…of the rest of your life.

A poster with that sentiment hung on the door to my fifth-grade classroom at Trinity Elementary School. I remember as a child not understanding what it meant, because the first day of the rest of my life started the day I was born, right and today wasn’t my birthday, wtf?

I asked my teacher, Mrs. Crowley – who later became the Principal, but that’s neither here nor there – to explain it to me.

“Vinnie…” she started as she sat me down. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Not the first day of your life. Today is the day in which you decide where you’re headed on this journey. Today is the day you commit to living a full, moral, productive life.”

“But what about tomorrow? Won’t tomorrow be the first day of the rest of my life?” I asked quizzically.

“That’s the magic of life.” She responded. “Everyday is the first day of the rest of your life. Everyday you’ll be faced with problems and dilemmas and issues that make you question the way you do things, those questions will lead to answers, and those answers, will alter the course of the rest of your life.”

Today August 14, 2010, the day I board the Boat, is the first day of the rest of my life, and the best ting about that? If today doesn’t go as planned, the next day or the next or the next, will still be the first day of the rest of my life. We can always start over, that’s the glory of life.

1. Peter Pan - It was a class trip. I saw it with Sandy Duncan at the original Helen Hayes Theatre on 46th Street. Which, just so happens – fun fact – was destroyed at the end of the run, along with four other Broadway theaters – to build the Marriott Marquis Hotel, where I worked at the eight floor ticket desk… if you go to the New York Time Photo Archives, you may even be able to find the photo our class posed for with the demonstrators outside the theatre which ran in the paper of record
2. Dreamgirls – With the original Original Cast! I saw it with my mother – I’m sure she didn’t know it was going to have such adult themes… I don’t think she’d've brought her 12 year old budding gay if she did. I’ve a vivid memory of questioning her the next day, in our basement laundry room, folding towels, not asking about the unwed mother storyline or the drug use, or the domestic violence, no, what I couldn’t wrap my head around was ‘how did the doves know the right time during the song to fly up to the rafters and after the show, how did they know to come back?’
3. A Chorus Line – I begged and begged to see this show, and finally, after my mother took my sister to see Cats!, I got to go see A Chorus Line.  I saw it with most of the original cast, a few years after it opened… I remember I thought it was funny that Donna McKechnie who originated the role of Cassie had left the show for bigger and better things had returned, just like her character – I didn’t know then that that was the nature of the business. I still have my souvenir brass ticket key chain some thirty twenty years later. It was the fist time I knew what gay was…

SO, to conclude, I’m fat, black woman who won’t grow up and wants nothing more than to wake-up to find she has somewhere exciting to go… It all makes so much sense!

A lot of it was unreadable, not all, but most of it.

So, today, I’m making a vow to you, Jew and Gentile reader, I’ll do my best to edit before publishing; I vow to try using proper grammer, capitalization and punctuation . To keep the tenses from jumping, I vow to attempt. But most of all I vow to keep it light, frothy and funny.

That being said, every once in a while, I’ll be reposting some of the better posts from the past VINformation, but trust me, they won’t be as you remember them…

While admittedly, I’m a person who has trouble making up his mind – I either tend to mull things over and over and do nothing or make snap, unthought-out decisions which sometimes have bad ramifications – but when said mind is made-up, I follow through, good or bad.

A few months back I made a decision; I wanted an adventure – a life-changing, wipe the slate clean kind of adventure. I was going to sell all my worldly possessions, give up my apartment, put the cats into foster-care and embark on a trip ’round the world.

Now, I wasn’t considering doing it overnight, something that big takes a lot of planning.

This was my timeline:

1/10-9/10 – prep the sale – I’d made a lot of money using eBay in the past, and I was going to go that route for all the small, shippable things; collectibles, kitchen items and home decor. Half.com for all my books and DVDs. Craig’s List when I got to the big stuff, like furniture and such.

9/10-9/11 – Sell everything I own… I figured a full year would be the perfect amount of time to rid myself of all my extra baggage.

12/21/11 – leave for South America –  I wanted to hit the places I didn’t hit while filming 5 Takes: Latin America. (Available on iTunes – $1.99 per ep or $12.99 for the eight episode season – worth it at twice the price.)

Of course, the Plan had many contingencies; it pretty much hinged on the main goal of paying off all my debt. And that being said, I’d decided not to bring anything else into my life except, food, clothing and basic necessities of life – no more books, no more toys, no more kitchen gadgets - no more anything unnecessary. I was going to curb my spending as and use only cash to pay for anything I may have needed to buy.

Never in my wildest dreams could I imagine I’d get paid to travel around the world – again – but then I booked a job singing and being funny on Holland America Cruise Lines MS Rotterdam. My contract lasts just under a year and I’ll be traveling, on someone else’s dime, mind you, from Alaska to South America and everywhere in between.

The job on the ship allows me to complete the first leg of my world tour – without having to sell everything – and also makes it very easy to pay off all of my debt – two goals in one! I wanted to hit North and South America and I’m going to hit North and South America.

I’m about to begin a very exciting chapter of my life and I can’t wait to find out where else it’s going to take me.

Originally published, August 5, 2008 (edited for clarity not content):

A New Start? An Escape? Wanderlust?

Sometimes, I think I want to sell everything thing I own – furniture, books, comics, TV – everything. Put what I want in storage and travel the world for a year – or longer – with nothing but a backpack, a video camera and my MacBook.

After all, I’ve nothing holding me here in NYC – no lover, no kids, no pressing career or awesome career prospects. Just bills, bills, bills, two cats and a great deal on a rent-stabilized apartment which I’d be willing to give-up in a heartbeat.

Perhaps, I’ll head back down to South America and teach English for a few months in Buenos Aries; then hop over to Europe with a Euro-Rail pass in my back pocket and hit England, Spain, France, Germany, Italy and of course, the Netherlands. India would be after that – I really want to see the Taj Mahal. I think I’d like to travel the world without anything hanging over my head, no need to get back to do anything or be anywhere…  I’d like to think my friends and family would still be here when I came back. If I came back… I’m craving freedom.

Maybe, I should start auditioning for more regional theaters or a cruise ship and get out of the city, for a few months at a time, that is, if I actually book something. I haven’t booked anything since January and it’s August already, I don’t know if that’s a plan I can count on to get me out. Maybe I should just be auditioning more in general!

Mayhaps my time at the Desk – if I stay through the holidays; what’s five months? It’ll fly by, right? – could pay for the trip and I wouldn’t have to sell anything.

I wrote this post two years ago, just after I started back at the Desk after my six year hiatus, “…just for two months, to cover vacations and earn a few bucks, it wasn’t going to be permanant.” Or so I thought… It was a year after 5 Takes: Latin America and I was depressed and getting fat due to the fact nothing bigger came from that experience. I had no choice but to go back to working another survival job other than just cock-tailing at the ‘plex to make ends meet.

I guess that was when the spark of inspiration came to me, who knew?