A moment of Fear...

I've just been cast in a show--Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. This is pretty cool. I've been doing the 'artist must lie to himself and diminish the need to perform in order to make mom and grandma and uncle sam happy' dance for a few years now, nearly completing the deletion of the inclination within me, when lo and behold--another shot at...something. Something. Which is good. Nothing, akin to the Nothing which ravaged Fantasia in Wolfgang Peterson's popular fantasy micro-epic 'The Neverending Story', is bad, and should be fought against, whether you use a poem or a paint brush or a deep emotional wound which allows you to 'connect in the scene'. I had begun to drown in the riptide of discouragement and responsibility, both achilles' heels for the artist. That is not to speak of the toothache of good intentions and the lumbago of self-doubt.
The character. I play Gooper, aka 'brother man'. If I were gutsy, I would slap on a dashiki for opening night, but why get blacklisted right off the bat? Ok, enough of that. The moment of fear I was initially referring to was a two part realization I had recently. One, Gooper has five children. My wife wants five children. So far we have none. We were both only children, but for some reason she wants an army. That was a little scary in an 'art imitates life' kind of way. Of course, I thought to myself, why on earth would anyone believe that I have five children. I'm young, 29, and youngish (think Seth Green--I only say it so that you don't say it first); how is that going to work on stage. Then I looked around. I live in the South. I'm almost thirty. I know people younger than me who already have several children. I think that was the scarier realization--that I could already have a full family. Living in NY leads you to believe that people don't grow up and decide what they want to do until their mid-30's, don't marry until almost 40, and may perhaps have one child of their own, although they will likely adopt a couple more. Oh, and the husband is optional. Understand, this is not the case with everybody. Just some bodies. Ahh, stereotyps: they start as innocent observations, and they end up as inclement limitations. Pilate made a good point, questioning truth.