at any moment...

here in san antonio it's a cold, damp martin luther king jr. day.
i slept last night from around 10 pm to 1 am, then was wide awake. after flipping through my beloved iPod for a while, i remembered i had two big bins full of laundry to do. so i packed up the car and drove down to the neighborhood 24-hour laundromat, a building on the same property where there used to be a mr. gatti's pizza, just across the street from where i went to high school and where i now work.
the laundromat was almost empty. it was around 3 am. two other men were there. i sat on the counter and listened to music. i watched my clothes and bedsheets tumble. and to think, i used to eat pizza here.
this past week i turned in my written resignation to my principal. i am moving on. nothing terrible has happened, no bitter betrayal or unresolvable power struggle. i am not getting kicked out or run out of town, like so many drama teachers you hear about these days. i have decided to move on, and to pursue my acting career. i have hesitated to write about this on the blog for fear that the news would get back around to my students before i get to tell them myself. i think the chances of that happening are extremely low; however, if you, reading this, have any contact with my current students, i ask that you exercise discretion and keep this under your hat until i have a chance to talk to them myself, which will probably be sometime in april.
in february i am going to a general audition at the guthrie theatre in minneapolis. i got this opportunity because a bigwig at the guthrie came to my school in december to audition some of the seniors for the actor training program there. somehow i had the unmitigated gall and gumption to ask him for an audition; somehow he had the grace to say, "sure, i can set that up." the rest is falling into place: the theatre offered to let me stay in their artist housing; i bought my plane ticket; i printed out a new resume; i'm putting an audition together. it is a truly thrilling way to kick off this new phase of my acting career.
when you know you're leaving a place, your entire perspective on the place changes. in some ways i'm more engaged now in my work at school, and with the students, knowing that these are my last few months with them. but in other ways i am already gone. it's a difficult place to be in, balancing between the end of one section of my life and the beginning of a new one. i have gotten some wonderful and surprising reactions from colleagues, all of them positive, that exhorted me to go for it, follow my dream, pursue my passion. and i've had only a handful of moments of doubt, all of them short-lived-- they were literally over in a matter of seconds. i haven't felt this sure about something in a long time, probably since i decided to move back to texas back in 2003. so to have extra support from people i work with has just reinforced my decision even more.
it is scary, in a way, but the scariness doesn't compare to the excitement. beyond the particulars of the situation, what's deeply exciting to me is the knowledge i have in my heart that it is time to move on-- this conviction. and then beyond that, the ability to move on-- the energy, the initiative, the follow-through, which already feels like a victory to me.
ps. to fran: i love you!!