Moss Hart really gets it.

I'm currently reading ACT ONE, an autobiography by the playwright Moss Hart. I'm 100 pages in and it is fascinating, a must-read for every person involved with the theatre. I picked up this copy for $1 in a thrift shop in San Francisco, and it was one of the best single dollars I've ever spent (having never played the lottery, ever... ooh, there is a nice clean "never have I ever" for a future game!).

Back to the book -- one detail I particularly like is young Moss's first job in theatre in the 1920s: an "office boy" for a road producer with an office (where else?) in the New Amsterdam Theatre!

Moss Hart has an amazing way of describing the magic and the heartache of a life in the theatre. There are so many quotable passages, and here is just one that I read tonight. After a stint as an actor Moss decides he is not cut out for the profession:

"It was a conclusion I did not come to easily. I was wrestling with a dream that had satisfied the needs of my childhood, and the elements of fantasy attached to that dream ran deep and strong. To give it up, to let it go, was to relinquish a secret part of myself that had sustained me through the years."

He says this so much more eloquently than what I often refer to as "pleasing my fourteen-year-old self." I do a lot of stuff to make that girl happy, but she isn't here anymore! That was almost half a lifetime ago.... yet most of the decisions of my life go back to events that happened then. All the choices and ambitions of adulthood running back to a few key moments in childhood and adolescence.