Aggressive Negotiations.

Unlearned lessons in international diplomacy.

I sometimes joke that my brain never stopped operating on the semester system. Except, like many jokes I make, I’m actually not joking at all. A tour can be any length. Personally, my longest tour was eleven months and my shortest was two weeks. But many of my tours have fallen in the two to four month range. Adding in prep time and wrap-up time, and just given the nature of the industry in general, that often shakes out to me having a spring tour and a fall tour with sometimes a summer tour but I usually try to hop onto a festival during that time of year for a change in pace (staying in one place for a while) and scenery (AirBnB in another city for a couple months rather than a tour bus).

It feels even more like school when I’m on tour with a theater production in the fall because when October rolls around for a tour that ends in December, it is audition central out on the road. Everyone in the show is using every spare minute of their time locking themselves in a room to film tapes to send out to whoever. Everyone is exchanging information about who they know on each road show. One actor turns to me and asks if I’m going to take a shot at Moulin Rouge. I say probably. And she then spends the next five minutes painting the scene for how life would be if we both got on that tour together.

Others take a different route with theme parks or cruise ships. I’m asked if I’ve ever done a cruise ship contract and each time I say “Of course not. Have you seen the Titanic?” Again, a joke that isn’t a joke in the slightest. Put me on a bus with people for a season and I can at least get off the bus. Put me on a ship with no land in sight? That’s just asking for trouble. And have you seen the size of those ships these days? No way they have enough lifeboats. And those COVID ships stuck at sea because no country would take them? That’s even more nightmare material!

Inevitably across my job search screen rolls in the occasional gig for lengthy tours in China or ridiculously lucrative contracts out in Dubai or Riyadh. Sometimes others on crew will ask me about those. Many guys I know have taken those jobs and lined their pockets, coming back with a nice tan and not a care in the world.

“Not for me,” I always say to an audience of confused faces and I sigh as I’m forced to explain what I believe is obvious given the number of action-packed shows about CIA operatives I’ve seen. “There are few things worse than being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong passport. I like to avoid situations that could end up in me becoming a CNN headline. I said the same about Russia before the war started and everyone thought I was being ridiculous!”

Everyone brushes off my paranoia again anyway.

“It’s actually really nice out there,” one man says about Saudia Arabia. “First off it’s not just like you’re living anywhere. I lived in a compound-”

“Oh yeah, I’ve heard all about the compounds. And you’d best bet I’m not letting anyone shut me away in one of those. Then of course comes the question, what happens if I traverse my way outside the compound? Unaccompanied?”

I’m told about all the cool things to see, how it’s different from what I’m thinking. I ask if they knew any women who took contracts out there and I’m told, “Some.”

“Good for them. Still, not for me. Knowing how I am, there’s a half decent chance I’d get myself into trouble. Have I told you the time about when I went to international relations camp? The embassy trip. Not the simulation where we had to run our own country and I started my own dictatorship and enslaved half the refugees from neighboring civilizations.”

“No,” they say.

The year is something like… 2007. My parents observed my enthusiasm for anime and all things related to Japan and figured that a constructive use of that interest would be for me to grow up and become some kind of decorated ambassador. So that’s how I found myself arriving for my first of many extended stays in Washington DC in a college classroom, probably thirteen years old, extraordinarily uncomfortable in my newly purchased business attire that was a requirement for the summer program that would run for a couple weeks.

During this camp, a trip to the Saudi Arabian embassy was on the agenda. We gathered on campus early in the morning to eat breakfast and lay down the ground rules. Going to an embassy, we had learned, is technically like going to another country. The most extreme version of “their house, their rules” you could come by. This was an exciting prospect for me, going to a different country. But by this age, I had resolved to never smile or look excited about anything. There was nothing metal about enthusiasm. So I trailed in the back of the pack into the metro station, out the other side at our destination, down and around a few blocks, until we had arrived.

I wish I could recount to you more about the embassy building itself. It was probably nothing spectacular, just your normal modern government building. I say this because the small theater inside the building (which I do remember) was similarly unspectacular, much like the college classrooms I’d been confined to over the previous several days. Standing at the back of the pack as I am, by the time I make my way into the theater I hear the camp counselor's directions:

“Boys sit in the front rows, girls sit in the back rows.”

My eyebrows raise not because I don’t enjoy sitting in the back of the room. In fact, it’s my preference to sit in the back of the room. Nonetheless, I’d never been told to sit in the back of a room before.

“Why?” I ask, still standing in the aisle.

“It’s the rules,” the teacher says.

“That’s not fair though,” I retort.

I am given an explanation about local customs and cultural differences, one that sounds familiar to the speech we were given earlier in the morning that I was only half paying attention to. And the more words are said, the more I am determined to sit right in the middle of the front row or die trying. Besides, everyone in the room at that point was American.

Few others in the camp are paying attention to the small scene I am causing. Meanwhile, I’m just dumbfounded that I’m having my own minor Rosa Parks moment in the 21st century.

“I’m not sitting in the back,” I say again. At this point, people who work at the embassy have entered the room and have started up the screen for the upcoming presentation. They look my way, sensing there is a holdup of some kind. I then sidestep the teacher, walk up to the second row (the first row was filled), sit down next to all the boys I’d been ignoring ever since camp started, and cross my arms (much like I had done in France a summer or so prior in front of a police officer with a machine gun during an incident with a suspicious bag reported by my father. I had gained more of sense of mortality since then, however).

My heart was racing but no one said anything.

The presentation was a lengthy tourism ad emphasizing cities of the future simultaneous with wonders of the past. I don’t think we were in there for more than fifteen minutes before continuing our little tour.

“That was kind of crazy,” one of the girls said to me on our way out. “You’re crazy.”

“I think my reaction was perfectly reasonable,” I say, reluctant to add: I just wish any of you stood with me.

My coworker’s eyes are similarly wide at the end of the story and I shrug.

“I mean it might be different now I’m just saying it’s going to take a lot more than a fat check to get me to work anywhere over there,” I conclude.

One of the guys laughs.

“You are truly wild,” he says.

“Don’t be impressed with me. Be impressed with the women over there who have to live that reality every day and are still fighting the good fight anyway.”