Inner Circle

Last week, on Wednesday, a member of my inner circle made it to Broadway.

Now, I’ve had friends on the Great White Way before, and certainly some of my colleagues are up there on a regular basis. But this, my friends, is inner circle. Rob is my best friend since I was 12 years old. We survived Texas together. He busted his ass to graduate from Julliard. We lived together in the summers up in Syracuse where I was going to school and we painted houses to try and pay our rent. We were really poor. We ate Army rations a friend had sent me as a joke when we ran out of money and food. We graduated from our glorious institutions and dove right into student loans and the hustle of making things work. Rob applied for and received a Fullbright scholarship (!) and then he went to work and teach in Colombia, South America for almost 10 years. (And when he went there he didn’t speak Spanish, he had to learn when he got there.)

He came home from South America, and many of his friends from school were already working at a very visible level. And he had to work, really, really hard to get back up to speed here in the USA. Very hard. Blood sweat and tears soul-busting hard.

And now he’s going to be on Broadway. He’ll be covering the lead in The 39 Steps, and I hope like hell he gets to go on sometime in July or August. (He’ll have at least 6 months to go on, but I want to see him up there NOW!) I can’t wait. He’s amazing, he’s brilliant and he’s where he’s supposed to be.

My best bud is stepping into the light -- and it feels so good.