Songs for the Struggling Artist

The other night, I had a short play of mine read at an evening of readings. It’s a very slight piece of work and it was way too esoteric and theatre nerdy for a room full of people who are mostly film folk. I knew it wasn’t going to be a wild hit, the way my previous play had been there.

I know it wasn’t my most successful work but on balance, I received nothing but positive reinforcement and it felt great.

That same week, the first...

Many years ago, when I first started a band, I was instructed, by many people in the know, that the most important thing to do when we played shows was to sign people up for our mailing list. I took this very seriously and handstitched and painted a little booklet where people dutifully wrote down their addresses, with a pen on a ribbon attached to it. We made card stock postcards at Kinkos and sent them out before our shows at pla...

I started reading the letters between Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford in the hopes of getting a sense of what a conversational tone of their era might be like. They’re writing to one another at the height of their success. They’re seemingly very comfortable with one another and on very even footing in a lot of ways.

I was just reading along, not particularly struck by anything, just sorry I don’t have a lot of paper correspondence wi...

For me, blogging isn’t art making. I think of it as a kind of side gig that helps support the art, both financially and emotionally. This is the business bit, I’ve always thought. Then, a couple of months ago, a play of mine was read in an evening of short plays and films and when introducing the play, I mentioned the source of it, a blog I wrote about In the Boom Boom Room and acting training. There is a direct line between that b...

Not long ago, I finished casting the third season of my audio drama. It took a while to do it so I’m sure most of the people who submitted for it assumed they hadn’t gotten it when they didn’t hear anything. It’s been the norm for some time that you cast your acting net into the sea and then never hear anything again.

But it seems to have gotten even more extreme than it was in the days I was auditioning. Now it’s not just auditions...

Not long ago, I noticed that Netflix was trying to sell me on an Angelina Jolie movie I’d never really heard of before. I watched the trailer and maybe because it featured Tony Shaloub playing a prophet, I added it to my watch list. Then I forgot about it.

Last week, I got a notification about several things on my list leaving Netflix soon. This movie was on that list so I watched it. It was terrible. It came out in 2002 so I’m sure...

Watching Z: The Beginning of Everything, about Zelda Fitzgerald led me to read a bit more about her. I’d attempted to read Zelda’s novel many years ago so I was not unfamiliar with her story – but I hadn’t retained much of it. The TV show was terrible but Zelda’s Wikipedia page made me think. Her Wikipedia page makes a big deal of Zelda’s lack of skill in the domestic arts. There’s a section in which we learn that Zelda didn’t do F...

Recently, I was casting the third Season of the Dragoning and listening to lots and lots of auditions. I’d asked folks to record a small portion of the text for various characters and hundreds of people generously did so. Another hundred or so just sent me their audio reels and, I guess, expected me to imagine them in a part. And maybe that works for people who are looking for a particular kind of vocal quality – but because I’m lo...

What are we going to do about this 45 year old play that keeps getting assigned in acting classes?

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I was trying not to listen but you know how it is with actors, you kind of hear them no matter what. These two seemed to be meeting for the first time to work on their assigned scene for their class – a scene from David Rabe’s In the Boom Boom Room.

Do you know this play? If you’re a woman and were in an acting class, you surely encoun...

A few years ago, I wrote about my experience of reading, and then watching, The Buccaneers. At that point, the only TV version of The Buccaneers was from the 90s and starred Carla Gugino, along with Mira Sorvino, Greg Wise, Connie Booth and Elizabeth Ashley. Recently, I’ve been getting quite a few views on this Buccaneers post and I suspect it is due to the release of the second season of the new Buccaneers TV series. This made me ...

Not so long ago, I wrote a piece about quality, after seeing a community theatre production. I wrestled with it because I wasn’t sure how to articulate this feeling I was having. I hacked away at it, hesitated to post it, as it somehow felt incomplete, but I shared it anyway. As I prepared to record the audio version of it, I continued to think about it. As I searched for the right song for this idea for the podcast, I weighed what...

Watching my college’s reunion cabaret this year, I was struck by how old fashioned and bourgeois so much of the musical theatre repertoire being presented was. The songs that folks had brought to perform were things like “Stars and The Moon” by Jason Robert Brown and selections from Grey Gardens. The material was similarly conventional when I was a student. At the time it seemed normal to sing songs about middle class marriage and ...

Finally, I got around to listening to the Writer’s Guild East’s podcast episode on audio drama. It’s from 2019 but you know, I thought I should give it a listen. It is my field, after all.

This episode aimed to give writers the low down on how to get into audio drama and how to self produce. I imagine it might be helpful if you’ve never done this before. But one thing that popped out at me was their take on budget. They said it woul...

Really, I wasn’t going to say anything. The momentum and the joy people were feeling around Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy was a pleasure to behold and I didn’t want to say anything that might jeopardize the chance that he could beat Cuomo in the primary. He did it and I’m glad and grateful but now that he has, and the cuckoo bananas discourse is going off the rails, I feel like I have to say something, just for some perspectiv...

In the lecture, the professor was talking about a well regarded work of art. It was a kinetic sculpture piece so he showed us a video of this distinguished artist’s work in motion. Because the video was on YouTube, I couldn’t help but notice, when the professor exited out of Full Screen, what the first comment on it was. It said, “Get a job.”

To keep reading "Get a Job"⁠ visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog.

This ...

At my college reunion, I learned a lot of history I’d never heard, or thought about before. I had a vague sense of the origins of the college but I hadn’t really ever thought them through. The fact is, the college was created to educate privileged young women. Formed in 1926, it was designed for a population of gentility. It was not designed to get women jobs.

In thinking about this, and how financially insecure I have always been, ...

While in a small city, I saw a performance that was fairly ambitious for the location. And they did about as well as a group of amateurs could do. They took the work seriously. They committed to it and gave energetic performances. If they were my students, I’d be proud of them!

But watching this performance made me remember what it was like to be a young actor in a small city.

To keep reading Quality and the Reach for Greatness ⁠⁠⁠v...

Back in my days with the band, one of my bandmates used to get very frustrated with me about my feelings about recording. He felt we should record as often as possible and I was very reluctant to put our stuff on tape. (It was tape then.) I felt like, unless our work was the best it could be, we shouldn’t put it down. I was fearful about having a record of myself sounding bad in any way.

I was really concerned with my permanent reco...

The slide of a Hogarth etching in the Power Point presentation made me think about how incredibly tedious it must have been to do all that cross-hatching in the background. I imagine that it would have been fun to draw all those laughing faces but then – to do all those straight lines behind them? Tedium. Absolute monotony.

This made me think about the point where I gave up on working through Lynda Barry’s Making Comics book.

To keep...