“Will you drive me one hour across Cleveland, Ohio, at 6:00 am, so I can sit in a room all day and write short stories for the Power of the Pen competition?” I asked my parents one day, when I was 10. Okay, maybe I didn’t use those exact words, but nonetheless I’m sure my request confused them. This was, after all, coming from their son who only cared about sports and put off his summer reading till the last minute; but they lovingly acquiesced. The adrenaline rush when the moderator would read the story prompt and the ensuing dread of not knowing what to write next were unlike anything I had experienced. I was hooked.

Years later as a senior in high school, my AP English Lit teacher had us study four plays by William Shakespeare - Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth. I found the class challenging. I didn’t understand Shakespeare, and for exams, our teacher would simply give us a few lines of text from the play, to which we would respond with the character that spoke the lines. This required an intimate knowledge of the story, which was not always easy to decipher. To help me prepare, my dad thought it would be a good idea to “act” the scenes together in our living room. Neither of us were actors. My dad was an architect, but he loved Shakespeare. I vividly remember the gesture he made one night, as he grasped the air and asked: “Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?” It was the most fun I had ever had studying.

Little did I know that almost 10 years later, I would graduate from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art with a Masters degree in Classical Acting. It was during my time at LAMDA where my passions for acting and writing fused and found peaceful coexistence.

A lot of life happened before then, and these days I find myself writing stories of grief, love, and family; trying to remember the purpose of playing “whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature,” as Hamlet advises the players…Cleveland…at 6 in the morning…during the middle of winter. How did I get so lucky?