Episode VI: Return of the Merch Whore

Greeting and salutations, Dear Reader. I’m so glad you’ve decided to stick with me, despite my lengthy absence. So much has happened in the last year and I’m anxious to tell you all about it.

In last year’s big cliffhanger (OK…it was more of a series finale with the possibility of a spinoff), I was about to leave the Kinky Boots national tour and move to Orlando, Florida to pursue my dream of performing at Walt Disney World. You’ll recall that I was quite anxious about the move and the return to the “real world” after being on the road for so long, and those fears and anxieties were for good reason, and unfortunately, many of those fears have become reality.

Now, I don’t mean to start this reboot on a negative note. Let me first start off by saying that I did, in fact, get myself a job at Walt Disney World, but not as a performer. Within a month of moving, I was hired as an Attractions Host at Magic Kingdom, working at Big Thunder Mountain – the wildest ride in the wilderness! I spent nearly 10 months at Old Man Thunder before I was transferred to Disney’s Hollywood Studios, where I am now an Attractions Host at the new Star Wars Launch Bay. I enjoy my job at Disney very much, though it is not by any means where I want to be in my career. Performing in the parks is still the goal, and I’ve been auditioning as often as I can, time and health allowing, for Voices of Liberty, the Dapper Dans, Finding Nemo: The Musical and other shows around the parks. More on those auditions later.

Me on my last day at Big Thunder Mountain.

In addition to working at Walt Disney World, I also landed a job selling merchandise – surprise, surprise! – at Universal Studios’ Wizarding World of Harry Potter, which admittedly I knew nothing about when I interviewed for the job. Many would agree that I still don’t, but I do a very good job of faking it. I still can’t tell you what the horcruxes are. I’m not even sure that I spelled “horcruxes” correctly. Don’t you judge me!

Adjusting to life in the real world has been difficult. Money is, as always, a constant struggle for me, which was one of my greatest fears of delving back into reality. My money management skills are pretty much non-existent. Of course, I had to have a car, so I got a cute little green Kia Soul and named him Elliott (SEE ALSO: Pete’s Dragon), and then I realized that 90% of Kia Souls on the road are also Elliott Green, but I still love him. I nearly had a heart attack when I found out how much my car payment was going to be, though. I hadn’t had a car in 14 years and had just quit my job and had no prospects on the horizon. It was no exaggeration when I dramatically exclaimed to my Dad, “It’s fine! I’ll just get a third non-existent job to pay for it!” Even though I work nearly 55 hours a week between the two jobs, it still isn’t enough to cover all my expenses. I’ve fallen way behind on my student loan payments – again – but on the bright side, one of my credit cards is nearly paid off thanks to the credit consolidation plan I started before I went out on the road. Once that’s paid off, I can start applying that money to my loans. So there’s that.

There’s also my health. I would like to go on record to state that I never missed one show while I was on the road. Not one in two years. I was healthy as a horse. But here in Florida, I have been sick with something almost from the day I got here. Allergies, colds, bronchitis, sinus infections, ear infections, strep throat, the flu…you name it, I’ve had it since I moved here. I’m sick now, in fact, getting over some sort of malady that laid me out at home for two days. But I can’t afford to call out of work, so I plow ahead, shortening my lifespan by a few years with each mucus-filled shift. I know that most of this illness stems from the other thing that has been difficult to adjust to: the weather.

Let’s be honest with ourselves, Floridians…we live in the Devil’s Armpit. It’s hot, moist and, frankly, sometimes smelly down here. I’ve never lived in a place where a summer rain shower (and by “shower,” I mean “deluge”) actually makes the temperature hotter than before. I have accepted Swamp Ass into my life and should just go ahead and buy stock in Gold Bond powder to foolishly attempt stop the chub rub and chaffing between my thighs. Here’s the truth: It doesn’t work. It’s a fool’s errand to try to soak up all the moisture, so just accept the Swamp Ass and move on with your day.

It took me about three weeks to accept that every time I stood up from my seat on the shuttle bus from the parking lot or from a chair in the break room, I would leave a stamp of sweat behind. Sure, you can try to slide out of the seat to wipe some of it away, but after a while, you just give up. It’s a sad, sick, disgusting part of life down here and I hate it. I worked a parade shift once in August in which I sweat so much that I was sent back to change clothes because it looked like I’d wet myself.

I miss the snow! I miss the cold! I miss the air!

“But what about the good things,” you ask? “Surely something makes it worth being there!”

