This past Saturday I turned 40. Usually this is a time for people to take a moment and reflect on their life, where they’ve been and where they want to go, that sort of thing. I’ve already mostly covered the past two decades, however: both my 20’s and my 30’s (mostly; offset by two years, but close enough). Funny thing about that last post, however; it was made in January of 2020, and near the end there’s this line:
“Honestly, both these past years have kind of run together, and I don’t know if the next years will be similar, but they very well might be.”
Turns out that, well, 2020 was not similar. Not similar at all. If you’re reading this in the far future then you may not know this, but there was a worldwide pandemic that year that upended most people’s lives, mine included. I got furloughed from Little America Hotel, spent several months indoors trying to figure things out, ended up taking a tech job at Hale Centre Theatre and not returning to the hotel job once they eliminated my position (but they said I could reapply to try to land a job with twice the workload and no pay raise!). I’ve documented the salient points of that journey in recent posts, and I’ve no wish to repeat myself. Long story short: I’m still in financial trouble and am often scrambling to make ends meet, and am working through a whole host of mental health issues on top of it.
However!
While those situations haven’t been resolved yet (and at least the financial one has worsened) since the last time I posted anything here, mentally I feel like I’m doing quite a bit better. I’m not top-notch, granted, but most days are pretty decent. This isn’t really due to anything I’ve decided or done, at least not on my own, but due to a group of friends that has evolved over the past couple of months that has really helped out. I don’t want to mention any of their names here, as I haven’t asked their permission, but I do want to tell the story.
During the last show that Hale put on, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, the spotlight operators ended up forming a closer bond with each other than I’ve ever had at a job before. This is due to a few factors:
1) Changes in our pre-show duties meant that most of us ended up spending around an hour in our own area up by the catwalk instead of down on the stage level, where the rest of the cast and crew were milling about, meaning that there were fewer people around to overhear our conversations or distract us, and we could get to know each other better within the department.
2) The nature of the show was light on the effects and had a bunch of talk-heavy and simply-lit scenes, meaning that we had a fair amount of downtime on headset where we could (softly) chat among ourselves while the show was running, and often did just to avoid going insane, because…
3) Molly Brown isn’t that good of a show. Don’t get me wrong: our production was good and the actors were great, but the script was pretty uneven and terrible, even after having been rewritten to be more “historically accurate”. However, it was terrible in ways that engendered a whole lot of discussion for us who ended up seeing it around fifty times. The relationship between the leads, in particular, was super fascinating for those who wanted to see how a marriage built on false promises between two people whose priorities are fundamentally opposed without really acknowledging that in the text is a gold mine, no pun intended, of discussion (the pun being that the show is centered around a literal gold mine). As a result, we ended up discussing some somewhat heavy topics on headset about relationships, love, trauma, consent, and even rape (toward the end of the show Molly’s husband ends up having an affair with a showgirl that destroys their marriage, but it’s unclear how able he was to give consent at the time…it’s a whole thing that probably deserves a separate post that I will most likely never make), which was really weird for a show that mostly bills itself as a toe-tapping, good-times, Music Man-esque musical about a headstrong woman who happened to be a Titanic survivor. These discussions were always respectful and enlightening, and as a result we became a pretty close-knit group that felt free to be ourselves around each other for the most part.
To be fair, it’s not like the spots department was always cold or stand-offish before this point. There had been ups and downs, but for the most part I had gotten along with the other spot ops in previous shows. But it was always a work-friends type of relationship that hadn’t moved past the theatre exit door.
This ended up being something different.
The first moment that stood out for me was when I mentioned that I couldn’t work a particular performance because I was planning on perfoming in an improv show in Ogden with the ol’ Absoludicrous troupe that I’ve been in since the mid-2000’s with high school friends, and a couple of the other spot ops expressed interest in coming to the show. I was actually taken off-guard by this. I guess my poor autistic socially-anxious brain had never even entertained the idea that work peeps would be interested in doing something with me in the off hours. What ended up being more surprising is that they actually came! Made the drive up to Ogden and everything! Saw me do an improv show that, while a bit rusty, was on the whole one of the better Absoludicrous shows we’ve done (despite being literally in a parking lot just outside the City Hall of West Haven).
Not long after, one of the other spot ops set up a Discord channel for gaming. We’d tried one of those before nearly a year ago for a potential D&D campaign, but it ended up fizzling before anything happened. This one was more general, though at first it focused mostly on a Minecraft server that a lot of us spent a bunch of time in. Even me, and I don’t really love Minecraft (it’s OK, but not really my thing), but I did like hanging out with this group.
Soon after we started using the Discord server to plan real life outside-of-work get-togethers to hang out and, like, play Jackbox games and such. So far we’ve done two of them and have plans for a third post-Thanksgiving. I’ve been hosting them all, since my place is centrally located and I don’t have kids or parents or roommates to worry about. Sure, it’s not a huge apartment, but we’ve worked around that so far, and it’s nice being able to use this space as more than a place to put my bed and computer.
I cannot overstate how important this has been to my mental health. Yeah, it’s not like I was entirely friendless before; I still have my family, and some friends that I game with online (including Johnathan who, since that 30’s post I linked to above, I’ve reconciled with and we have a far healthier, less co-dependent friendship now). But I don’t see them every day; heck, even my family I usually only see about once a month or so, and most, if not all, of my other friends are either busy or out-of-state (or both). I spend the vast majority of my time outside my apartment at work, and it’s a lot better when there are people there that are genuinely happy to have me around, and that I’m genuinely happy to be around. A lot of our quirks generally gel well with each other, and it’s made life far more bearable, even when I’m still struggling with other financial and health issues.
We’ve expanded a bit beyond the Molly Brown group, both with previous spot ops and some from the current show (The Little Mermaid). And while circumstances of Mermaid are turning out to be quite different and will most likely not lead to a similar tight-knit group like what happened with Molly Brown, a lot of those ops are still there, and the ones who aren’t are mostly still active in the Discord and such. Part of me is waiting for the other shoe to drop: for people to start getting busy on their own and drifting apart and such, but I’m gonna enjoy this until that happens as much as I can. Heck,
Anyway, this post ended up not being about turning 40, or even as philosophical or existential as I usually get, but for those of you who get the impression from this blog that everything is doom and gloom for me all the time, it’s really not. There’s actually quite a bit more I could talk about involving this group and things we’ve helped each other discover about ourselves and each other (cue cheesy sitcom theme), and maybe eventually I shall, but like I said earlier, I don’t want to post anything personal without permission. Suffice it to say they’re good people, and I think we’re good for each other, and that’s all that I need to say here for now.
Part of Me 