This is my binder. There are many like it, but this one is mine. I have had this binder for a very, very long time now. It’s my rehearsal binder and also my reading binder for when I do Fighting Words readings with the Babes With Blades. I think that I’ve been using this binder for as long as I’ve been back working in Chicago; I’m reasonably sure that it was the binder that had the book for the production of Sweeney Todd I did back in ’08. It’s been with me ever since, through roughly a dozen shows and easily twice that many readings. As you can only sort of see from the high-quality photography I provide, it’s really starting to show its age and will eventually have to be replaced.
I’m a sentimentalist, which should come as an understatement to anyone who knows me. I hold on to things far longer than I ought to, which applies to the physical as well as the ephemeral in equal measure, but this binder is different. It has been a part of so many important artistic moments for me and it’s the binder I was using for a reading the day I met my girlfriend, and yet I don’t really feel sad at the prospect of this binder ripping apart at the spine. I’m fond of it (which is a strange thing to say) but it’s just a damned binder, I’m more sentimental about the scripts that were contained in it. Maybe that’s a sign of growth or a creeping sense of proportion in my age.
What a terrifying thought.