Yes. The people I’ve met down here make it worth it. I’ve made wonderful friends at both of my jobs. Getting to go to Disney World pretty much whenever I want to makes it worth it. Mickey and I are very tight, and I get to talk about Star Wars all day long. I even run into Darth Vader – sometimes, quite literally, run into him – backstage and he scares the bejesus out of me, because I get to be an 8 year old again. At work. And that’s awesome. I’ve met some of the most incredible Guests and made Magical Moments for people and

That’s me behind Neil Patrick Harris.

have gotten choked up over meeting the coolest little kids on the planet in their cute Princess gowns and their little Darth Vader costumes. I’ve seen people weep over being chosen by a wand. I even got to perform at Epcot this Christmas as part of the Candlelight Processional, finally singing again and getting to do it behind people like Neil Patrick Harris and Daniel Dae Kim. And one of my best friends in the world, Brance, moved down here this summer and we’ve played mini golf and watched movies and played in the parks and shopped for Star Wars t-shirts and I’ve loved getting to spend that time with him. I’ve hung out in the parks with my college friend, Sara, and her wonderful husband and totally amazing daughter, Nora. I’ve seen old friends from all aspects of my life when they’ve come to the parks on vacation and I get to see my Mom and Dad more often than I did when I lived in New York because my Dad works in Tampa for a few days every month, and we meet up for dinner when he’s near.

So things aren’t all bad, and part of the reason that I’m rebooting the blog is to remind myself of that. Don’t get me wrong, y’all – the struggle is real – but I’m not alone in this. And I’m still pursuing my dreams. I’ve started taking better care of myself and taking control of the enormous amount of weight that I have gained over the last 3 years. Oprah and I are doing WeightWatchers and I’m making excellent use of my new FitBit Surge, walking an average of about 14,000 steps a day. More, if I’m able. It turned out to be one of the best Christmas gifts I could have asked for. And I’ve lost 11 pounds in the last month.

Almost every night, I take a screenshot of my FitBit summary and post it to Instagram (jasonb1976) and Facebook, mostly to keep myself accountable and excited about going out to exercise, but hopefully to also encourage others to do the same. Tonight, a friend of mine from the Evita tour sent me a message on Facebook to let me know that she was inspired by my FitBit posts and that she’s about to embark on a 28 day fitness challenge that’s making her a bit nervous. She wrote, “Long story short..it’s going to be hard for me but I was thinking about your posts and they just put a smile on my face and made me excited to work toward a healthier me.” Guys. Pick me up off the floor. I don’t even know how to respond to something like that. I have inspired someone to work toward being healthier!?! That’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever told me. If I can inspire her, maybe I can inspire someone else on here, too. And then I can inspire the world! Or at least take over the entire tri-state area!

Next month I’m moving into a new living situation that I think will be better for me both financially and emotionally and, as you can see, I’m writing again, which excites and scares me. I’m under very strict guidelines regarding what I can and cannot write about with both of my jobs, so please understand if I don’t mention work very often. You won’t get any secrets out of me. Nor will you get free tickets, but that’s another entry for another day.

So there it is, folks! Episode VI: Return of the Merch Whore. I look forward to seeing you again very soon. May the merch be with you.

 

 

The Great Email Purge Of 2014

I am terrified of the television show “Hoarders.” Not only because they find dead things buried under years of hamburger wrappers and old Lillian Vernon catalogues, but because I’m scared that I could quite easily become a hoarder myself. Understand that my personal definition of hoarding is not defined by what we are shown on TV, but by what my mother would consider hoarding. That is to say, what most other people would just consider clutter.

When I first moved to New York, I shared a one-and-a-half room apartment with my friend Jennifer for a few weeks before moving into my first place with her boyfriend, Charlie. He ended up staying at her place, which got crowded, and I had a large first floor apartment basically to myself, so we eventually switched places and I took Jenn’s apartment and she and Charlie stayed in the bigger place. Jenn’s place was furnished, and I had furniture of my own, so the one and half rooms filled up very quickly. I had no intention of staying in that apartment very long – there was no kitchen and I had to share a bathroom in the hallway with everyone else that lived on my floor – so I kept all my moving boxes so I wouldn’t have to buy more when the time came to move out. No one was more surprised than I when it took me 2 years to leave that place.

One can accumulate a lot of things in two years. I seem to accumulate mail. I have an ever-increasing fear of identity theft, so I don’t ever throw anything out that has my personal information on it unless it’s been shredded first. I’ve already blown out the motors on two shredders. I also have a fear of the IRS coming after me and demanding I present all my bank and credit card statements to them. Why they would do this, I couldn’t say, but I never said the fear was rational. So I have shoeboxes full of old bank and credit card and student loan statements in my storage unit in New York. I should probably throw them out or spend the time to scan them into my computer and throw out the hard copies, but that requires time. And a scanner. And who has either of those these days? Not me!

I am always amazed at how much junk I tend to accumulate. Every time I move – and that’s been a lot – especially since The Incident – I get angry at myself for the amount of clothing and paper and books and just…stuff…that I’ve collected and then I spend far more time that I’d like to sort through everything and purge.

