When I was about 19 years old, I met the great playwright Tony Kushner. I asked him, “What advice would you give an actor like me, just starting out?”

He replied “Don’t go to school to learn to act”

As an idealistic young person with my heart set on BEING AN ACTOR, I balked at that.

What??? But how would I learn how to act if I didn’t go to school for acting?

I recognized that I needed training. I still believe in the great importance of training.

But I understand more as I get older what Mr. Kushner was saying:

You can’t create art from art.

Artists pull from a well. But the well isn’t filled by art, and you can’t fill it directly either.

It’s filled slowly by life experiences that pass through the soil of time, until finally they land drop by drop into the aquifer below, to be pulled back up in a new form.

The rain that falls from the sky is still water, but it is not as rich and unique in composition as the water from the ground.

Filling the well takes time. Patience.

Luckily for me, even though I did not heed Mr. Kushner’s warning, my liberal arts degree forced me to take all sorts of classes outside my major.

I took classes like:

Comedy: Text and Theory
Intro to Judaism
Women in Grimm’s Fairy Tales
The Philosophy of Physics
American Pop Culture 1900-1945
The Biogeography of the Global Garden (yes, that was a real class)

Classes and reading can add to your well, sure. But being out in the world does the most. Experiencing life. Interacting with others. Traveling to new places.

This past year, we were not much out in the world.

While I was in lockdown, I learned new things, took classes, met people, kept in touch with friends, etc.

But this past week, I actually got to go home and visit my friends and family for the first time in almost two years.

I felt like Dorothy when she wakes up in Oz. Everything was more vivid. The smells were intense. Emotions were heightened.

For the first half of my trip, I was a bit panicky about not working for two weeks. It was really hard to relax and just enjoy my trip, and not just because I was cramming a few months’ worth of activities into ten days.

Interacting with people in real life is different than interacting with them via text, email, or even phone or Zoom. It’s a lot more chaotic and lovely. Unfocused. More driven by and intermingled with the necessities of daily life. Interrupted by chance events.

Chance events like helping this little dude cross the road to safety…

You might be unpacking a box in the unfamiliar house your mom just moved into, and find the hammer she was looking for in a box of unrelated objects including hair products and lightbulbs, while she yells something unintelligible from the other room.

You might be occasionally exchanging looks with your best friend who is “on a work call” but also walking on a treadmill in her office/guest room while you get ready to meet another friend for coffee.

You might be sitting in the shallow waters of a midwestern lake talking to your friend about her baby while a fish stares at you both from just two feet away, unmoving, as if it is listening to your conversation, with the noises of children at play drifting away like dandelion seeds on the wind.

The sign reads: I assure you we aren’t open

There’s walking around your old city with a close friend who’s going through a hard time, and chatting about family while taking in the absolute destruction the last year has wrought on the place you used to call home—a city that now looks like a war zone.

One of three cemeteries I visited while I was home

There’s laying to rest your beloved grandmother, surrounded by all of her surviving children (12 of 13) and most of their kids, and some of THEIR kids too.

My stepmom Erika and sister Erin take a break before we brave the tunnel

There’s biking fifteen miles with your dad, stepmom, and sister, on a 90-degree evening—the heat of the trail, the smells of cow pasture and pine forest, and then the damp coolness of a pitch black, mile-long railroad tunnel that you’ve known your whole life, before you emerge back into the dying daylight.

There’s doing another ten miles the very next morning.

There are beaches full of people, terrible gas station coffee, a blind barn cat that sounds like a pigeon, nights out with friends and trying to get home with every city street seemingly blocked by a cop car, dusky forests filled with deer and fireflies, cows that won’t be contained, the agony of biting flies, chihuahuas with life jackets, gorgeous sunsets over corn fields…

And so much else.

So, I returned to Atlanta where I now live, feeling exhausted, and yet…full.

My reads have definitely felt different this week. Probably because I interacted with more people in person than I have in…well, two years. I have seen more. Felt more things… Good. Bad. Sad. Bittersweet. Lovely. Annoying. Delightful.

My palette to create with has once again been expanded. I have more colors to use.

But my dad always says that a downpour isn’t as useful as frequent soft rains. The crops need watering on a regular basis, and too much at once can sometimes hurt more than help. I’m excited to get back to work, and yet I’m SO TIRED.

As an artist, and a human being, I know it is my responsibility to keep my well full, even when I can’t leave the city. To get out and experience the world.

So…