The Day I Found Myself in the Library

This isn’t a flex.

It’s just one of the strangest moments of my life.

Almost every time I walk past Bobst Library on the NYU campus, I’m reminded of the first day of graduate school in 2014.

I had just enrolled in NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing program and, like any excited new student, I decided to arrive early. Armed with my brand-new student ID, I wandered into Bobst Library before my first class.

Being a theatre person, I naturally made my way to the theatre archives.

I wasn’t looking for myself.

Honestly, it never even crossed my mind.

My Off-Broadway musical From My Hometown had opened more than a decade earlier, and I was simply curious to see what the archives contained.

Then I stopped.

There was From My Hometown.

Not in one book.

Not in two.

But in multiple books documenting the history of Off-Broadway theatre.

I just stood there.

Five minutes earlier I had been thinking, Today I begin my education.

Now I was looking at part of my own artistic journey preserved in the very library where I was about to study.

Curiosity got the better of me.

I wandered over to the Broadway section.

There I was again.

This time, not because I had written a musical, but because I had been part of the original Broadway company of Dreamgirls at the Imperial Theatre.

I remember smiling to myself and thinking,

“Well… this is surreal.”

Then I headed off to my first class.

Very quickly, however, I realized something else.

Most of my classmates were much younger than I was. They were wonderfully talented, full of dreams, and just beginning their own artistic journeys.

I didn’t have the vocabulary for it then, but looking back, I realize I spent much of those two years trying to shrink myself to fit into the room.

Not because anyone asked me to.

I simply wanted to be another student.

Of course, life had other plans.

Leslie Odom Jr. visited one of our classes.

“Oh, I know Lee,” he said.

“Everybody knows Lee.”

On another day, a casting director was speaking to us about the profession.

“I know Lee knows what a casting director does,” she laughed. “I’ve cast his shows.”

Then came the day none of us saw coming.

In one of our classes, the two professors were deconstructing the orchestrations of Dreamgirls. Because the original Broadway cast album contains numerous cuts, they chose to use the complete 20th Anniversary Concert recording, which preserves the full score and orchestrations.

They pressed play.

The first voice the class heard…

…was mine.

If you could have seen the looks on my classmates’ faces.

People often ask me why I went back to school after already having a career as an actor, writer, composer, director, and producer.

The answer is simple.

I wanted to know as much as my critics knew.

I wanted to know as much as my literary heroes knew.

And if I was going to break the rules, I wanted to know exactly which rules I was breaking.

Turns out, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Not because I needed another degree.

Because I wanted another level of understanding.

Now, every time I walk past Bobst Library on my way to teach at NYU, I smile.

I remember that first morning.

I thought I was walking into the library to begin the next chapter of my life.

Instead…

I discovered that a few chapters had already been written.

Sometimes your journey catches up with you just as you’re trying to begin the next one.