To the Stars: Autobiography of George Takei by George Takei

Author:George Takei [Takei, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Juvenile Fiction, Biographical
ISBN: 9780743434201
Google: OYg1BgAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2015-03-10T04:00:00+00:00

12

Return to Hollywood

I CELEBRATED MY TWENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY in New York City. A quarter century. I had been in Manhattan almost a year now and had little to show for it. Nothing was happening with my career. Two television guest shots and a few photo modeling gigs. The only theater I did in New York was the last couple weeks of the Fly Blackbird! run. Back in Los Angeles, there had been, at least, a steady upward progression to my career in films and television. And, most of all, I missed my family and hometown.

Josie, too, had her parents in Los Angeles and was getting homesick for the space and sunshine. We both decided to go back before it started getting cold again. I closed out my account at Dime Savings Bank and bought the ticket back to Los Angeles.

The first thing we did when we got back was to drive up the coast in my father’s big Buick—swooping up the Pacific Coast Highway all the way to Santa Barbara. It was sublimely liberating. After the overwhelming press of humanity, the racket and the crush of high-rises, suddenly the blue sky and the ocean, the sunshine, the breeze and open space tasted incredibly sweet. We were Californians. We needed the freedom to ride with the wind over the tawny, rolling hills of Malibu and cruise past the marinas of Ventura. The gulls were in the sky, soaring and wheeling, just hanging out. We were back where we started, back in California. But we were no longer the same people who had left.

We had been to the twentieth-century primordial pool of Manhattan. We now knew how teeming, how competitive, and how chancy survival could be. But we also knew we could do it. If anything, our season in New York had energized us, strengthend our determination, reawakened us to the powerful potentials of the theater. We just needed some time to breathe, an intermission, then we would be ready to dive back in. As we wet our feet in the cool Pacific at the beach in Santa Barbara, we talked about our next move.

Josie knew theater could be a force in building a new America. It spoke the binding language of the “mind and the heart,” and that was where the dialogue for change had to be carried on. She had been talking with Jack Jackson about a multiethnic theater where not just the performers on stage, but the policymakers, the artists, and, most importantly, the audience would reflect the entire ethnic tapestry of a community. This would be a theater literally “of the diversity of America.” Josie was talking about forging a new American theater, carrying the energy of our Los Angeles production of Fly Blackbird! to a grander scale.

On that beach in Santa Barbara, our plans for the future soared like the gulls circling in the sky. We were back in California, where dreams still seemed possible.

* * *

Fred Ishimoto welcomed me back enthusiastically. There had been a lot of

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