“Moving feels like a breakup.”
R. Eric Thomas, the bestselling author, columnist, television writer and playwright, was musing over a cup of coffee on a sunny Mt. Vernon morning, the burgeoning spring kind that’s made roughly half of the patrons cautiously optimistic about wearing short sleeves and the other half cling to their heavy jackets because they’ve been fooled before and they weren’t about to get got this time, BALTIMORE.
Thomas, who at this particular moment was prepping for the Everyman Theatre opening of “Crying On Television,” has moving on his mind. He and husband, Rev. David Norse, relocated to Baltimore, Thomas’ hometown, six years ago, but are now splitting time between here and Philadelphia, where Norse has taken a new position.
Setting up house in a new city is already complicated, with the physical transition of your body and belongings - “I don’t know where any of my stuff is” - as well as the emotional changes that come from adjusting to change you. And it can be particularly tricky when you’ve moved back to the place that made you, something you never imagined you’d do. Because of that breakup and all.
“They say that it takes half of the time you were in a relationship to get over it, and I feel like Baltimore was an ex of mine,” Thomas said, smiling. “But we didn’t have bad blood.”
So even though the idea of it shocked not only him but people from outside the city that he told about it - he reunited with his first love, civically-speaking, and found that it felt so good, as Peaches and Herb predicted. Weird. Disconcerting. But good.
“I think I had to see myself in the city, and a future in the city,” he explained.
Thomas, 41, was raised in Upton and was born at the time of another fabled and, for a while, realized period of potential and possibility in the city, with the development of the Inner Harbor. His father, Robert, was the executive director of Lexington Market, while his mother was a public school teacher.
A confession: I have been a bonafide fangirl of Thomas for years, since I discovered his sublimely snarky and sharp “Eric Reads The News” column for Elle Magazine, where he wryly and hilariously recounted everything from the incessant stern auntie glow of Rep. Maxine Waters (”Honey, Maxine Waters is not the one. You may have been told that she is the one but you were lied to”) to the magic of salty Twitter maven Dionne Warwick. He’s also the author of several books, including the hilarious and bittersweet memoir “Here For It” and the upcoming YA novel “Kings of B’more.”
But good enough that it inspired five plays, three of which have been produced this year, including “Crying,” which is about the difficulty of finding connections as an adult in a world built for solitude, and finds its roots in the first building Thomas lived in when he came back to town, an example of, as he puts it, “luxury living in warehouses.” Those places are presented often as a cool new way to use old structures and bring new people into the city, which seems like a good thing in theory, but didn’t always realistically feel that way.
“It was a low-key disorienting experience,” Thomas explains. “It seemed transactional. It’s about development, but investment seems very different than that.”
It was the opposite of what he was looking for when he moved home, that connection that his “Crying On Television” characters crave. “I wanted community. I wanted that Smalltimore.”
That investment in the community confounds that big change in Baltimore that we always hear is just around the corner, and Thomas thinks we need to focus on the structural problems that stop us from realizing that potential, like “racial politics that undercut that potential. There are definitely problems, civic problems, but we’re talking only about crime as an issue, when these are systemic issues. (Not acknowledging that) does disservice to the humanity of the people here. The system has to change.”
Because of the media emphasis on the failures, Thomas says his friends elsewhere had trouble wrapping their heads around the move, “like ‘Well, your parents live there. That makes sense,’” as if there couldn’t be any other reason. There were, but Thomas admits that his husband was surprised by the decision. So was he.
“My husband likes to tell the story of us driving down North Avenue on the way to buy me a car, and I was like ‘That’s the funeral home where we buried my grandmother, and that’s the funeral home where we buried my aunt, and that’s where I got mugged,’” he recalls, explaining that his husband was understandably flummoxed by why these particularly memories would make you want to stay, and not run far away.
Being here - reinvesting here - requires a hope “that you have to have to live here.” Since being back, first in Hunt Valley and now back in Upton, Thomas has rediscovered a Baltimore he never imagined as a kid, like that “it’s a wonderful food city,” as well as one filled with remarkable artists.