The First Act

I will tell you what happened in the first act, which is that I was good. Not transcendent. Good. Reliable. The audience did not know they'd been short-changed and possibly they hadn't been. I hit my marks. I found the laughs. And the whole time, underneath, a second voice was running like a stagehand muttering in the dark, and the second voice was saying: you could just not do this anymore. You could teach. You could move to the coast. The voice was not bitter. That was the unsettling thing. It was kind. It sounded like a friend who had been waiting nine years in the wings for ME, the way I had waited for the part, and was finally, gently, getting its call.