Who the fuck DO you think you are?

 Who the fuck do you think you are?

I was asked this by a friend, jokingly, when I wore a bow tie one time. I've been playing with the idea of image for some time now, and one little adventure I got into a few years back was to wear clothes I either wouldn't be seen dead in, or clothes that were just out of character for me.

I've been an actor, on and off, for decades. And the business of pretending to be someone else was always interesting to me, but it wasn't until things got really interesting for me thirty or so years ago, and I literally lost my mind, that I began to explore who I was, what my values were, and what I wanted from my life.

I started to ask myself what made someone else them, and myself, me. Why other people liked the music they liked, had the tastes they had, held the opinions they held and so on. And I found it difficult to answer. I realized I had prejudices about many things, some of which I'd never even tried or encountered.

It was during a rehearsal for a play in Leicester, England, back in 1981 that I think it first dawned on me. I was playing in a musical called Cruel Tears, which was about truckers in America, and the music featured heavily. It was Blue Grass county music, with banjos and fiddles and dobros and slide guitars, and it was the kind of music I'd been telling myself I really didn't like. It wasn't cool or fashionable to enjoy country music, for me at the time. I was into Hendrix, and jazz, and funk, and anything that smacked of what I perceived as right wing or dumb or hick or hillbilly wasn't sophisticated enough for me.

But there I was, singing a song accompanied by this amazing blue grass band, and all the banjos and fiddles and the sing sing happiness of it all was making me laugh. And then it dawned on me: I liked it. A part of me was telling me I shouldn't like it, but I did.

So once the show was over, I started to learn five string banjo. Music I once thought I loathed became something I liked. And I asked myself the next question: what else have I got prejudices about? And so, even though I wasn't entirely aware of it at the time, I started on a journey to really discover who I was.