Paul Holmquist

I Survived Theatre School

Intro: tracking the weather, gardening, unhelpful aphorisms.
Let Me Run This By You: memory
Interview: We talk to Paul Holmquist about making a difference through teaching, learning Laban Movement Analysis, and making career moves in theatre. Plus, a truly horrifying story.

FULL TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1: (00:08)
I'm Jen Bosworth from me this and I'm Gina Polizzi. We went to theater school together. We survived it, but we didn't quite understand it. 20 years later, we're digging deep talking to our guests about their experiences and trying to make sense of it all. We survived theater school and you will too. Are we famous yet? How are you?

Speaker 2: (00:32)
Good. How are you? I'm pretty good. I mean, yeah. I'm I'm the Midwest is going snow. Are you getting snow today? Oh, don't. Oh God. Don't tell me good Lord above. Oh, hell Jesus. Um, I mean, I can not let me put it out into the universe. I cannot handle that. I cannot. Yeah, we're just going to put it out there. Nope, Nope. Nope. It's a big part path. I feel, I feel, um, I feel interested. I'm interested in that. You can, you can be. Yes. You can have a curiosity, curiosity, but I'm not, but I don't want it for the East coast, but just the Midwest, like a lot of stuff. I don't know, like wintery mix is how they put it.

Speaker 2: (01:33)
Okay. You keep tabs on the weather in Chicago. Yeah, because I'm, I'm really, I have to like really pump myself up that I moved. Like, it helps me to feel like I made the right choice. That's interesting. And um, my people in my family do that people in my family, like every once in a while, every once in a while my mom would call and she'll be like, she'll tell me, she'll say like, is it snowing there? And I'm like, what? She, yeah, every morning my family is obsessed with the weather. Yes I can. My cousin Roxie, she gets all the radars and she's tracking and she knows exactly what's coming this way. I mean, she should be a meteorologist frankly. She totally should have her own show on YouTube. She's a she's. So on top of the weather and my whole family is like that.

Speaker 2: (02:23)
I think it might be. I mean, it makes sense like that, that would have been handed down if, if it were from farmers, you know, like that would, it wouldn't be a big deal to like being to the weather. I that's like my favorite. Um, the only thing, well, not the only thing, but there was, when I went to, after my dad died, I went to the partial hospitalization program, um, in Highland park hospital. And um, in that time I had a bunch of therapists and some of them were horrible. And what, but one this one young and now looking

Speaker 3: (03:00)
Back, they were young as hell. There were young therapists and they were probably like, what? In the, uh, anyway, this one therapist said it was a gloomy day. It was a spring gloom or like summer gloomy day. And everyone was like, Oh, this weather. And he said, you know, I just have this story. You know, whenever I, whenever I have the glooms and I feel like, and at the time I thought he was a P an idiot, but he said, when it's I had planned to go to the beach today after our therapy. Right. But now I can't go to the beach and I was just thinking, it reminds me like somewhere I'm, I'm off and depressed and somewhere there's a farmer. That's rejoicing because his life is saved. Oh,

Speaker 2: (03:44)
Wow. Oh, wow. And

Speaker 3: (03:46)
I was like, it's great

Speaker 2: (03:48)
Perspective later.

Speaker 3: (03:51)
I was like, Oh my God, that is so deep. And this farmer is like dancing because his farm is saved. And I'm like, but you know, and it's not to diminish anyone's pain, but it's also just perspective. Like you said, like perspective somewhere, someone is happy and falling in love for the first time or somewhere, you know, like,

Speaker 2: (04:10)
Absolutely. And for some reason that also just reminds me of maybe just because talking about Chicago when I was an intern, social work school intern at Northwestern, inpatient, psychiatric, the thick people who worked that, I mean, people who work in psych hospitals are so interesting. Especially if they've been working there for a really long time and this, uh, OT, occupational therapist, guy, Fred Mahaffey. If you're out there, Fred, I love you. You taught me so much. Um, he, he's the person who introduced me to DBT. Um, and I was sitting in his group and he came in and he said, I just got a very upsetting, or I got a very troubling phone call, but I couldn't get into it because I have this group. And so right now, the thing I'm going to practice is, I can't know until I know

Speaker 3: (05:06)
Fred, you're amazing.

Speaker 2: (05:08)
Right? I mean, I think about that all the time. You can't know until, you know, which is really so much about worry and anxiety. It's all this worry about the things that we don't know. And sometimes that's appropriate sometimes. Yeah. You should be worried because something terrible is going to happen. And other times you just waste all of the in-between and then it turns out to be nothing. And you've just been tied up in knots for no reason.

Speaker 3: (05:32)
I am. The more, the older I get, the more I'm I sort of, um, am drawn to, um, Tibetan, Buddhism. And I am reading, I read it every couple years. I read Pema childrens when things fall apart, heart advice for hard times or difficult times. It's brilliant. It's it's saving me in terms of, it go...