Home for the Holidays!

Lots of us are finishing up. Either audition season, singing/performing in a fall production, or an academic semester.

Lots of us will be heading "home", be that your parental homestead, your significant other's parental units' abode, or your actual home you get to live in some of the year when not performing.

I described my home yesterday, out of the blue, to a stranger. She was making my latte at Starbucks. She asked me if I was going somewhere for the holidays.

"Yes, home to Iowa."
"Is that where you're from?"
"Yes."
"Oh, I thought you were Canadian."
"Nope, Iowan."
"Is that where you moved from to come here?"
"I left Iowa in 1988, so I've lived lots of places."

Then I went on to scroll through the cities and states -- KC, Tulsa, Des Moines, Santa Fe, Memphis, Pittsburgh, Miami, Ithaca, etc.

"Wow." And her eyes kinda glazed over. "So you don't really have one place that's home, eh?" (Indeed, there was an "eh". No matter how it is denied, there's always an "eh" at some point."

So I tried to make her more comfortable:

"Well, actually, home is wherever my wife and I are together."

So true.
Sweet, eh?

And I guess that's how Elizabeth and I see the world we live in. Not in terms like we've moved to Montreal, or we are immigrants, or we are midwesterners, or we are this or that. We see ourselves as a HOME that travels around. Together.

Being together is tough. It certainly was at the start of our relationship. She was, um, a bit older, and a LOT more established in her career aspirations when we first started dating 30 years ago this May. We dated for about a year, then she graduated and went to MSM in NYC while I stayed behind, dropped out, came back and eventually graduated. The plan was for me to get to the East Coast. Instead, I went to the University of Missour at Kansas City for three years. That's basically 7 years dating long distance. It was also thousands of dollars we didn't have in long distance bills. It was getting engaged and then breaking off the engagement and then getting engaged again.

Once we were married, it was even tougher to be in the same place. She lived in Chicago, singing at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, I lived in NYC doing my fellowship at The Juilliard School. We were married for two years, only living together for 6 months of those first two years.

Then we eventually settled down.

So -- Home.  It actually is where the heart is.

I hope all of you get a chance to get to where your heart is ----- sometime soon!