Two anniversaries

Two years ago this very day the activities room of a senior center in Brooklyn was converted to a theater for the debut performance of City Love Song.

None of the three dozen people or so present, myself included, could possibly have guessed how far this project would go from there. The extent of the plan had been to circle the country by train and to tell a tale as I traveled. That’s just what happened, and three months later, at the journey’s completion, my conclusion was that City Love Song had been an interesting, ambitious experiment and little else. My mind poked around at other projects before I realized that this experiment was yielding significant, unexpected results and opportunities.

Eight months later I found myself performing a new City Love Song in a first-rate theater Off Broadway, and then ten shows in Scotland. Good reviews came in. Doors opened. People began to ask what might follow.

What followed was a complete rewrite of the New York City cycle of City Love Song for a two-week run in that same Off Broadway house. That ended and a new journey began: the performance of the America cycle in thirteen global cities.

Today is also the fifteenth anniversary of my arrival in New York. A chubby, naive nineteen year old with three thousand dollars and a dream without form. That dream has changed constantly since those early, starry-eyed days of yearning, instant ramen and minor desperation.

But never in my many efforts–some noble, some less so–has the dream ever had so clear a form. Never before has it been the greater shape of my reality.

That interesting experiment became a grand project, and that grand project has awakened my sense of purpose. It has very truly given me the world, and this latest journey, the newest experiment, is only just beginning to reveal its results and opportunities.

These days I’m back to that same activities room–it’s where I earn my living. Instead of theater in the after hours, it’s gospel songs and trivia in the morning and BINGO in the afternoons–not a bad way to pay one’s bills.

But it’s not my only work.

By this time next year I plan to be performing the third and final story. My plans are to begin in New York City next summer and then travel the States again in the fall.

It is my great fortune to have been able to do this work. It has been made possible by countless magnificent, generous people. My duty now is to plumb the depths of this experience for the music and the rhythm and the shape of our final City Love Song–a story of our world, of our people, and our time.

Thank you for these last two extraordinary years. Let us build something now that is worthy of the effort.