Posted February 4th, 2003 by Sean Williams

I wrote something yesterday that included a reference to a friend of mine who lives in North Carolina. It seemed to be saying something bad about both his life and his artistic pursuits. This is a man who has never said anything bad about me, and I feel like this needs to be addressed.

Jordana is a strange bird. She is lovely and talented and smart and demure and a thousand other things that people are attracted to, but when you spend a couple of weeks getting to know her, you start thinking she might be crazy. Her sense of humor is always two pegs removed from where you think the joke is going, her sense of the world has a strong moral center colored by these strange ideas of retribution and celebration. Her possibility for joy is incredible.

I have to be honest, my world is made up of people who get Jordana, and people who don’t, and I draw a line between them. People who meet her and then seek her out, show me an ability to see past the madness to the greatness within. It’s hard to do, particularly since so much of what we do as people is based on snap judgements.

There is another woman who is like Jordana in many ways. In an effort not to disclose names, I hope you’re okay with me calling her CM. When I met her eight years ago, I sort of half fell in love with her and that has never left me. She and I were doing a show together, and I tried desperately to get her to date my friends, although one by one they didn’t understand her or have the patience to make it work. And I started feeling like, either you get her or you don’t, and the man who finally does will have to be a great man indeed.

And then this man, the director I mentioned yesterday, met her and fell in love completely. And I can’t help myself, the fact that he asked her to marry him makes me feel endless affection for him. He got one of the beautiful strange creatures that most people just can’t figure out. And I wrote something yesterday that could easily be misinterpreted as disrespectful to him.

Concerning the lifestyle, two days ago I asked Jordana, ‘If you got the chance to move to a small town and run a theater company, would you do it?’ and she answered, ‘in a heartbeat.’ What my two friends are building for themselves in North Carolina is the dream. If you live in New York, every time you leave and visit somewhere else, you are surprised by how much you want to stay and try this life there. To live in North Carolina and do theater… it just doesn’t get any better than that. If I felt like I had already tried to get a national audience for my work, then I would leave and try this life somewhere like that. The only problem is the radar, and how low it doesn’t go.

When you go through one of these periods of self-loathing, when you start shoveling shit on yourself, you sometimes get it on other people. I wish I hadn’t done that, and I guess I will have to be careful about doing it in the future.