First Impressions: Dominic Papatola

Welcome to my first installment of First Impressions: a brief look at not only what the mentors at the O'Neill thought of me, but also what I thought of them. The first critic that I met there was Dominic Papatola.

"I can see that you're the troublemaker."

It didn't take long for Dominic, a fun character with wicked smarts, to brand me the jokester of the group, although I still can't figure out what I did to earn that title. There were others there that I thought beat me by a mile, but I wasn't going to let him down. I think that I subconsciously went about at least proving him half-right. I mean, what else would make me, in a review of a show that I saw there, make the connection between gin (that was really Jack Daniels, I later found out) and Eli Whitney, the cotton gin inventor?

Yeah, I knew that I was stretching it as far as Mr. Fantastic with that one, but I couldn't help myself. The play was one of those abstract, what the heezie, what Dominic likes to call "sea monsters" that was challenging to decipher. Sometimes I like to make sense of things no matter how crazy my ideas are. No one can say that I'm not gutsy, though. After all, I might have been at least in the ballpark. Who knew what that playwright was thinking? If anything, it did make for some interesting conversation the next morning, and many professional productions can't even achieve that.

The best part of all? I made Dominic Papatola smile. He said "clever, but don't ever, ever, ever do that again!" Well, in the grand scheme of things, crazy but clever is not a bad compliment.