J
ames VAN Der Beek
School days started for James Van Der Beek ’95 as they would for any average Cheshire Academy student. He’d wake up, eat breakfast and head to class. But right before lunch, the crunch began for Van Der Beek and continued long into the evening. In the early afternoon, he drove to New Haven to catch a train to Manhattan. Van Der Beek got some of his school work done during the nearly two-hour ride before he boarded a subway to a rehearsal studio. Several hours later, he was back on Metro North heading home. While others were snoozing, the teen-aged Van Der Beek studied his lines on a train full of commuters in business suits. He got home around 10 p.m. and did his writing assignments, which he couldn’t do on the train because the ride was too bumpy. Van Der Beek then slept for a few hours, woke up, and did it all over again the next day. “I had a passion,” Van Der Beek said. “It’s something that I knew I wanted to do, that I needed to do. I still marvel that, for 1 ½ years, I would make trips to New York and have nothing to show for it. I told myself, the industry just didn’t get me yet.” He finally received his break during his junior year at the Academy. Van 36
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