The Road Not Traveled
Dunkirk NY – If there is one decision I made in my life which I truly regret, perhaps it was the decision not to move to Seattle WA in 1977. Had I done so, I probably would have been in on the ground floor of the Seattle theatre scene, and my life no doubt would be quite different.
I was in NYC at the time, had just left the NYU MFA program, and was trying to think about what to do next. As a city, Seattle had always fascinated me from the moment I first visited it in 1976. My wife and I had developed a plan whereby we would move to Seattle, get jobs, and after a year to establish state residency requirements, I would audition for the University of Washington’s MFA acting program and hopefully get to study with Duncan Ross. But the lure of a full-time high school teaching job in upstate NY, an area I absolutely love, lured me away from taking the risk of moving to Seattle. I actually turned that job down initially, but they came back a second time, and I thought that to have that job offered twice to me meant that I should take it. I quit after four months at that job. Eight months of nearly penniless living later, I was enrolled in the MFA at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, mostly as a means to escape debt.
It’s not necessarily the road less traveled, but the road not traveled that comes back to haunt you. -twl
