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When I discovered I was interested in writing, I was in high school and at that time at a high school in Bloomington Minnesota. It was one of several I attended including as I’ve already mentioned the one in a suburb of Toronto in Canada. They were going to put on the play The Teahouse of the August Moon. It is a comedy based on the US occupation of Okinawa right after World War II. I was very interested in a girl who was always in the plays, so I tried out and got a part in the play just to be near her. The basic storyline of the play is that the Army wants to put up a clubhouse and the villagers want to put up a teahouse. An aside: there was a movie made of this play starring Glenn Ford and Marlon Brando. Back at the storyline – the Okinawans brew a liquor from sweet potatoes and the soldiers love it and sales quickly finance the teahouse. When a local commander finds out about the teahouse and liquor sales, he orders the teahouse and liquor destroyed. The locals pretend to carry out the orders, but break up some old barrels and disassembled the teahouse and put it into storage. The play ends happily when a senior commander wants to make an example of these wonderful new teahouse. The local commander is forced to help the locals reassembled the teahouse. I had a very small part as one of the villagers, and I had a very few lines. I didn’t have any trouble learning the lines, but I thought they could be rewritten in a way to make them more effective. That’s when it became apparent to me I wanted to create by writing and not by acting. The girl? As usual I moved away, end of story there.