"I feel very complete right now."

I was a sophomore studying theater at Miami University, dissatisfied — I don’t think I really had any reason to be, I’ve just always been a dissatisfied person — and I just wanted to go and be somewhere else. I’d gone to college with dreams of being an actor, and I felt like I was failing at it, not getting roles, not getting positive feedback in class, and not feeling like I was at all in command of it.

My two best friends, Scott and Dan, were similarly restless. Dan was auditioning at NYU, and Scott was auditioning at Syracuse, both to study acting. I couldn’t decide (never could, not when I was 8, not this week) whether to be a visual artist or a theater artist, so I sent my portfolio to Parsons and auditioned at Syracuse, and I thought I’d just see where I got accepted and let fate decide. I knew deep in my soul that I would end up in New York, but I think at this point I was still intimidated by the notion of moving here. I was accepted at both schools and chose New York, and the rest .…

I made this journal entry right after my Syracuse audition. i did a monologue from Shadow Box, a play that was very buzzy at the time but I don’t ever hear about it anymore. (I noticed when I was watching The Last Movie Stars that there’s a film of it with Joanne Woodward, so I’ll have to watch that.) It’s pre-AIDS (just barely), about a terminally ill gay man, his lover, and his ex-wife. Anyway, I thought I’d nailed it. Manning and Rosenberg and Bennison were my teachers at Miami. I don’t recall any of them doing anything deserving of such scorn.

I had decided midway through my second year at Miami that I wanted to direct, not act, and I chose Parsons because I thought studying painting and sculpture would be great director’s training. (Or that’s what I was telling myself.) It would have been, except that within a week or two I was completely seduced by the idea of being a painter.