“To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson
I had wanted to live in New York all of my life. Once I finally decide to make the move, all it took was a year to get there.
Two weeks before I was supposed to get married, I flew to New York for a week to do some auditioning. I had only ever been to New York once before, so the prospect of going there on my own was pretty daunting. My wife and I were intending to move there after our nuptials and I wanted to get a head start on perhaps securing a job.
I made it to several auditions that week. I went to my very first New York audition straight from the plane. I brought my luggage with me to the audition. I went to just about every audition that I could fit into my schedule and the week turned out to be very productive.
I got three job offers that week, unfortunately none of them were actually in New York. One was for a dinner theatre in Ohio but the pay wasn’t very much, one was for a performing position on a cruise ship sailing out of Singapore for six months but I didn’t think my soon-to-be wife would appreciate me traveling to the other side of the globe for six months immediately after our big day, and the final offer was for the role of Charlie Brown in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in Florida. That’s the one I accepted. The theatre’s producer also offered my wife a job in the box office so we set off for Florida after our wedding day.
Wintering on the Gulf Coast of Florida was like having an extended honeymoon, so when the producer asked my new bride and I to stay for the remainder of the season there was only one thing we could do – buy more suntan lotion. We stayed for seven months.
Far from New York and with no opportunity to audition for a summer gig on the East Coast, I returned to Missouri for the summer to do a season at a theatre in St. Louis. My wife took a job stage managing for the same Florida producer at a theatre he ran on Cape Cod that summer. I joined her on the Cape at the end of the season as a replacement in the show that she was managing.
Once the gig was over we drove to New York to finally begin putting down roots. Our first instinct was to explore the town of Weehawken, NJ. We’d each had friends tell us what a nice community it was and how convenient was its proximity to Manhattan. The tiny little municipality is directly across the Hudson River from mid-town Manhattan.
The first apartment we looked at was one that we liked, but we were afraid to make a move on it because we thought we owed it to ourselves to do a little comparison shopping. We saw several more apartments that following week but none that we liked as much as the first. We called the agent who had originally shown us the place and were happy to find that the apartment was still available. When we told that story to our New York friends they always tell us how lucky we were that such a great place was still available.
After we put down a deposit and agreed upon a move in date, we drove back to the Midwest to gather up our belongings. I rented a moving truck and car hauler in hometown in Missouri. And after packing up my stuff, I drove to my wife’s childhood home in Kentucky to get her and her things.
We loaded up our odd assortment of childhood knick-knacks, used furniture and wedding gifts and set out. We felt very conspicuous with our big yellow moving van and car in tow driving up the New Jersey Turnpike. We got as far as Princeton, NJ where we stopped off for the evening.
The next day we got an early start, but we also got an early bit of bad news. The two people who had agreed to help us move into our new home, in fact, the only two people we knew in New York called to let us know that they had both received a last minute plea to appear in a staged reading of a new show. Now we had no one to assist us in moving into our new third floor walk up.
My wife and I bit the bullet and did as much as we could that day. We were under a little bit of a time constraint because we had to return the moving truck the next day. We made getting the bed into the apartment and set up our first priority so that we’d have a place to crash that night.
The next day after many hours, many boxes, and many, many trips up and down three flights of stairs, my bride and I finally had all of our belongings in our new New York home. And although it had taken us over a year to get there, we settled in and called the place ours for the next several years.
Who knows what kind of experiences I might have had in Singapore? Who knows if I missed any chances by taking a year to get to New York? Who knows if my “friends” actually had to go to a reading or maybe just came up with a great excuse to get out of helping us move? Who knows? I sure don’t and maybe I never will.
But there are a couple of things that the whole experience taught me. I am now and forever a New Yorker, no matter where I may live for the rest of my life. But if and when it comes time for me to head to my next stop on this journey we call life, the first number that I’ll be dialing will be the movers’.
