An MFA Application Bio

One of the MFA Programs I am applying to is asking for a 500 word bio.  Here's a first draft that I am amused by...

Splash:  I am 10.  I read Inherit the Wind and try and produce it in my garage.

Splash:  I am 15.  We produce movies with my parent’s Super 8 camera.

Splash:  I am 18 and I take my first theater class at the University of Minnesota.  I take more, but eventually drop out of college.

Splash: I am 18 and I usher at Theater in the Round, a local high quality community theater.  I become increasingly involved there until within a few years I am Chair of the Technical Advisory Board and working as a stage manager with great directors.  Which might explain why I’m not having much luck in college.

Splash:  I am 22 and we start our own theater company and produce our first show and it’s a mixed bag of success and failure but exciting and engaging and then the financial reality looms and emotional baggage crashes down on us and Splash.  That’s over.

And I am 25 and I get married and suddenly there isn’t as much room.  And I wander off into a career and there is no Splash.

And for a number of years the waves splash but I am not standing on the shore.  Some years I don’t even hear them, though I take my children to the Children’s Theater Company in Mpls and my wife and I attend The Guthrie and Theater in the Round, but...Splash...I’m not listening.

Splash:  At 39 I decide to leave my role as a partner in the family business and enter teaching English, hoping that I might find a position where I can also do some high school theater.

Splash:  And I do and I did and over the course of twelve years I direct over thirty mainstage productions and a whole bunch of one acts and establish a new community theater and find some time to perform a few roles and I get disenchanted with traditional public education and realize that this is what I truly love.  This is the ocean in which I want to swim for my whole day.  Not just for the moments when I can squeeze it in after school or in the evenings after already having a full day of work but when it is the complete focus of my whole being.  My work.  I realize that...

Splash:  I should spend the next decades doing only the one thing that truly brings me joy.  That I want to do it in a way that is not compromised and diminished by doing it on the side.  I want to do it in a way where there is the energy and the commitment to exploring text and character and image and life.

Splash:  I am applying for MFA Directing programs.