Chuck Yeager

I saw Sam Shepard in the East Village. It’s the second time I’ve been within the realm of a possibility of speaking to him, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. It’s not that I’m intimidated by his celebrity, because I’ve approached other famous people. With Sam it’s different. I’ve always had for him what I can only call a cross between a Dad crush and a wish that I'd been his age in New York in the 60's and 70's. It all started in ninth grade when we read The Right Stuff for English. My English teacher was retired Air Force so we read The Illiad and The Oddessy each in just two weeks, but spent an entire six-week grading period studying The Right Stuff. There were model planes all around the room, videos from the view of a simulator, field trip to NASA. We watched the movie twice. And ooooh…Sam as Chuck Yeager. Brave, rugged, mysterious Chuck Yeager. His performance stole my little ninth grade heart. A couple years later I discovered his plays and the mystery of Sam grew exponentially. My dream role to this day is Beth in A Lie of the Mind. At one point I read an interview with Sam in which he tiptoed around the fact that he followed the writings of Gurdjieff. My parents were in a Gurdjieff group when I was young so I understood the tiptoeing and felt another instant connection. He seems somehow equally loyal to his roots while exploring outrageous creative possibilities; raw and vulgar while classy and gentleman-like; fiercely emotional while stoically intelligent; rigid with good posture while completely comfortable in his skin.  One of those people that could know more about you than you know about yourself in just a few minutes of conversation. So you can understand why I've frozen up both times I’ve been near him. What could I possibly say to such a man? But the third time is a charm, right? Oh Sam, what shall I ask you first when I see you next?

Man has no individual I. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small "I"s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, "I". And each time his I is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly.

- G.I. Gurdjieff