Last Saturday the digital copies of my original VHS tapes of all my High School plays arrived and I spent some time this morning checking them out. It’s a digital mountain of memories and, on the downside, it makes me feel old. Turning 30, which will happen in 2 days is also something I have had somewhat of a time managing.
I REALLY miss those plays and it’s something that is hard for me to get back or relive. Or sure, there is community theatre – I always wanted, and still do, to eventually get into that. And I think, one of these days, I will. But by then I’ll be the old guy that plays all the old guy roles :) and it still won’t feel exactly like it felt back then. That was a special time and I’m so glad I was able to play a part in all of those.
But I don’t have a time machine so I can’t go back and, even if I did, I couldn’t relive those memories directly. You can’t change the past, but on the upside, the future looks pretty neat. One of the things we talked about doing for our next Victim Cache, album, for instance, is live shows. We even talked about some theatre-like components and if we can swing that, it will be pretty awesome!
I think the favorite thing Mrs. Houghton, my High School Theatre teacher ever taught us was the heartbeat. It’s a theme of life, really. Life gives us the good and bad and, much like the beat of a heart on an EKG, it’s better than a flatline. To that end, though I can’t relive my High School plays, and in some ways that haunts me, I’m glad for that. Mrs. Houghton was wrong on one point those. While I do have the good memories of all those plays, I still do indeed remember the bad. But I don’t mind. As a said, those experiences shaped me, by no small margin, to who I am today and I’m extremely glad for that. At the end of the day, I at least have these memories, and now digitized video, to look back on and that’s pretty cool!