Looking back at my life, I find many examples of interests that come and go. Sometimes I will become quite passionate about something, even obsessed, for a while, before dropping it unceremoniously and moving on to something else. I used to view this as a character flaw, a short attention span; but as I have gotten older I have realized that it comes instead from a desire to constantly seek out new things to learn. I tend to take on hobbies and pursue them long enough to get a feel for what they’re like. But once I reach the “been there, done that” stage, I lose interest.

One of the earliest of these flings was acting. My entire career as a stage actor was coextensive with my years in high school. When I say “career,” of course, what I mean is that I was active in the drama club; I auditioned for pretty much every play, and I always got cast. That was my main extracurricular activity in high school, and in fact, I lettered in drama. (I still have the sew-on letter somewhere, but I never bought a letter jacket to attach it to.) There were at least two big productions each school year, one in the fall and one in the spring, and occasional smaller ones; it seemed that I was always auditioning or rehearsing for something.

I was never a leading man. I usually got cast as an older character, often someone who stood apart from the action, like a narrator, or the dad, or the police chief. The only time I was the leading man was when I wrote a one-act play we produced for a local drama festival, and of course, I wrote the lead role for myself. (I took the third-place award for playwriting, but I’m actually not sure if there were more than three plays in competition.)

It’s something of a cliché, but I was a shy kid, and I think I enjoyed acting because it gave me the opportunity to wrap myself in another persona. But it wasn’t just that; theater was the best way imaginable for a shy kid to get to know other people and feel a sense of belonging. I was in plays with older kids and popular kids, but when we were on stage together all such notions of hierarchy were erased. It was even an opportunity for me to talk to actual girls and not feel like a dork.

And I was pretty competent. The sorts of parts I played rarely called for anything too dramatic or emotional; I tended to be the guy providing exposition or playing the straight man. But I was a quick study, and I was almost always the first member of the cast to go “off book” during rehearsals. I was dependable.

Our school did not have a proper auditorium, so most of our rehearsals took place in a big open area at the top of the stairs in the main school building. It wasn’t until the dress rehearsal that we got access to the actual performance venue, which was at another school. This was always something of an adjustment: after many weeks of rehearsing in a relatively intimate space, we were now on a much larger stage, which meant that suddenly everything was farther away. To make matters worse, when it came time for dress rehearsal and performance, I generally had to take my glasses off. So my scene partners, whom I’d been used to seeing up close and clearly, were now vague blurry shapes some distance away.

I was always nervous before a performance, but my nervousness always vanished when it came time to go on. It was an exhilarating, adrenaline-fueled experience, and it always seemed to go by in a flash.

My favorite memory from my entire drama experience is from a scene that went wrong. It was during a performance of Calamity Jane, in which I played Henry Miller, the proprietor of the saloon. At the end of one big scene, everyone was supposed to leave except three of us; there was then an additional conversation involving just me and these two other characters. But during the performance, one of those other actors, a girl named Terri, got confused and left the stage along with everyone else. That left two of us, me and a guy named Tommy, to perform a three-person scene with only two people.

I can’t really explain how we did it. For just a moment, Tommy and I made eye contact (even if he was blurry), and it was as if we telepathically said to each other, “We got this.” We proceeded to perform the scene, adapting the script on the fly. I took some of Terri’s lines, adapting them to make sense coming from my character; Tommy took others. And it was seamless; we never talked over each other or missed a beat. After the show I described what had happened to my family, who were in attendance that night, and they said they hadn’t noticed that anything was amiss.

If you’d asked me when I was a high-school senior, I would have told you with certainty that acting was something I expected to continue. And yet that’s not how it happened. My biggest-ever role came in 1983 when I played Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee in a community theater production of Purlie Victorious. But somehow, after that, I got busy with other things, and before I knew it I started to think of theater as something from my past. I’ve never really missed it. But I’m happy, once in a while, to look back and think: I did that.