College...Regrettably

There's a lot of nagging failures that haunt me about college. My academic pursuits were too diffuse, my efforts in relationships (platonic, I mean here) too thoughtless, my involvement too limited...but these aren't particularly exceptional nor particularly painful.

The one thing that will eternally tear me up can be best described by two images: myself wearing a loincloth and that of a roundtable of seniors treating a sophomore with respect.

The former describes a pretty incredible situation. My freshman year, after incredibly being accepted into the improv troupe here at USC, Commedus Interruptus, I had the even greater luck of becoming part of a theatrical production I didn't even audition for. Chris Cantwell was short an actor and asked me to step in some two weeks before his piece opened as part of Brand New Theatre (BNT). I vaulted from just a mostly lost freshman to one connected to countless people. In one lucky stroke, I had the chance to perform with individuals much more talented and make friends across classes and campus.

I won't go so far as to say call it my "Pip" moment, though a select few were aware of my very brief "Estella" event during that time period. But inside humor aside, it was a great feeling. I had immense respect for the elders of Commedus, as I thought of them. Somehow, they comported themselves with a character that merited respect without being superior. Being allowed to be part of a production without even trying was just to be given a gift.

Of course, that doesn't explain the loincloth. The subsequent semester, I was cast as a barbarian in Cantwell's BNT play, and got to prance around in skivvies and body paint. To say I was full of myself would be a gross understatement.

But the people sitting around a table? That's me circa sophomore year, when I was unexpectedly elevated to opinion editor of the Daily Trojan. In a sudden shift of fortune and fame, I went from a lucky columnist and sometime assistant editor to head of the whole kit 'n kaboodle. Amazingly enough, the seniors above me didn't just run roughshod over me. Blake Hennon, the editor in chief that fall, was like the grandmaster of the DT, a sage with years of wisdom and knowledge, just waiting to be poured out for an eager younger classman. The innumerable blunders and failings on my part were taken in stride, my insufferable character endured with patience.

Finally, an anecdote not referenced at the beginning of this post: a pair of mimes battling out to a brutal bloody death on stage.

That was the conclusion of our sketch show my sophomore year, the final year of Sean, Chris, Dave, and Laura in Commedus Interruptus. I didn't even have copies of the sketch to hand out. We improvised the entire thing, the first time being Friday afternoon with the performance in just a few hours. The seniors not only went with my last minute proposal, but performed brilliantly, taking a half-baked concept and turning it into a piece of hilarity (and gore) perhaps unrivaled in the annals of Commedus -- gunshots, knife-throwing/stabbing, grenades...it was a gory sketch that consumed nearly a gallon of fake blood.

The common theme to all of these is, of course, an upperclassman taking a younger (me, in these cases) under his wing and altering his experience of college in a way probably far more than anticipated. Reflecting on some of the most seminal moments in my collegiate career, they tended to depend upon trust from an older, wiser Trojan who was willing to not only give me a chance, but pass along their knowledge to aid me.

And therein lies my regret. If I have failed in anything in college, at the least, I have failed to remain in any one activity or remain at such a position of authority that I can be that mentor to the next generation. The debt I owed to the classes above me...I failed to pay it back to those below.

I'm not wallowing in self-pity. It's just an act I wish I'd had the circumspect to recognize as an implied obligation. The concept is familiar. I've often thought of how much I would like to do for others when I'm established in a field, how much I'd like to extend to interns and the like. Somehow, though, the idea always lingered at the macro level, never reducing in scope enough for me to think about how it could be applied immediately.

As Dignan once said, "That's inappropriate, that's inexcusable, that I do not forgive."