Gregory G. Allen's Blog

I remember exactly where I was standing.

September 11, 2001. I’m in Hoboken, watching the towers burn across the river after getting off the train. I was on the phone with a coworker at the World Financial Center. I never made it into the office.

I’ve thought about that moment a thousand times. But I’ve also watched the footage so many times since. On anniversaries. In documentaries. Replayed on cable news until we are numb to it. It became something that happened to a city, to a country and all the individual stories get wrapped into one.

That’s what we do. We absorb. We grieve. We move on. And somewhere along the way, we just get used to it.

War. Famine. Natural disasters. We feel them. We post about them. We donate, sometimes. And then we get back to our individual lives and move forward. I understand that. I think it’s even necessary, in some self preserving way.

I’m just really afraid we’re about to do what we always do.

We’re going to move on from the Epstein files.

Not the hashtag. Not the cable news cycle. The actual files. The actual testimony. The actual names and the actual acts against actual children. Adults who have spent decades carrying horrible scars inflicted by powerful men.

I’ve read what’s in those files. I’ve listened to the victims speak. These are not conspiracy theories. These are documented accounts of abuse at a scale that should have stopped the world.

Should have. Because from where I’m sitting, nothing stopped.

There have been no significant arrests. The men whose names appear in those documents are just living their lives as if they got away with something. Some are still celebrated even. Still protected.

And just so we’re clear, this isn’t a political rant. I’m not interested in embarrassing one party over another or the culture war that the media is making this story. What I’m interested in is so simple: justice.

We have watched repeatedly how money and whose number you have on speed dial means rich people simply don’t have consequences. Ivy League students. Executives. Politicians. The rules that apply to everyone else seem to disappear when the right people need them. We’ve grown so accustomed to this that we’ve almost stopped noticing it.

But this is not a white-collar crime. This is not insider trading or campaign finance fraud. I mean with those, Martha Stewart taught fellow prisoners how to grow a garden as the powers that be used her as an example. This time, we are talking about children.

I don’t fully trust the people responsible for pursuing this to actually pursue it. The people we’re counting on to do something about this are often the same people whose names we’re waiting to see in those files.

I have to believe something is going to happen. I have to, because the alternative is that we live in a country where the heinous acts in those files are simply allowed to be true and left unchecked. Where the victims’ lives don’t matter.

I’m not ready to believe that. But I’ve watched us do this enough times to know how it usually goes.

But here’s the thing: atrocities don’t stop being atrocities just because we stop paying attention. The towers still fell no matter how many years have passed. At ten years old I was in one of the worst tornados to hit northern Texas, separated from my parents. To this day, when the sky gets gray, I can feel those inner scars tingle. That’s nothing compared to the children in those files, but I wanted to point out that they didn’t un-experience what happened to them because we got distracted by the next news cycle.

They’re still there. Still waiting.

We owe them more than a hashtag and a news cycle and a collective shrug as we move on to whatever comes next.

This one has to be different.

Thanks for reading Gregory’s Thoughts! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Have you stopped to notice what you’re turning to for escape these days? I turn to mundane TV shows, puzzles, and Broadway, as you’ve seen from my previous reviews and recaps.

I noticed something different with the shows I saw this month. I usually love to be moved emotionally. The dramatic, the sad, the shows that tug at heartstrings. This month, I just want to laugh.

I started with the play Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo. This 13-year-old play had the audience laughing at things no longer spoken in 2026. It was a great way to start the month: a dysfunctional family and the woman who flips lives upside down like a housewife flipping a table.

I saw two musicals in one week, and while they’re completely different kinds of shows, both had me laughing, smiling, and enjoying two hours of life. Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) is a British transplant with tons of heart. When the British character makes a comment about an idealized America, I got a lump in my throat missing the America we once knew. Personally, I think this is the best musical of the season.

A close second started off-Broadway, where I saw it twice. I then caught a production in Paris and returned again to see how it holds up on Broadway. Titanique is just as kooky, wild, entertaining, and a little naughty as it’s always been. Audiences roared.