Purging is hard, though. You have to let go and trust that you will not, in fact, wear that t-shirt that you bought at Old Navy three years ago ever again not only because the armpits are stained and it doesn’t fit you anymore, but because there will always be more $12 graphic tees at Old Navy. That you don’t have to feel guilty about throwing out those personalized flip flops from so-and-so’s beach wedding 9 months ago or that birthday card that your grandmother sent you because really, no one else has to know but you. But I still feel guilty sometimes.

Last night I started to get frustrated with myself not because of the amount of stuff I’ve accumulated in my suitcases, but how much stuff seems to be taking up space on the hard drive of my MacBook. It’s a 320GB hard drive and I only have 50GB of space left. How is that possible? All of my music and movies are stored on external hard drives. The last time I checked, I only had 90GB of photos on my computer – now I have over 200GB. I don’t know how that happened. Then I took at look at my email accounts and realized that I had over 2000 “archived” emails – most of which could be tossed (and many that I thought I had already deleted). I may be hesitant to let go of things, but even I can recognize that I have no need for dozens of emails from Lumosity and Groupon or notifications from Facebook that someone mentioned me in a comment from four years ago.

So I began the arduous task of sorting through and deleting non-essential emails. I started by doing specific searches for things like LivingSocial and Groupon and then moved up to old emails from Flashdance and Evita from last year that I don’t need anymore. Like I said, non-essential stuff. Even after clearing out all of that stuff, I still had about 1700 archived emails, so I decided to start from the very beginning. I’ve heard it’s a very good place to start.

I scrolled all the way down to the bottom of my archives file and started deleting, one by one, all the emails I didn’t need. The archive went back to 2009 and, while there were some emails I decided to keep, I tossed most of them. What I wasn’t expecting, though, was the journey back in time as I read each subject line, revisiting events in my life that were both marvelous and humiliating…joyful and painful. There were the emails from the marketing/promo company that I worked for – a job that had been a life saver that turned sour. I traced my history with them from the day I was hired up to the day that I was fired from a promotion because of my looks, reliving and remembering all of the humiliating details. Emails back and forth from my employers at the other merchandise company I worked for in New York with abbreviations that no longer make sense to me, though I know they did back then. Shift requests and scheduling emails and emails about signing contracts for my tour of Junie B. Jones, about which I was so excited. And then the emails after Junie B. and The Incident between me and my former roommate about when I would be in to collect my things. The seemingly endless correspondence looking for places to live. It was a lot to take in.

Then I started finding the emails about Japan. “You should audition this year,” and “Welcome to DOC 2011!” Emails sent between cast mates before we’d even met one another, messages from our producers in Tokyo. I kept those. And then the return to New York…buying tickets to see Barry Manilow and Barbra Streisand in concert…unemployment paperwork…job offers from the company I work for now. It was all there. And then there was the paper trail of emails from the marketing company after things changed and I was no longer the golden child and eventually was let go for being “imperfect” and “overly emotional.” I was happy to delete those.

It’s amazing to me how quickly I was taken back to how I felt when I wrote each of those emails. The emotions still there, raw, captured in time on my computer screen whether I wanted to acknowledge them or not. But, hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, and looking back of the narrative of the last two years that I was in New York actually opened my eyes to just how miserable I really was compared to where I am now and where I hope to be in a few months. I couldn’t believe how much I was hustling to secure work to just pay my rent and barely get by. I had emails from the promo company saying, “Sorry – we can’t get you on the schedule…we’ve filled all the available shifts in the 2 minutes since we sent out the first email.” You know what I didn’t have a lot of emails about? Auditions. Singing. Acting. Almost none, in fact. There were a lot that pertained to looking for places to live – I ended up moving to new places almost every 5 months after The Incident because of money issues. There were a few emails about flying home for the holidays or pathetic, halfhearted attempts at meeting people online through dating sites. I wasn’t living the life I wanted. I wasn’t having any fun. I was surviving – not living.

I’ve recently been accused of sounding unhappy with my job and my life as it is on the road by a “friend” on Facebook. While there may be a tiny amount of truth to that – I am starting to nest and plan for my new apartment in San Diego, though I have no idea when that move will be happening – I can honestly say that I am in such a better place now than I was 2 or 3 years ago. I’m certainly happier and more stable than I was just before I left New York, and honestly, I think a lot of that has to do with being away from New York. Yes, I’m fatter. Yes, I miss my friends in New York and sometimes I get very lonely and yes, I deal with idiots every day, but I don’t worry anymore that the FBI is going to come to my door. I don’t get calls from collection agencies anymore. I’ve seen parts of the country I never imagined I’d get to see. I’ve made dear, dear friends and I’ve decided what I want to do next. Those are all good things in my book.

Today as I was purging I posted this status on Facebook:

My friend Ryan commented a few minutes later, simply saying, “It’s liberating clearing out that inbox, isn’t it?”

Yes, it really is.