Chapter One: Time to Go Home

For my high school graduation, my favourite teacher, Mr. Schuester, gave me a book titled 1000 Places to see Before You Die. Three months later, he died.

I knew for a fact that neither he nor the 9 students who died in the same school shooting had seen even a fraction of those 1000 places. It was too late for them.

So I took the money I'd saved up for a baby that had turned out not to be mine, a wedding I had turned out not to have, and a college I had turned out not to get into, and I started trying to make sure that I saw all 1000 of those places before it was too late for me too.

I opened a Youtube channel dedicated to vlogging about my travels. I called my vlog Peregrination, which was a word I found in a thesaurus under 'travel'. At first, I only posted the vlogs to make my mother feel better about my absence, but it quickly became an obsession. Vlogging about my experiences allowed me to take extra time to remember and be grateful for every moment.

Some of my nearest and dearest had died before they'd ever had the chance to experience the world, and I was determined to not only experience the world, but to appreciate and understand each experience I had.

I put more work into my vlog than I'd ever put into anything else.

When I crossed the last item out of the book almost five years after my first vlog, Peregrination had one and a half million subscribers, and between that and my accompanying blog, I was regarded as the Messiah of low-budget backpackers across the globe. I was making steady income through my online clothing store and from advertisements on my Youtube channel and my blog. I was constantly being overwhelmed by the loyalty and compassion of my "Peregrinators"-the people who watched my videos every day and formed the only permanent community I'd felt included in since high school.

But after I crossed the last item out of the book, I didn't know what to do or where to go.

My travels and the success of Peregrination had helped me grow up and find peace with the world and my place in it, but once the book was done, it felt like it was time to find something bigger than world tourism to care about.

I'd seen the world and experienced more than I'd ever dreamed, but my stamina for constant travel was wearing thin. I knew it was time to start a different kind journey, but I didn't have a clue what it should be.

I just knew I needed to give my life something more, now that I'd seen all 1000 things and I still wasn't dead.

Then one night when I was sitting on a bunk bed in a hostel in Budapest, waiting for the final vlog in the 1000 places series to upload, I got a Facebook message from my step-brother Kurt, in New York City. He wanted me to help him take his theatre troupe's latest show on tour.

The theatre troupe was called RattleBingBang, and it consisted of Kurt, his boyfriend Blaine, and their friend Rachel. I'd gone to high school with all three of them. They'd been staging original plays in New York City for several years, and they had most of their shows up on Youtube. They were very very good in a darkly quirky, devastatingly honest kind of way that had often glued me to my laptop late into the night feeling feelings I wasn't prepared to feel.

RattleBingBang's latest show was an original musical called Soundtrack. They'd received a grant which entitled them to stage it for a single night in each of the forty-two Avonroy Foundation sponsored theatres across North America and the UK. Stage hands, lighting and sound technicians, and front-of-house staff were all covered by the grant, but the rest was up to them. Kurt, Rachel, and Blaine could produce a phenomenal show on a tiny budget, but they didn't have a clue where to start when it came to orchestrating the travel, accommodations, and publicity for such an ambitious touring itinerary.

So Kurt sent me a script and a digital version of the soundtrack to the show, which the three of them had recorded in their apartment. I read the script and listened to the soundtrack and immediately bought my plane ticket back to the United States.

I spent the next month and a half coordinating tour details from Hungary and then Serbia and then Romania. I coordinated with the theatres to organize lighting and sound, worked with events promoters to get press for the show, ordered merchandise, arranged transportation and accommodation, and psyched myself up to come face-to-face with my past.

And then it was time to go home.