Turning Point Overturned

 I began my career as a professional scenic carpenter in Orlando at the ripe old age of thirty five. I knew going in that I could do the job, due to my years in community theatre. What I didn't know going in was that a) I was really very good at it, much better than I realized, and b) there was a huge good-paying market for it in most major cities. I started out in an events management company, doing sets for meetings, conventions and best of all, huge themed parties. During my first year I built some of my favorite things. See www.slideshare.net/jimemerson for details. And I began to realize that if I had known all of this twenty years back, I could have been working on Broadway or in Hollywood well before I was thirty five.

I was walking the dog this morning (see https://walkingwithabassador.blogspot.com for details) and thinking, as usual. My mind drifted to the time of year it was, and remembered that next year will be fifty years since I graduated high school. Would I go to Vero Beach for the reunion? Hell No. If I went to any reunion, it would be to Gambrills, Maryland to see the friends left behind when my parents uprooted and moved to Vero Beach in 1968. Once again, I was grumbling about that, the most life-changing change of my early life. Who would I want to see in Vero? The only 1971 VBHS grad I would want to see was in a play with me when the tenth year reunion was going on. And the only other folks I would want to see would be the friends I made in the Vero Beach Theatre Guild. That sent me on the same old track about how things might have been different if only... Suddenly, the juxtaposition of all of these musings took an unprecedented turn.

When my parents moved me to Vero, I had my high school life all mapped out ahead of me in Maryland. I knew dozens of people, I was asked to work on the yearbook committee, I was known to be a good football and baseball player, and I might even have gotten into theatre. I landed in Vero Beach determined to hate it. I skated through high school doing the bare minimum it took to graduate, and moved back to Maryland a week after graduation.

I thought about Vero Beach High school, which at the time was also home to the Theatre Guild. I actually went there to see Guild shows. I already was in love with theatre. There was an active theatre group doing high school shows. So determined was I to eschew anything that might be construed as enjoying my imprisonment, I avoided the drama department. Ten years later I was acting in a show with someone I sort-of knew back then. Sixteen years after that, at forty three years old, I was working with another, much more recent VBHS grad at F/X Scenery And Display outside of Orlando, doing real big-time world class set work. 

Suddenly, my whole life story turned upside down. It was not my parents uprooting me that ruined my early life. It was me, my pig-headedness that made me refuse to find my calling until middle age. I could have been a game builder/stagehand for The Price Is Right, if only I had allowed myself to find out early on that that was my dream job. I forgive you, Wyni and Gil Emerson. Rest in peace.