Play often!

a chapter from my Pocket Guidebook on Personal Evolution...

Play often

Don’t worry friends,

I promise I won’t mention the dreaded phrase (Inner Child) once. Oops.

Enter The Fool, my Patron Saint of Play. Way cooler.

Upon my first weeks to San Francisco in 1990, I happened across a part time job at The Black Point Forest Renaissance Faire.

Some call it A Living Historical Theatrical Re-enactment, some call it an outdoor theme mall but after my first few days, I called it my home.

In the dust and hay and merriment of my first Faire, I lost myself and was found by The Fool. In this playful environment, supported by an elaborate subculture of various communities and accompanied by a merry troupe of fellow fools …I discovered the real power of Play.

For two days a week for two months, I donned the fool’s cap and bells, rolled in the dirt and generally made an ass out of myself to amuse paid guests.

It was glorious.

What looked to the guests like some poor underpaid actor embarrassing himself for a drink of warm beer was in actuality, me, finding my own liberation. I had found something I thought I had long lost.

Play, pure and simple.

The two words of wisdom that my father always offered me as a kid, “Have Fun”, certainly applied here.

Playing The Fool granted me the freedom to be silly, to prance and laugh and scamper and skip.

Play allowed the grip my intellectual mind had over me to relax, drift, free associate and most importantly, to operate in new ways.

Just allowing myself the luxury to NOT CARE what others thought about me and be ridiculously without concern for my appearance was like a drug!

Here, where All The World Truly Was A Stage, my talent for improv was received and through play, my hunger for direct experience fed beyond my wildest dreams.

After those first two months at faire my passion for play was clearly revealed.

Determined to keep playing after all my fellows went back to their real jobs, I set immediately out to create a puppet stage, a set of puppets and a fool’s outfit, marched straight out to Union Square and played to anyone that would watch.

Completely untrained but fueled by a newfound passion for play, i was soon ‘discovered’ by several local talent agencies and for the next 15 years found myself getting paid to play.

The Power of Play infused my entire life with vitality, fun, light-heartedness and fresh perspective. Every year that has passed I have grown younger.

Be playful and laugh at yourself often, friends.

Life is too serious to take seriously.