Doing The Pageant Redux

Every now and then I log on to the Lost Colony Alumni website and sample the journal I wrote during the summer of 2003. I have mixed feelings about it. Sometimes I think it is funny, sometimes boring, sometimes maudlin, sometimes “what the hell was I talking about?” I had always intended to go back and edit it into something that would be readable to a non-Colony person, or at least something more accessible to Colonists from all years. I never got around to editing it. There were offshoots – novels! – which I started to write but I always got a few chapters into them and then wandered away.

Lisa and I moved away from Manteo in 2007 and became very involved in a new life in Moore County North Carolina (most famous for Pinehurst – but we don’t live there or even play golf). Acting/directing/producing has occupied me since.

But Manteo keeps drawing me back. Our daughter Alice will never forgive us for moving away from the home town beach and when she finished graduate school she moved back to the Outer Banks. I got involved in her housing choice and we ended up renting an apartment in Manteo with two bedrooms. We split the rent. I spent half the summer and fall there, commuting back and forth every week.

Times are tough in the paying-theater world and I need a part time paying acting job to pay my half the rent so I can enjoy the beach and town again this summer.

A need to make some money acting on the Outer Banks?

A desire to update and expand the journal I wrote in 2003? But the journal was about being part of the Lost Colony acting company. How to get myself back into the day-to-day details of doing the monster so that I could finish the writing project I started in 2003?

Hmmm…

So I went to local Manteo auditions in February.

I got a call from the director Robert Richmond yesterday morning.

I’m going to be playing Father Martin this summer.

In the final journal entry in 2003 I wrote: “Sometimes, if you are very good, say your prayers (and) have piled up good karma, (you can) just say: “Screw this! I’m doing the Colony.” 

Lisa has given her approval to this adventure. She has been very involved in animal rescue and rehabilitation groups in Moore County for the past five years and has been accepted into a two year vet tech school at Central Carolina Community College (“Cougars” and yes of course she has a cougar tee shirt).

And this website! It was pretty state-of-the-art back in 2003. Lots of alumni participated. But the site goddess has long since abandoned paying attention to it and so has her assistant (me). Most participants have gone to Facebook. I’ll see if I can goose the site up this summer.

Question: should I mirror what I write on Facebook? I’m thinking about it.

When I first ventured to Roanoke Island to be an actor in that pageant they put on there on the north end every summer in the 1990s it was as a working vacation away from running a theater company in Durham. Ignore the bullshit part of the show business and just be an actor. Show up, do my thing, go home, collect paycheck. That’s very much my situation right now. I’ve either acted/directed/produced six shows since September. Heck, I’m in rehearsal as we speak for another one! (“Over the River and Through the Woods” at The Sunrise Theater in Southern Pines NC March 23 – 27. It’s gonna be good!) and I am feeling burned out.

Screw this! I’m doing the Colony.