From: Jeffrey Epstein [[email protected]] Sent: 3/24/2014 7:06:50 AM To: soon yi pre When I was 8 years old, I watched my trial-lawyer father play Horace Vandergelder in the Livingston, N.J., community-theater production of “Hello, Dolly!” He entered wearing an enormous marching-band bass drum (the character is in a parade), and he roared to his sobbing niece, “Dammit! How am I supposed to play “Yonkers My Yonkers’ with all that bellowing in my ears!” It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen. I was a melancholic child. Worried, anxious. I never felt as if I belonged anywhere, as if I were a foreign exchange student living among the other kids, who seemed predestined to love sports. Add to that alienation the fact that my parents were going through a divorce, and I was truly treading water. But in that junior high school auditorium, I felt like ’'d discovered a secret I didn’t even know was being whispered. There was a place where I might belong: It was the Theater, and I was sold. A few years later, at Stagedoor Manor in Loch Sheldrake, N.Y., I joined an intensive theater boot camp for kids just like me. The second I stepped off the bus, I felt like baby Simba when he’s lifted into the air in “The Lion King” and all the animals sing. Everyone was affectionate; everyone hugged; no was called “gay” for doing anything that wasn’t masculine. (My insecurity about this had shamefully kept me from doing theater in school.) It was utopia, and I never wanted to leave. Photo From left, Helene Yorke, Zach Braff and Lenny Wolpe in the musical “Bullets Over Broadway.” Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times It was there I met Michael Larsen, the musical director of the camp. He told me that I wasn’t just a camper having fun, but that I also had talent. And he was tough — sometimes he’d scream at me — but I knew it was because he thought I had a shot. (Michael was the first of many gay men instrumental in guiding me to where I am now, which is why I try to speak on beha