Live Free or Die


This, if you're not up on your state mottoes, is the motto of New Hampshire, and well, I'm soon to be living there. The interview went very well on Friday, or I should say, the first interview, because I had a second with another newspaper within the same company, Salmon Press, which owns community newspapers throughout New Hampshire. Well, what ended up happening is Mary at the Granite State News, which is in Wolfeboro, called me as I was headed to New York and told me the job is mine if I want it. I'll be calling her tomorrow to accept officially, barring a miracle here tonight or early morning, and in the next couple of weeks I'll be heading up to start at the Baysider, which is the new paper focusing on the town of Alton. I will be working in the Wolfeboro office, but I'll be looking for an apartment in both cities (taking only one obviously). I'll probably be up there for a year or eighteen months, maybe more, before I look to move up to another paper, like a daily or something, but this is a very good start for me.

The last few days certainly have been fun. The drive up to Wolfeboro on Thursday was fine, though a little bit tiring. Interesting things I saw or found out on the way up: I saw M & T Bank Stadium, where the Ravens play, on the way up. Not surprising, I guess, that the seats are purple. Second, Delaware is not very big, or at the very least, the area you drive through is not. Third, the food on the Jersey turnpike is amazingly expensive, especially when you consider how much things cost everywhere else on earth.

More things that were interesting: the toll for the George Washington Bridge is $6.00, and the state of New York really seems to enjoy the toll booth as a means of getting money. The headquarters of the WWE is all Black mirrored glass and has a huge, black WWE flag on top, creating a really weird image. Not much interesting happened until I got to New Hampshire, mainly because the roads in Connecticut and Massachusetts were clear, with the exception of Lawrence, Mass. (the hometown of both Robert Frost and Leonard Bernstein). I also drove past Walden, which was just fun to be near. New Hampshire is exceptionally pretty, the area where you come in the state is near the Atlantic, and the area I'll be in, the area around Lake Winnipesauke, is gorgeous. While I drove around in the morning, I saw several ice-fishing shanties’ still up, and some hearty soul had brought his pickup out onto the ice. On March 25. Plus there were some pretty views where the Lake, which is still iced over, was in the foreground, while the White Mountains stood pretty majestically in the background, with snow near the caps.

I left the second interview at about 12:30 and headed out. I called to wish my dad a happy birthday, then got going on the highway after about a half hour on two lane roads. Mary, from the Granite State News, called at around 2:30, while I was on the Mass. Pike. After about 4 hours of driving, which included celebratory phone calls to my family, Laura, Bohne, and many others, I came up to New York, where I was going to stay the night, and eventually two nights, at John Sellers' apartment. My dad navigated me through to John's place in Brooklyn, and I was able to find a parking place quickly. I spent a few minutes talking with John, while I also checked my email and everything else that I had neglected for a couple of days.

I also called Beth Snyder, who also lives in Brooklyn, and her, John, and myself spent sometime over dinner catching up. Beth has been doing a lot of auditioning, as well as waitressing at a bar across from Madison Square Garden, and doing some cabaret singing at various locations throughout the city, with Audra White, who accompanied Company, as her piano player. She really seems to be doing pretty well, she has a Summerstock audition on Friday, and she says she's likely to be moving into the city soon. She also told us about a rather harrowing experience she had while she was teaching, where she was staying in the House on Haunted Hill outside of Jackson, something involving ghosts, a wood stove, and million of cockroaches coming out of everywhere. We went back to John's apartment and continued to talk and watch TV, and as John's roommates, Rick and Courtney, arrived they joined us, until Beth went home around 1 a.m., and then the rest of us pretty much went to sleep.

Wanting to spend a celebratory day in the city, I spent Saturday pretty much being a part of the energy of Manhattan. More than any other place, you can be alone in New York and be perfectly content, because the city is just so thriving. I spent much of my time just walking around the city, and of course standing in the line at TKTS. I walked around Central Park, and saw the many children playing, or parents walking their kids around, or dog walkers, and anything else you can imagine, all of which of course is part of what makes it the greatest city in the world. After a couple failed attempts at buying tickets at TKTS, and seeing that none of the musicals I really wanted to see had tickets available, I ended up buying tickets for Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which starred Kathleen Turner as Martha and Bill Irwin, who actually appeared in Albee's last new play, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? when it hit Broadway a couple years ago. I had started to read the play once, but seeing it on stage, being performed by the people Albee thought would be best for it, really made the play hit home with me. Seeing this marriage, seeing these two people who obviously both love and hate each other, as well as seeing the way that Nick and Honey get caught up in, and are likely destroyed by viewing the marriage of George and Martha was an incredible experience. It also made me think about myself a bit, because there seemed to be a lot of similarities between myself and George, in the way he plays games with people and uses what they say, and their own insecurities, against them, especially when he has something to drink, and the force of nature that is his wife is getting going and sharpening her own knives to dig into George's back, and his heart. But to watch how he literally destroys the marriage of Nick and Honey in a manner of minutes, while doing incredible combat with his wife was something to behold. I can see myself as a kind of cruel and mean drunk, because drinking lowers inhibitions, and the inhibitions against doing cruel things might be the first to go.

Today I went to Mass and the came back to DC. It was really great of John and his roommates to host me, and I want to thank them again for that, as well as being good to see Beth. I was also able to talk to Susan and Amy Lewis yesterday, and it was great to hear from them. When I come for workshops next week, I'm hoping I'll be able to catch up with Ms. Lewis.

I wanted to say something regarding Alex. I don't ever recall thinking that Alex was being anything but humble about his movie experience, and I certainly don't recall saying that he was being a jerk about it to anyone. That really would have been awful thing for me to do, particularly because it isn't true. I've only spoken to Alex a couple of times on IM, and then only for a couple of minutes, as he usually was busy. That's it. I haven't spoken to him on the phone or in person since the movie came out, so I wouldn't be able to make any kind of judgment. In the article about Alex on the Albion website, as well as several of the interviews I've read in other newspapers, he's been very humble and self-effacing, nothing else. I wouldn't expect him to be any different. Maybe there's been some kind of misunderstanding, but I just want to put out my side of this, and make sure that I put it out there that I haven't done anything to disparage Alexander Theodore Carroll