A Room with a View

Two years ago today was the last day of my mother's life. I was performing a tiny role in Philip Glass's Orphee at Portland Opera - the role of the Glazier, the first dead soul Orpheus meets when he enters the underworld. The set was two parallel apartments. I left the show, went back to my mother's apartment, where I was staying in the parallel apartment next door, then slept on the floor next to her as she drifted in and out of wherever it is you go when you die. She fell into a coma that morning.

At the same time I was buying an apartment in NYC with my father, our main goal being to have a view. In yet another life is stranger than fiction situation, the apartment I was buying looked remarkably like the one in Orphee. Stranger still, Glass's opera casts Orpheus as a mid-career writer in New York.

Fiction:


Life:

Two years later I'm in a new apartment, my father having bought us out of that other one, but we still have a view.



And, in the ain't-life-strange-department today is the first day of auditions for my first musical, premiering this spring at the Old Globe in San Diego: