Ciao bella

I landed in Chicago Thursday night, after a clown journey that eventually involved 19 hours of travel, one taxi, a train, three buses, three planes, and a hired car. Chicago was its pretty, sparkly winter self. Since then, of course, the weather has turned awful, has plunged into the sort of cold that makes you question every event in the series of decisions that brought you here. I've promptly developed a head cold, and the impending fact of Christmas seems entirely unreal.

Some farewell views of Arezzo and the villa:

The Christmas lights on the Corso, and our constant companion, the Duomo, settling into shadow on my last evening.

From an upstairs window, here's a view of our courtyard, and the Teatrino, the studio where the theater students spent long hours.

And, also from upstairs, some views of the land around us. In the first shot, the lean-to roof at the bottom left is the area where we ate when the weather was warm enough.



I could have chosen to stay there, and I didn't. I guess that merits an explanation. It's not as simple as the one given by an Aretino student I talked to one day at the bus stop. "I hate Arezzo!" he said, in plaintive English. "There aren't any funs." By this he meant nightclubs, concerts, that sort of thing--and it's true that Arezzo is fairly small, about the same size as Las Cruces, and after a mere three months we students routinely encountered acquaintances on the street. But it's also beautiful, and the proximity of city to farm is something special. And the Accademia is full of people I adore and respect.

No, it's just time to be back here, to do the work that is before me, to brave the cold and use everything I've learned and be a full-time writer and actor and musician. Had I stayed, I'd be an administrator, surrounded by art and learning but not really participating, without even the mitigating possibility of nighttime rehearsals and shows. That was what it came down to: A desk job in paradise is still a desk job.

So I'm here, in this great chilly studio of a city. It'll be very interesting to see what happens next.