falling into something new

I love that fall seems to have come early this year. I love the crisp quality in the air. I love sweaters and scarves. I love watching leaves begin their journeys from green to red, orange, yellow. I also love being brought once again to the feeling of possibility that has always accompanied this season. I love the idea of it being time to begin again.

Now clearly spring is often the time many folks think about new beginnings, about emerging from the dark and cold into the light and the warmth - and that's all well and good, but for me fall has always been that "wipe the slate clean" season. It might be because I was so fond of going back to school each year - new pencils, new backpack, new notebooks, new lunch box - and often new school, new friends, new life in a new town brought to us courtesy of the Air Force's reassignment of my father. Maybe it was because I always felt more defined as a person inside the satisfying and navigable structure of academia than I did in the loose and lax - and usually way too warm for my comfort - time of summer.

In my adult life, maybe this feeling of renewal and possibility is tied to the tides of a typical theatrical season. New seasons begin in the fall and carry us through the darkest days of the year, giving us warm rooms in which to contemplate the push and pull of our lives outside those walls. I've been fortunate to spend my last two falls in the rich, wood-grained, chandelier-ensconced Lincoln Park Cultural Center, beginning two seasons of monumental growth for my artistic home and me. I've spent the last two falls with two remarkable ensembles who fast became families and who taught me how to be a better artist.

Tonight I get to begin again - again. Tonight I get to start work with on a play that I love by an author - and a friend - whom I admire. I will begin working with my intoxicating ensemble of 10 men (yes, you heard me. 10. Men.), continuing to uncover the world of secrets, of joy, of bad-assery - real and imagined - that my crack production team and I have been starting to reveal to one another.

It's fall. Time to begin. Again.