Wisest Thing I’ve Read Today

Over the weekend the Boston Globe ran an interview with eleven-year-old actor Aidan Gemme. He’s currently starring as Peter Llewellyn in the unfathomable stage musical adaptation of Neverland, the unhistorical movie about J. M. Barrie writing Peter Pan.

One of Gemme’s earlier Broadway jobs was alternating in the role of the Boy in Waiting for Godot. Here’s how he described preparing to play that frustrating character:

The Boy doesn’t really have a personality, and you can’t get information on him. I didn’t step into him. I just stepped out of myself.

This Is Your First Time?

In the New York Times’s review of the New Yiddish Rep’s production of Waiting for Godot, I noticed that the Boy is being played by nine-year-old Nicholas Jenkins.

I know New York is a cosmopolitan melting-pot, but it still struck me that a lad named Nicholas Jenkins had probably not grown up hearing Yiddish.

In fact, the theater company has shared a video of “Nicholas Jenkins’ First Yiddish Lesson.”

And it turns out Nicholas and I have something in common. At an early age we both played a Flying Monkey in The Wizard of Oz.