Writings

September 11th, 2001

I wrote this in my LiveJournal on the one-year anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon

I didn't want to write about September 11th. I didn't feel as though I could express my thoughts and feelings about what happened that horrible day any better that the people who actually experienced it. I thought that anything I tried to add would just be superficial, trite, and above all, completely meaningless. So I wont. I won't talk about how the world had changed, or what 9/11/01 meant to me, to the country, and to the world at large. I'll just tell my story.

Monday, September 10th, 2001 was the start of "production week" for a play that I was doing called Under the Sickle Moon. If that wasn't enough, it had been only two weeks since my grandmother unexpectedly passed away. Needless to say, I was still grief stricken. I got home from rehearsal at about 10:00 PM, got something to eat and sat down to watch the rest of Monday Night Raw. Since Tuesday was our "dark day" (no rehearsal), I figured I'd stay up a bit later than usual and make up the sleep Tuesday morning. I fell asleep watching ESPN at around 1:30 AM Tuesday morning, with no idea how dark our "dark day" would turn out to be.

At some point Tuesday morning (approximately 9:30), I drifted into this state of half-sleep. I was still sleeping, but I could hear things that were happening in the conscious world. And one of the things I heard was the voice of ABC News' Peter Jennings. I couldn't make out what he was saying, but I knew it was his voice that I heard. As my drifted further toward consciousness, I thought, "Wait a minute, I was watching ESPN when I went to sleep, so why is Peter Jennings on TV?" At that point, I woke up and fumbled for my glasses, then I saw it on the TV screen: "WORLD TRADE CENTER COLLAPSED. TOWERS HIT BY HIJACKED PLANES. PENTAGON ALSO HIT." Because I had stayed up late, I woke up at about 10:45. Needless to say, I was just shocked. I can't say it any better than that: shocked. I spent the rest of that day the way most Americans did: sitting in front of the television, trying to comprehend, trying to come to grips with what had happened. And even though it seemed completely meaningless at the time, I wondered about whether or not the show was going to go on. (It did. And I'm not ashamed or regretful that it did. We wanted to keep going. We needed to keep going. And we donated the proceeds of the show to the NYC relief efforts.)

Watching television that day was a very weird experience. For that entire day, there were only about six channels: every other cable channel carried their network news feed. I must have seen the videos of the planes crashing and the towers collapsing at least two or three dozen times that day. The whole day was just... surreal.

Well, that is my story, such that it is. I'll never forget that day as long as I live.

Pyramid Scheme Productions, 1998 - 2004
E-mail:pyramid_scheme@yahoo.com
Last Updated: July 13, 2003 9:14 PM

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