Something New

I was born in 1999. I love getting to call myself a 90’s kid, even if it’s on a technicality. My older siblings (’93 and ’95) tend to be less stoked about it. A great part about 99 is that I always get to be as old as the new year, I get to be 25 going into 2025. 25 feels like an important one. It’s always been a fun little observation, then we get to this year.

“This year has been one of the hardest years of my life” has been what I’ve said year over year for the past 5, and I gotta say I think it might be true again this year (fingers crossed for 2025). In the past five years we’ve witnessed continued social isolation/distrust, political unrest, media structure collapse, monopolization of resources, stifling of labor action, and ongoing genocidal military action being perpetrated across the world. Take your pick of any combination of these as a reason for any of us to feel quite justified in a shitty state of the world, and I’m certainly not smart enough to get to the bottom of any of that.

What I do know is MY last five years. Five years of hardship and hurt, sure. But also five years of learning, growing, and becoming my own person. At the top of 2020, things were sailing about as well as they could’ve. Still at Boise State that time, I had just asked one of my earliest high school friends to be my girlfriend. Business classes were going…fine, plus I was just cast in this amazing Mae West play that BSU was putting on for the first time in the country (correct me if I’m wrong, anybody who knows The Drag). Naturally Covid hit big, classes were starting to become optional, and one night of The Drag we had a meeting that it would be the last performance of the run. This cut the run short a week and a half early but I’m so grateful I was able to be a performer in that show. Things can flip in an instant. The world shuts down, classes go online, my last year and a half of college becomes a screen. It becomes particularly difficult to do any form of live theatre, which just so happened to be what I did the most of and found so much of myself through.  A lot of folks made some very compelling attempts through the pandemic, but live theatre is still making its recovery (please go see plays when you can, I promise it’ll be good for you).

Thankfully I’m still able to mostly be working through the pandemic. I pivoted to doing a LOT of landscaping and sprinkler work. My girlfriend moved in, the world stayed quiet, my life became landscaping, zoom classes, and sheltering in place with her. That last one was the easy part. I’d known her since middle school, and it was like we were close friends immediately. We knew a lot of the same people, had a lot of the same stories, and got along great. 2021 was a slow start to recovery from the pandemic, we were more used to it. It became very comfortable to go through the routine. Theatres slowly started to open again; I picked up a job working at the Morrison Center for Performing Arts. I’d help load in for whatever touring shows came through Boise in various positions. This was huge to me because it was my first time getting paid for anything related to theatre work. I’ve always been drawn to storytelling and performance; it’s always felt like a peek into people’s souls to me. I’m obsessed with hearing other people’s stories and seeing how it shapes them. I got to help out on the Broadway tours of Anastasia and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, along with a lovely variety of other touring shows (shout out Disney Princesses Live). That time solidified my desire to continue to work in live events/theatre/sound engineering.

2022. My time at the Morrison Center eventually ends. The world (kinda) opens back up, My girlfriend and I have been together for three years at this point, the longest relationship I’ve ever had. So we start vaguely talking about a ring and a wedding… At the same time, my girlfriend and I are looking into two summer camp positions where we would travel to Maine for three months in the summer teaching kids art and theatre, what a perfect opportunity. I get a new job at another theater in the meantime as well! Boise Contemporary Theater hires me to help out as the sound engineer for the WORLD PREMIERE of a musical written about Boise by two of my biggest creative inspirations, Alex Syiek and Tom Ford. Show on the Roof has the single most formative show of my career so far, I’m so grateful to that cast/crew for being so patient and kicking so much ass. I was thrown into the fire and somehow grew and learned and made it through.

On the Sunday before closing night, May 1st, 2022, I get a phone call from my dad. “I know this isn’t the way you want to hear, but school officers up at U of I found a body and they called us. It looks like it might be Hudson.” My little brother, up in his first year of college at the University of Idaho, passed away in an accident late at night. Things can flip in an instant. He deserves his own separate post when I’m ready. That was a surreal moment, I remember almost laughing in disbelief. There’s no proper way to react to that news. The next period was a bit of a blur, I know we had closing week of the musical, I know a lot of people sent a lot of words to my family, I know some dumbasses on TikTok tried to play detective when more tragedy hit the University of Idaho campus later that year. Mostly I remember going along with the flow. It was too much effort to push through and decide for myself, so I resigned myself to what I thought other people expected of me.

