“Talent Show
Show Us What You’ve Got
Live and Video Acts Welcome”
It was posted in the office bathroom, and really kind of surprised me when I pulled my pants down early in the morning.
Talent show? Where am I again? High school?
I ripped the page off the wall, washed my hands, and walked back over to my cubicle.
Me: You see this?
Gary swiveled his chair around, staring at me, hungry and bored.
Gary: What.
Me: It’s a talent show.
Gary: Yeah.
Me: You’ve been?
Gary: Happens every year. They rent out a space down the block. It’s a competition with two other firms, and it’s a joke.
Me: You mean people don’t take it seriously.
Gary: Oh, they do.
Me: Then what.
Gary: Doug. It’s a bunch of finance guys trying to do a song and dance. These awkward, talentless idiots attempt something creative for a night. It’s comedy gold.
It did sound kind of funny. I tried to imagine Larry my frizzy-haired manager singing “Oh Shenandoah” while wearing a bow tie and tap-dancing, and almost spit out my coffee.
But my eyes lingered on the boldfaced “Video Acts,” and all of its potential…
Back when I was in high school (ye olden days of yore), I used to perform with friends at the annual talent show, creating skits about odd scenarios – like stumbling upon a wormhole under my backyard patio, eating a magical fruit that made us phosphorescent and telepathic, and digging a hole to Japan.
I did it mostly to get girls. It didn’t work. It worked for Lucas, though. And he didn’t even write the damn scripts.
I guess it was the first time I started creating and entering other worlds that weren’t real. Every year, the more I’d write the skits, the more I’d realize just how colorful the mind could be, and how I’d rather be there.
So I kept creating, even when the annual talent shows passed, and high school passed, and I started college.
After a longtime creative writing professor took a video of my friends and I acting out my skit about zombies who only kill the cruel (it was very pre-Dexter of me), I marveled at how it looked on screen, and started to teach myself how to film.
I’d stay after class with this professor – Professor Glass – who’d show me how to handle a camera, and write for a character who” really wants something,” and how to foreshadow and make all the dots connect in these characters’ lives, in a way mine never did.
Two months before graduating, after filming my very first 5-minute skit on supernatural sisters, Professor Glass put the script down and lowered his spectacles. He said he hopes that, when I leave this place, I never change. That I always stay the same. And that I never give up doing what I’m doing, because it’s “one of my dots.”
I thought it was crazy at the time because who doesn’t change, you know? How do you live life without changing? And of course I’d never give up. I was 21-years-old living in a bubble. I felt ready to take on the world.
But a month later on a Tuesday, Professor Glass didn’t show up to class. And with a bowed head and sad eyes, the Dean announced at the podium that he had passed, from a longtime case of cancer.
And while Professor Glass told me never to change, I did. I really couldn’t help it.
I went from writing skits about supernatural sisters and phosphorescent friends, to brothers road-tripping after the loss of their dad, to kids getting lost in a canyon.
The color and fantasy began to fade. Life got real.
And though I changed, I didn’t give up. I kept writing scripts that went on to attract national attention. But success – it’s just a visitor.
And while it’s hard to sit at this desk in New York nearly 15 years later, working a job that has nothing to do with my origins, I looked at those boldfaced words “Talent Show” and could still feel the hope in Professor Glass’ words.
“It’s one of your dots.”
“Never change.”
So, I signed up.
thesaintgermain 