FROM MTC’S NEW ARTISTIC DIRECTOR At the end of her life, as I rubbed her aching feet, my grandmother (the only one I knew), told me that she regretted not having done more. “I wanted to be a private detective,” she said, “or a spy.” This was a woman who spent a good portion of her adult life religiously entering contests that won her international travel, a cameo as a clown in the circus, print bylines, as well as cars for herself and most members of her immediate family. This was also a woman born in the 1920’s, married as a teenager, and responsible for raising four children across four decades. For women like her, regret was a product of sacrifice under circumstances in which sacrifice was a product of expectation. Since she died, I’ve often wondered how I could skirt regret in my final days as I look back upon a biography that from here, is at best, half written. Sometimes I wonder about my own mother’s regrets and whether I have grown enough to forgive the things that I think she should lament. When I feel pulled into that kind of thinking or begin to imagine some resolution to my ruminations, I try to look back at my history as though it were a play. I breathe deeply and remind myself that: Theatre at its best shows us people as they are (or were), not as they ought to be.
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