I must’ve been nine or ten, doing a community theatre production of “How to Eat Like a Child – And Other Lessons in Not Being a Grown-up.” (To this day, I still find myself mumbling, “Like a child, like a child, like a ch-ch-child,” under my breath like some dormant spell.)

Our director — I remember him as Mr. Matt or Mr. Mark, something with that soft, two-syllable, local-theatre ring — looked exactly how I believed a real director should. He wore black turtlenecks, short-sleeved because it was summer, and kept a stubby, utterly earnest ponytail. He carried a script he was writing in a slim briefcase, which he’d shuttle back and forth from the brand-new Starbucks down the street. And for reasons I still can’t fully articulate, I adored him. Partly because he treated us kids like miniatur

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