieds. I mean, first off, I'm grateful that I got in. There are many talented performers, people I think are fantastic, who are on the outside looking in this year, so I'm happy to have slipped through. I'll be using the same set of monologues I used at UPTA, so I won't really have to worry about time. I don't know, man. I just like auditioning.

Speaking of, I've got a couple of out of town auditions coming up, both of which are going to require me driving all night to audition in another state in the morning. Oh, what we do for our (jobs) art.

Nothing on the horizon in Atlanta. It looks like this summer is going to be quiet. I'll be going home to be in a friend's wedding ($160 is just too much to pay for a rented tux, am I right?) and at least I'll be available for Kidstuf and reThink.

There is much to be grateful for. Much.