This past weekend I attended a preview of Schmigadoon!, which began as an Apple TV+ series. They condensed an entire season into 2.5 hours for a Broadway musical about a couple trapped in a town that is a musical. I laughed so hard reliving all the golden age shows they spoof.

Which got me thinking about Broadway and what catches fire with audiences. It isn’t always reviews that keep a show running. Wicked opened to lukewarm notices and never looked back. It’s what resonates that keeps people coming. I wonder why producers don’t pay closer attention to what’s happening in the world before bringing a show to the Great White Way. Nobody wanted to sit with a story about a rich, entitled woman last fall during Queen of Versailles when so many people were struggling outside those theater doors. Dramas in general aren’t doing well unless a major name is attached as the draw. Even the beloved Beaches is finding it hard to pull an audience during previews.

I wonder if other theatergoers feel the same way I do. We want to laugh, not cry. There is enough making us cry without seeing it on stage. I need to let go of the real world and get taken somewhere magical and funny.

And yet I know it isn’t that simple. Producers can’t see the future. The process takes years before anything reaches Broadway, and by the time the marquee lights up, the world they were reading has already shifted. They’re guessing, same as the rest of us.

Still. Read the room.

I really want to hear from you after reading this. Let me know in the comments whether you agree with my take on Broadway during a war and an unsettling economy, or whether that doesn’t factor into your decisions at all.

Subscribe now

Birthdays used to mean that calendar date worthy of a countdown. Then you continue to age and you question if you count down or run away.

This one finds me more in the moment than I’ve ever been…which, depending on the day, feels either like growth or mild chaos. Sometimes both before lunch.

At 57, I’m exactly where I want to be in my relationship. Twenty-six years with someone who supports every pivot my creative life takes, makes me laugh constantly, and loves without conditions. I am well aware that is a rare thing and I’m blessed.

The creative life itself has always had seasons. Writing for a while. Sometimes filmmaking. Theatre here and there. Right now that creative outlet is teaching and coaching. The past several months of working with teenagers have been rewarding in an entirely new way. Sharing what I’ve learned through the years as well as still learning more. And soon I get to return to the director’s chair for a summer musical, which feels like coming home.

I have a circle: both family and chosen family that stays close even across distance. That’s not something I’ve ever taken for granted.

I’ve always been honest about sharing both my ups and downs, successes and failures, so I feel I need to mention some of that on this day as well. While there is exhilaration in this new world I’m living in, the unknown of my usual stability can sometimes be unsettling.

I’ve written before about my fitness journey. There was a whole post when I turned 50. Let’s just say, that journey took a tour as my life shifted. Hello, old habits. Yes, you. The ones I thought I’d outrun at 50. I’m carrying more weight than I have in years, but the work has shifted from losing it to unlearning the idea that it means something about my worth. The people who love me don’t love me less. I know that. I’m still working on feeling it.

Fifty seven.

Two years younger than my father was when he died.

One year away (hopefully) from finishing a college degree I started forty years ago.

Fifty-seven looks like hope and caution and joy and anxiety, all at once.

I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Subscribe now

I’ve always been physically flexible.

I could even put my leg around my neck up through high school. (Insert crude joke here, readers.)

Today…my body aches just from sitting cross-legged too long. I get a pain in my inner thigh. I also get Charlie Horses in my legs while doing absolutely nothing. Full-on pain attack, and I have to jump up and walk it out like I’m in some kind of an emergency.

Now, I know many of my readers are around my age and can relate. Those who are younger are probably laughing at this. Here’s the thing: we had older people telling us too. I never wanted to hear it, believe it, or give it any life, because it wasn’t part of who I was.

That’s the thing about aging. No matter how much someone older tells us, it doesn’t make any sense until you’re living it.

It might start with needing glasses. I always blamed the cellphone, the tiny print, the screens everywhere.

Doctors have more of a checklist as you get older, and you sort of just along with it. It’s gradual. You don’t pay much attention to it.

