An Excerpt from The Time of Ashes chapter.

I couldn't shake the sense that failure was lurking somewhere in the wings, waiting to pick my bones if my doubts should become reality. Still, in the face of all that, I had to stay in charge of my life no matter how it all played out. Regardless of whatever (or whoever) else might have been looking out for me, I needed to know, first and foremost, that I was looking out for myself. Even when the dread of being shot down by failure twisted my insides into knots. 

Did I misjudge this new culture? Should all the glitter that now seemed only inches beyond my reach have been taken with a grain of salt? Maybe natural balances weren't that easily found amid so much concrete and steel. Amid so many machines pushing automobiles, lifting elevators, pulling trains. Or maybe, at the very bottom, I wasn't yet ready to accept that environment compromises values far more than values do their  number on environment. 

The play ran only for four days. But to my surprise, my "triumph" in Lysistrata led immediately to another acting job as an understudy in a road show of Anna Lucasta, a job that lasted intermittently for several weeks. Then, after a long, lean, and frustrating period, during which off-Broadway roles happened by just often enough to keep my meager skills alive, I found out quite by accident that 20th Century-Fox was casting for a movie called No Way Out, the film would be the first that Reggie and Evelyn Poitier would ever see.