I Watched A VHS From 1990 of My First Play

And I stand by what we said then.

I didn’t expect to cry when I found the tape.
But when I saw my friends walking onstage, I remembered everything.

The lighting was terrible. The camera barely worked. My staging was a disaster and I tried to cram about nine plotlines into one act.

But watching it, I remembered what it felt like to try something huge before you knew how.

I Want to Be Free was the second stage script I wrote in high school, and the first I directed on my own. I was fifteen, a sophomore at Camelback High School in Phoenix, back before it got to be 100 degrees in March like it does now. We performed it in April of 1990. The cast was made up of fellow Masque & Gavel students who said yes when they could’ve said, “Are you serious?” They wore their own clothes as costumes, we had no budget…and way too many feelings.

All of which I was dissecting in real time on stage in front of an auditorium full of friends and family (and perhaps the stray enemy or two).

I Want To Be Free was about two siblings trying to escape an abusive home. To do this, they turned to shoplifting for survival. They end up at a private school for Bad Kids, and things only get more melodramatic from there.

It wasn’t a good show. But it was my show. I want to tell that 15-year-old what a great fucking job he did.

Because the people in that audience sat in silence after the closing monologue. Then came the applause.

The validation. Yeah, kid…we see you.

I watched that tape recently and recorded a commentary over it. Not because it’s good, exactly, but because it’s true.

Maybe you have a box of old notebooks or a zip disk full of poems or a painting you did in 1990 and forgot about. Maybe it’s time to look at it again. Not to laugh or cover your eyes, but to remember how fucking brave you were for making something.

Let’s do it again.

I Want To Be Free led inexorably to novels like my debut Party. As authentic as I could possibly be.