I remember buying the pill case, the daily one with the little compartments, and making jokes about the handful my grandpa used to take. Now I was becoming him.

Getting the hearing aid really made me see my age. I didn’t want to admit I was saying “what” all the time to my husband, but I knew that I was. In today’s world of constant noise and overstimulation it’s easy to blame everything else…anything except the fact that maybe my hearing is aging too.

Getting older means the world around us is constantly changing, and we’re moving right along with it. But one day you just look in the mirror, or you look at old photos because god forbid we don’t check our Facebook memories daily, and you see it: you’re not that young man you once were. Losing weight and keeping it off isn’t as easy as it used to be. Staying up late when you were always a night owl now means falling asleep on the couch halfway through a movie. Getting together with friends means you’ve turned into those people, talking about medications, copays, and symptoms that weren’t even in your vocabulary in your 20s. Even the commercial about becoming your parents makes perfect sense now.

It’s not overnight. It sneaks up on you…until it doesn’t feel sneaky anymore.

Maybe I have more of a barometer than most. After all, I’ve spent the last six months with teen faces looking up at me in class, and all I can think is: man, they must think I’m old. I hope they still think I’m the cool old guy...but old nonetheless. (The fact that I used “cool” in that sentence proves I’m old. I should have said “tuff,” which I’ve since learned has a whole new meaning.)

In less than two weeks I’ll be 57. Not even a milestone birthday. And while I’ve always said, “I don’t feel old”…old doesn’t really care how you feel. It just shows up anyway.

Now, I know someone will respond that age is a state of mind, and I totally buy into that too. My mom said her entire life that she didn’t feel old, that she was a young woman in an older body. That’s me. I’m no longer physically flexible, but mentally? Still a young guy just trying to figure out how to cope with this strange, invasion-of-the-body-snatchers moment.

So if anyone out there happens to have my 25-year-old body…feel free to send it back. I’d really appreciate it.

Subscribe now

When I was 18, I moved from Texas to New York City to study at the American Musical & Dramatic Academy. It was all I ever wanted…or so I thought. Growing up in Texas in the 80s, I had this picture in my head of what a performing arts school would be. There was the movie and TV series Fame, and in my mind, that was the experience. Training during the day, performing at night, surrounded by other artists chasing the same dream.

After a year of the reality versus the dream, I decided I wanted to experience true college life.

I recall telling my mom I was heading back to Texas and she moved heaven and earth and got me accepted into the University of North Texas.

Things change, NYC called me back, and after two months back in Texas that summer, I returned to NY and enrolled at Hunter College for the fall of 1988. Somehow, I managed to sit with department heads, walk them through what I had learned at AMDA, and actually got credits transferred for several classes.

I jumped into sociology, psychology, religious studies, and of course…choir. I loved being back in choir. I was also still auditioning as a young actor in NYC at the time and balancing both.

When I got a national tour to travel the country as a Ninja Turtle, I walked away from college leaving my 33 credits to head out into the world.

While auditioning and doing things like SNL extra work, I took a part time job at a major financial services firm as my “stay alive” job. What was to be a five month gig turned into 13 years. I started as a data entry clerk, learned programming of apps, and ended up as a project manager in the IT department. That job allowed me to move to NJ and buy a house, but also was the period I felt myself slowly letting go of my artistic dreams.

And all of this…still without a college degree.

Then something wild happened. A college president saw a musical I had directed, requested a meeting, and asked me to recommend someone to run their arts center. I told him…me. My business brain and my artistic brain would be a good fit. And without a college degree, a college hired me. Thank you, life experience!

It was during that time I started to feel like I should at least get an associate’s degree. I thought it would make me feel better working at a college and having something on paper. So from December 2010 to August 2011, I worked hard to earn another 30 credits and graduate with an Associate in Arts.

And if I’m being honest, I had a lot of anxiety around it.

I was embarrassed. Embarrassed to tell people I was back in school in my early 40s. Embarrassed that it was online, which carried so much stigma at the time. (Funny how much that’s changed since then.)

