In Praise of Roleplay

All of us play characters. Some are truer than others.

When’s the last time you threw on an outfit you’d never wear in regular life, looked into the mirror, and tried out some phrases…

“You talkin’ to me?”

…just to see how those words sound coming out of your mouth?

We all played this game when we were kids. Not just standing in front of the mirror and trying on clothes— no, I mean something much bigger than that. I mean trying on characters.

When I was a kid, every household chore was a journey into a different life. Pulling weeds from the lawn, I became a frontier settler, trying to coax crops from the hard soil. Slogging through my math homework, I was a tormented mathematician proving an uncrackable theorem.

Maybe you told yourself these kinds of stories, too. But unlike a lot of kids, I never stopped. All through high school and college and the career grind of my twenties, I was a dozen different people on any given day.

Those people — those lenses on the world — usually stayed inside my mind. But sometimes, when a certain role got too compelling to contain, it’d make a public appearance.

In my sophomore year of college, for example, I saw The Godfather and decided Don…