Numbly, I got ready for camp which we had to leave for not two weeks after my brother’s celebration of life. We went to Maine, we worked with a bunch of kids who are richer than I will ever be, and we both learned a TON. Many of the kids reminded me of my little brother, which was tough and healing. While out there, I officially popped the question and asked her to marry me. Picture perfect proposal, beautiful archway, I’m quite proud of myself for pulling it off still. I got to work with some of the coolest people I’ve ever met (shout-out Jay, Guy, and Marc). Teaching choreography/running tech for two musicals while my new fiancée is teaching arts and crafts in a beautiful summer camp?? It was lovely. She didn’t have quite as good of a time as I did, but she was patient and stuck it out. We eventually got to go back to our new life and plan a wedding! We got back and I was still working at BCT when they had shows running. I’m currently on my third straight season with them, somehow they like keeping me around! I also end up working as a fryer for Guru Donuts, rolling in at 2:30 AM to start cooking donuts. Shouldn’t be too bad for the sleep schedule, right?

2023 is largely consumed by working and wedding planning early on. Our date is set for May, so it’s mostly head down, work, go with the flow. I wanted to facilitate as smoothly as possible. It’s always been in my nature to try and mediate or fix things for people. Sometimes it can be super helpful but it tended to be my primary directive for more than it necessarily should. Going with the flow turned into not having many of my own opinions. It became allowing myself to acquiesce to what I thought other folks needed from me. Nevertheless, we persisted. We invited a bunch of family, coworkers, friends from school, friends from camp. Thanks to a lot of effort from key people, the wedding happened, and it went great! Aside from a little storm toward the end (which everybody kept saying was good luck, funnily enough). It was a beautiful day, being able to see so many people in my life there to celebrate our decision and potential future. Wedding commotion died down, and I continued working at BCT as well as  at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival over the summer! I was brought on to help mix music for the preshow concerts and even engineer for a full run of Dracula. I was still frying donuts at 3 AM through all of this. My day generally was 3-9 Donuts, 9-4 break maybe sleep, 4-8 ISF, 8-3 break maybe sleep. It was quite a lot to put myself through but I didn’t really feel the agency to seek a change. I was happy I was just married. I was going with the flow and working hard to build this new life I was expecting.

The new life steadily starts progressing. I’m building up my resume, working a lot of hours, making decent money to cover rent. My wife and I’s sleep schedules become a bit mismatched, obviously. Most of the time she’s working, I’m sleeping or off work, then I’m gone working myself in the evenings when she gets off. It was a tough schedule to work with, but we never fought and we got along super well so it felt worth it. This carries through 2024, I get asked to do sound design for these two educational tours that ISF sends to schools across the state/region. I was fortunate to work with former college professors of mine and some of the most talented actors I’ve seen. This all goes well, but schedule wise is brutal. I had a day where I fried from 2:30-9:00, then tour rehearsal from 10:00-4:00, THEN a BCT show 5:00-9:00. I was stretching myself thin, to say the least. This put a strain on my marriage, but it was always something we were willing to work through. My parents are divorced, but we’re not like my parents, right? Then one morning in March, we were laying in bed and she asked me “do you ever think we were meant to be just friends?” and it all sort of fell into place. Things can flip in an instant.

Her and I talked through a lot in the following weeks, decided to end the marriage, and I’m always going to be incredibly grateful to her for being the best person I could’ve gone through it with. We learned so much from each other and there’s still mutual love there, but this was a massive wake up call. My going with the flow and acting passively was not serving me like I thought it would. I moved out of the apartment, back into my old room and, with a lot of support from my family/friends, I’m feeling like my own person again. I’ve spent a lot of time living for what I thought other people wanted from me. I tried to fix things for everyone else while blatantly ignoring what I needed to do to fix myself. One of the first things my dad said to me after the divorce was “look into the Sun” when confronting yourself. Look right into the painful, burning, searing parts of yourself because that’s the only way you’ll have enough light to see. It hurts but it brings so much clarity.

Now we’re going into 2025. The world is wide open and ready to be explored. I’ve made a few big personal strides so far. Last year, I got officially diagnosed with ADHD and it has brought so much clarity. Now I have an angle I can deal with my mental health struggles from. Learning new ways to help myself through therapy has been incredibly important as well. I’m fortunate to be acting for the first time in four years as a company member of this year’s version of that very tour I worked on last year! I’ve been dating somebody new and doing my best to keep the pressure off myself. I’m planning on moving away from Boise this year as well to see what else there is to discover.

I adore telling stories, being a part of so many different productions and stories has been such a delight of mine. Thank you for getting to the end of this story, if anybody did. If anything resonated, please feel free to reach out. I’ve long been isolating myself from most other people and I’m kinda sick of it. Please know I’m always a listening ear. I’m going to try and write/create more. It helps me to get some of my brain thoughts out there, so thank you again for reading. Please immerse yourself in the world around you as much you can, there’s only so much time we have in it. Be your best self.

BB