I continued to get hired, continued to lead, and spent 19 years in arts management without a bachelor’s degree. But at some point, people recognize that life experience counts for something.

Which brings me to now.

In 2025 I made yet another shift and had an incredible experience as a long-term theatre teacher. Thankfully, New Jersey offers an alternate route, and with my associate’s degree and life experience, I was able to earn my CE and get into the classroom.

But I also knew I wanted more. More certifications. More opportunities. And yes, more doors would open with a bachelor’s degree.

So at 56, I’m back at the same school I attended 15 years ago to complete my bachelor’s. Once again, they accept prior learning experience, and I’ve been building some massive portfolios formalizing my work in leadership, communication, theatre, and film.

This time around, I’m not embarrassed. I’m not hiding.

I’m so freaking proud.

And I’m hoping that by my 58th birthday next spring, I’ll be holding a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies with a concentration in communication.

I can’t imagine knowing at 17 what I wanted to do forever. Back then the plan was to be on Broadway. Teaching wasn’t even on my radar…and honestly, I would have missed out on an awesome life.

So if you see me proudly wearing a Thomas Edison State University shirt, you’ll know why. I’m not trying to prove anything to anyone except myself. I just want to give back as a teacher, and somehow in this process, I’ve fallen in love with being a student again.

Subscribe now

It’s not only on Epstein Island.

The headlines lately have been full of arguments about who knew what, who should have done more, and who is to blame. The victims in those stories were children, and the responsibility for what happened to them belongs entirely to the adults who exploited them.

But those headlines also remind me of something I learned early in life.

Why are we still so quick to shift blame onto young people instead of holding adults accountable?

Whether they’re called teenagers, minors, or simply kids, the pattern is often the same.

I learned something about that during my years in youth theatre.

It was my world. Rehearsals, performances, traveling to conferences with other theatre students. For a kid who loved storytelling and performing, it felt like I had found my place.

Looking back, it was also the first time I realized how often adults in positions of authority can cross boundaries.

Within a two-year span, two separate incidents happened that I never forgot.

The first involved an adult woman connected to a theatre program. During what should have been a normal interaction, the situation suddenly shifted into something that felt uncomfortable and inappropriate. I remember the feeling immediately in my gut that something wasn’t right. At fourteen, I knew enough to trust that instinct. I called my parents and asked them to come pick me up.

The second moment happened at a theatre conference held at a hotel. I was there with other students and chaperones, excited to be surrounded by people who loved the same art form I did.

At one point I went into the hotel bathroom and an adult man approached me and propositioned me.

I was fifteen.

When the situation was reported, the response from hotel management was so unsettling that my chaperone immediately went off on them.

Their explanation?

Perhaps the man had simply gotten the wrong impression because of how I was dressed.

Let me pause there for a moment.

I was dressed in a period costume for the theatre event.

The implication was clear: somehow the responsibility might have been mine.

It gets worse.

Later we learned the man who approached me wasn’t just some random guest.

He was the head of hotel security.

As I watch powerful men fill the airwaves with story after story about situations like this, my mind often goes back to that hotel.

Not just because of what happened, but because of how quickly the conversation shifted away from the adult’s behavior and toward the possibility that a teenager had somehow caused the situation.

What made it worse is that I spent years wondering if I had somehow contributed to it… partly because I was already questioning my own sexuality at the time.

That’s the quiet damage victim-blaming does. It plants doubt where there should be none.

Predators don’t only exist in the places that dominate the headlines.

They exist everywhere adults hold power. In schools. In churches. In sports. In hotels. In arts programs. In organizations that claim to protect young people.

Most of the time they don’t look like monsters. They look like respected adults with titles and authority.

And far too often, when something happens, the first instinct of institutions is not to ask what the adult did wrong.

It’s to ask what the teenager did to invite it.

What were they wearing?
How were they acting?
Did they send the wrong signal?

Those questions reveal a mindset that has existed for a long time, and unfortunately still exists today.

