Good Things Come To Those Who Wait: On Half-Past Eight PM (Part Three)

A few years after the video version of Half-Past was made, I was in a different place in life. I had finished the two-year Journalism course I took after high school and, after deciding I didn't want to be a journalist, enrolled at University of Toronto for a highly useful, very worthwhile Bachelors program in English Lit. I was growing out of my self-imposed outcast ways, nearly as likely to go out for drinks or board game nights with friends as I was to be sitting in front of my computer on a Friday night.

Early in my second year there, I was standing in line for a Metropass when I saw a flyer advertising open submissions to the Victoria College Drama Festival, encouraging student-writers to get in on it. A lightbulb went on over my head. I had, after all, written the greatest, funniest, most original one-act play in history, Half-Past Eight PM. Surely the people in charge of this festival will be salivating for my inclusion once I submit my 20-pages of genius.

With a Lot of Help From My Friends: On Half-Past Eight PM (Part Two)

Are you ready for more self-mythologizing? Here's what happened next in the saga of Half-Past Eight PM...

A lot happened in the next school year after my success with Half-Past. My friend Ana, who had transferred to Catholic School for personal reasons, transferred back and asked me to write a movie script for her to direct, but was sadly never produced. Josh and I collaborated on a 30-minute film for CommTech where we played hired killers. And I appeared onstage for the first time outside the drama room in the cast of the Grade 12 production of The Importance of Being Earnest... as the main character's butler.

Over the course of that year I became closer with those drama kids I had been orbiting. Only my paralyzing shyness kept me from auditioning for that year's Sears Festival production of Twelve Angry Men, one of my bigger regrets in a high school career comprised mostly of regrettable moments. But I did become part of that group anyway, making friends without having to be a joiner, just as I always wanted. In the final months of high school it kind of finally felt like I belonged somewhere. My personality had taken three and a half years to bake, and I was very close to shedding the pervasive feeling that they didn't really actually like me. I just wished I had more time to enjoy it.

A Strange Form of Revenge: On Half-Past Eight PM (Part One)

As someone who is prone to nostalgia but optimistically suspects his best years still lie ahead I have a tricky relationship with successes of the past, even as moderate as they may be. While putting on a reasonably successful local theatre theater production is a pretty low bar for greatness it remains the thing I have done in life that was seen and enjoyed by the most people. So since this is the blog about me, please indulge the part of me that is a legend in my own mind. Here's a little reflection on the 15th - and 10th and 13th - anniversary of Half-Past Eight PM.

It began as revenge. A very specific, strange form of revenge. The kind where the people you're getting revenge on aren't even there to know it.