Something I forgot to recount in the description of October was how late in the month (I have no idea why, but I emphatically believe it was the 20th, our director, Tony Coggins arranged a field trip to U of M Flint (which he attended) to tour their theater facility. Stagehands walked us through, explaining the flies, the spots, the rehearsal spaces and black boxes. It was a bright, sunny Saturday, crisp and cold; perfect October.
Maybe I remember that now because my main memory of November was how the play came more and more to take over my life. I had a fair number of lines to memorize, and while I don’t remember our exact schedule I know that we came to spend several hours a day rehearsing after school. I was also involved in the band, and so I was pretty busy. The collective effort involved built toward a feeling of intense belonging and ownership with this group of people. It was something that, for a long time, seemed to specifically apply to theater, and is the main reason I became addicted to it for so long. But that moment hadn’t arrived yet; it was still in the works.
The previous month’s vampire obsession had also led me to rent Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. I beat the game, one of my very favorites, for the first time on Thanksgiving. My cousins came over, as did my grandparents and aunts, and later in the day we went for a walk back to the river. It was an amazingly mild day… windy, but we barely needed to wear jackets at all. In the field behind our barn there was one point where a dried out grey lumber post had been driven into the ground before the horse shelter. As we walked back I looked at it, and everything seemed about that time seemed to swirl around the point of that post: vampires, the gothic, theater, and impending cold. All swept up in gray grass, leaveless tree branches, gray skies, and wind.
Where were you in November, 1991?