Teenagers are not responsible for managing the behavior of adults.

Adults are responsible for controlling themselves.

When a grown person crosses a boundary with a teenager, the fault does not belong to the child. It belongs to the adult who made the choice.

And yet, again and again, we see the same pattern. The narrative shifts. Responsibility gets blurred. Institutions become defensive. And young people are left wondering if they somehow caused something that was never their fault to begin with.

Sitting in a classroom recently, looking at students the same age I was then, the idea that adults would blame them for adult behavior feels even more disturbing.

That moment in a hotel bathroom when I was fifteen stayed with me for a long time. Not because it defined me, but because it showed me something about how the world sometimes works.

Predators are not limited to private islands.

They exist anywhere adults believe they won’t be challenged.

And the most important thing we can do for young people is make sure they never feel responsible for the sins of adults.

Subscribe now

Yes… I’m comparing theatre and education in that title, and I’ll break it down for you.

After spending three months as a teacher last fall, the past two months I’ve stayed in education as a substitute teacher. I’m working on additional certifications, and this has allowed me to remain in this world. No, subbing is not the same as teaching… but I still get to work on soft skills like classroom management, connecting with students, and reading the room in real time.

In theatre, a swing can go on for multiple roles to keep the show running when someone is out. Enter the sub… walk into a room, give instructions, keep classes moving. So yes, Virginia… a sub is the swing of the education world. (Or maybe I just really love theatre.)

In two months I’ve been in English, math, science, architecture, music, and more. I have my standing intro… unless I’m in Spanish class, and then I deliver it in Spanish. One student told me he’s had me subbing in so many of his classes that I should send a progress report to his parents. I see comedy in this kid’s future.

But the moments that stick with me tend to be quieter.

When I work as a hall or cafeteria monitor, I get the chance to actually talk with students. Those who know my background as an autism awareness speaker will understand why it hits different when the special needs kids run up calling “Mr. G!” and ask which class I’m in today. I’ve gotten close to several of them and even gave the program a copy of my superhero book on autism. This job is never just coverage.

I also love when high school kids think they’re getting one over on you… and you just smile and let it go. You don’t have to win every moment to keep the room moving forward. Experience teaches you that.

Last fall, I wrote that working with a class for ten weeks and then leaving felt like closing night in theatre. The run ends. The family dissolves.

What I didn’t expect was this.

Being a sub… I get that family back. A little at a time, room by room, class by class.

This swing says call me as much as possible. I’ll keep going on.

Subscribe now

I was raised Southern Baptist.

In the church every time the doors were open.

Vacation Bible School, church choir, church camp… all of it.

Growing up, I think I knew one Catholic and had never met a Jewish person until my freshman year doing Fiddler on the Roof in community theater. (Looking back, the irony of that is not lost on me.)

Moving to New York City at 18 cracked me open in the best way.

The city itself, sure, but also the sheer volume of faith I hadn’t known existed.

I took religious studies in college. I met people who prayed differently, believed differently, lived differently… and somehow loved more openly than a lot of what I’d grown up around.

I even found a church connected to the Southern Baptist Convention, yes, in New York City, and became the music leader. I was all in.

Then, for reasons that deserve their own essay, I stepped away from that particular church.

But I kept my faith.

Because here’s what I’ve always believed:

faith is personal.

Faith is not an organization or a building or a voter registration drive. Faith is the quiet, private relationship between you and whatever you believe your higher power to be. Nobody gets to put a logo on that.

For decades, through all the questioning and the studying and the growing, I still identified as a Christian. That word meant something to me.

It meant the Sermon on the Mount. It meant loving your neighbor. It meant the radical, inconvenient, beautiful idea that we should care for the least among us.

It also meant home. Family. Belonging.

To be honest, I can’t say if that’s what the word means anymore. At least not to the people saying it the loudest.

Somewhere along the way, the word got co-opted. And I don’t use that word lightly.

Co-opted means something that was yours got taken… repurposed, rebranded, turned into something you no longer recognize.

