Dream. Hope. Rock: Part 1

In April of 2000 I unexpectedly found myself in Washington DC for a long weekend. In the early afternoon hours of April 29th I found myself in a van with the TV Star, Ellen Degeneres, Anne Heche, Melissa Etheridge, Laura Dern and a TV crew. We were on our way to RFK Stadium for a sound check.

A few days earlier I had gotten a call from the TV Actor saying that she was going down to DC for the Pride Rocks concert and a brief vacation and had an extra room in her hotel suite for a few days. Did I want to join? Did I?! Things were tough for me at the time. I was working in casting, enough said on that front. Graduate school rejection letters were pouring in. Ok, they weren't really pouring in because I had only applied to three schools: Columbia, Juilliard and Rutgers. I wanted to stay in New York, preferably. If not, the immediate area. After being rejected from both Columbia and Juilliard I was holding out hope for Rutgers. I didn't have much hope left.

Amy Saltz, the acting head of the Directing program at Rutgers University: Mason Gross School of the Arts, had put me through an intensive interview process. I had amazing credentials and stellar recommendations but Amy thought I was "too young" for the program. Reading over the MGSA materials on the program Hal Scott, who started the program, felt that a good director had to be over 30 in order to bring a certain amount of "life experience" to the table. I called bullshit. I had more life experience at the age of 25 than most people had in a life. Amy saw this but was still tentative. We had three interviews. We liked each other. I responded to her gruff, matter-of-fact manner. She was attracted to my passion and ideals. (I was full of both back then.) After our last interview she said she needed some more time to make a decision. Frustrated and thinking the answer would be negative I fell into a slump. My back-up plan of taking the money I had saved over the past few years and going to Italy until it ran out seemed to be the plan of action.

So I was working in casting. I was waiting to here from Rutgers. Present Ex and I were still living together, semi-broken up and semi-together. Relationship limbo. So when TV Actor called with the invite, I jumped. I needed a break from the island and my real life. I didn't really expect to be be in the middle of such an all-star event.

TV Actor and I had become fast friends when I put her in to the national tour of Cabaret. We got into lots of trouble together and enjoyed every moment of it. Whenever I went out to work on the tour, she invited me to stay with her. We laughed a lot. Drank red wine a lot. Smoked Nat Shermans a lot. Danced a lot. Partied a lot. And that was just rehearsal.

Her hotel suite was truly amazing. I hadn't realized the difference between having money and having TV money until I walked in there. Richly furnished and lushly upholstered, it was almost like being in a palace. My room of the suite was so far away from hers we might as well have been on different floors. I hugged her hard and thanked her for the invite. She said she was going to jump in the shower and then we were going to tour the Holocaust Museum. Fun times.

On the way in to DC I had received a phone call from Amy Saltz. I headed to my room in the suite, took a deep breath, swallowed hard and hit redial, bracing myself for the bad news. She answered the phone almost immediately. "Hi, JV. I'm glad you called back so quickly. I wanted to invite you into the Directing program at Rutgers..." And time stopped. The world seemed to move away. I wasn't expecting that. I was prepared for another rejection. I was getting ready to spend months in Italy learning how to speak the language and getting lost among the natives. And Amy talked on about how I would be one of three incoming directors. How we were all so different. How she was excited about each of us. And obviously I said I accepted. Stunned, I went back out to the living room and waited for the TV Star to make her entrance. What better way to celebrate then by experiencing a Holocaust? On the way out, the TV Actor asked the concierge to have a masseuse in our room that night at 10pm and be prepared to spend two hours, an hour for each of us. Nice.

The Holocaust Museum was a truly devastating experience for both of us. Of course, having worked on Cabaret, we talked about it and were familiar with it on an education standpoint, but seeing it in front of you makes the whole experience more visceral, more tangible. I kept myself together for as long as I could until we walked into a room that was, from floor to ceiling, covered in shoes of the victims. I broke down in tears. These relics made it real. These were possessions of people that had been thrown away, destroyed, and all that remained were these thin pieces of broken leather. Stacked behind wired fences the shoes seemed to go straight up to God. And I wanted to reach out and touch them. I wanted to connect with whatever had touched that child, that woman, that man. I wanted to know the person who had chosen that shoe for her daughter, who had crouched down and tied the laces a hundred times until they were stripped of them and kicked aside, now useless. The TV Actor who had been crying for some time now came over and put her arm around me, leading me to a bench outside where I pulled myself together.

"Let's get out of here," she said. "Let's go get a coffee."

I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of lives lost. And as I looked around and realized who I was and where I was and where I was staying at the particular moment in time, I realized just how lucky I was. It was the second (the acceptance into MGSA being the first) of many monumental events to occur that weekend.