That’s what happened. And I see so many people who grew up in the faith now feeling spiritually homeless.

The word Christian now arrives with baggage I didn’t pack: red hats, white nationalism, cruelty dressed up as scripture, and a political agenda that seems to have very little to do with anything I read in the Gospels.

And that’s the thing that breaks my heart.

Not that people have different beliefs. I made peace with that a long time ago, somewhere between a college religious studies class and a Friday night Shabbat dinner I was lucky enough to be invited to.

What breaks my heart is the weaponizing of a faith I loved. The way compassion got quietly escorted out and replaced with judgment. The way “love thy neighbor” became conditional.

Did I leave Christianity?

Or did Christianity leave me?

I think about that kid in Vacation Bible School, singing his heart out, believing with everything he had that this faith was built on love.

I don’t think he left anything.

I think he’s still standing exactly where he always was.

It’s the building that moved.

Subscribe now

Does 2026 feel like the longest year to you, just eight weeks in?

On a global level, it already feels like we have lived an entire year. The news cycle moves so quickly, with so many competing narratives, that keeping up feels almost impossible. And layered on top of that is something even more exhausting: not knowing who or what to believe.

That uncertainty ages you in a way lack of sleep never could.

I keep trying to think of another time in modern history that felt like this. Yes, the obvious comparisons come to mind, but we did not live through those moments ourselves. We do not fully know what it felt like day to day to exist inside that level of uncertainty.

What I do know is this: lately I feel like I am living parallel lives.

In one life, I am consuming news from multiple sources, trying to piece together what is signal and what is noise, what is fact and what is spin.

In the other life, I am simply going about my day. Teaching. Creating. Answering emails. Having perfectly normal conversations as if the ground beneath all of us does not feel just a little less steady than it used to.

Maybe that is the strangest part of this moment.

It is not just the volume of information. It is not even the severity of the headlines. It is the growing realization that trust itself feels… thinner.

There was a time when most of us, regardless of politics, had at least some shared understanding of who the “good actors” were in a situation and who were not. Today, that clarity feels harder to come by. The lines blur. The narratives compete. And ordinary people are left doing the exhausting work of constant interpretation.

So the question becomes: how does trust rebuild once it erodes?

History tells us it can. But history also tells us it does not happen quickly, and it does not happen accidentally.

For now, many of us are simply doing the best we can… living our parallel lives and hoping that clarity, eventually, finds its way back to us.

I set out to write this piece as an allegory. Something loose. Something layered. Something where readers might not immediately know what I meant.

But then I remembered… Animal Farm was already written.

Which raises a harder question:

Are we living it in the longest year ever… only eight weeks in?

Subscribe now

I’ve always been a night owl.

My brain doesn’t shut down. I make lists. I’m actually most creative then. Several of my books have been written by nightlight. I’m even writing this Substack at night.

Luckily, most of my day jobs have accommodated that tendency. Flexible schedules. No early morning meetings. I could wake between 7:30 and 8:00 and carry out my day. Arts administration truly enabled my nighttime wiring.

Teaching is a different animal.

To be fair, I lucked out last fall when I covered for the theater teacher. My day started later, so even with the commute I was still sleeping until my usual 7:30.

Subbing isn’t the same.

I finally see what most teachers go through. Honestly, what most people go through with regular daytime shifts. I leave my house around 6:30 a.m. because I live by one rule: if I’m on time, I’m late. I arrive before the 7:30 check-in, bright-eyed and busy-tailed, and start the day.

Side note: finding time to use the bathroom as a teacher is an entirely different challenge. I was warned about that one. 😉

As I talk about Act 3 of my professional life, it only makes sense that it includes a shift in my body clock. After all, don’t they say many people start waking earlier as they age? Or am I just leaning into clichés?

Either way, I’m making the change. I’m using this time to retrain my body because my goal is clear: a full-time teaching position that starts early and ends with a day spent mentoring teens.

So let’s go, universe. Act 3 apparently starts before sunrise. I’m adjusting. You send the classroom.

Subscribe now