Songs for the Struggling Artist

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...

On the Gen X subreddit, someone wrote a post titled “Anyone else hate podcasts?” and asked if anyone else felt like they were the wrong generation for podcasts. The OP (on Reddit, the person who posts is called OP for Original Poster) says they can’t stand all the chatting by Millennials on podcasts, so they hate podcasts.  They received a lot of support for this post. It has over four thousand upvotes and the comments are full of ...

Recently, it occurred to me that part of the reason that I remain in the arts, despite very little obvious success is that I am really just a stubborn cuss. I will not give up, no matter how much it would make sense to. I will not yield. I will not surrender. It’s not that I won’t face reality; I am well aware of how bootless this seems, how steep the odds are. I just refuse to give up. I hear all the stories about the old timers p...

A doctor I heard on a podcast said he prescribes all his patients to smile twenty times a day. It sounded very convincing on the podcast and I thought, I can do that! Then I hesitated. For women, it can be a little loaded to be told to smile more. I don’t LOVE this for that reason but I do understand the benefits and the rationale. Smiling is good for you! And then I thought about how dramatically my relationship with smiling has c...

I have this idea that I don’t cry in the theatre. Movies, yes, all the time. TV, yep. But I think I don’t really cry at plays. It’s not true, though. It just doesn’t happen very often. And pretty much every time it does, it’s such a remarkable piece of theatre that I feel like I have to write about it. It happened at Indecent. And at One Night Only. I have noticed that I only write about a show when it has either really made me mad...

It’s very possible I’m just becoming numb to the relentless cruelty and bad decisions happening in our country but the news about the National Endowment for the Arts didn’t bother me nearly as much as I would have thought. Maybe if it had happened first? Like, before USAID and before all the “deportations” that are really kidnappings and before all the privacy violations and before all the flagrant attacks on the First Amendment, m...

I think a lot about this dinner I had with my clown teacher many years ago. I was in my late 20s and I was recounting my plans to put on a show. I don’t think it was far enough along yet to have been a plan for starting the theatre company – but it could have been, because that is what it ultimately became. This was the show that led to the company. In any case, I enthusiastically laid out my many hopes and dreams and plans to this...

If you’ve spent time in writing circles or writing workshops or writing advice threads, at some point you will have run into the concept of killing your darlings. This is the idea that sometimes you have to cut the parts of your text that you love for the greater good of your piece. Some people take this idea so seriously that they cut their darlings unilaterally – just “Do I love it? It’s got to go.” Personally, I think this is go...

And here’s the thing that’s really freaking me out. It’s set in Marseille in France in 1940. The US hasn’t even entered the war yet. And everywhere they go, there is only terrible coffee. Over and over, the main character drinks undrinkable coffee or brown water standing in for coffee. And I know this is not nearly as bad as the bombings and the arrests and the people being ripped from their families but even the rich people in thi...

In the last handful of years, NYC has been doing something called Participatory Budgeting, which allows us to vote for which projects we’d like to see funded in our district. It’s mostly small budget proposals for schools or parks or community groups. It’s a nice idea, though I’m not sure how well it works in getting things funded. I got an email for this round of projects recently and in looking at the choices, I noticed there wer...

In the midst of all the chaos and my friends losing (or preparing to lose) their federal jobs, several of them have asked, “But what about you? Are you losing funding?” And it’s so sweet. It’s so kind of them to check on me and I am grateful that people in such despair are thinking of me too but a part of me laughs very hard at the notion of my tiny theatre company losing federal funds. I don’t think I even know anyone who has ever...

Recently, I went to see a middle schools’ production of a musical. It was one of the Broadway JR series shows – where they do an edited version of a Broadway show and sing along to pre-recorded tracks. I used to teach for a program helping to implement these shows so I am pretty familiar with what the deal is. They’ve become very popular and the program has succeeded in getting a lot more kids into musicals. That’s pretty cool.

Whe...

During the Hollywood Reporter’s roundtable for documentary filmmakers, the woman who made a doc about Frida Kahlo said, “There’s a whole universe of people who are incredibly invested in Frida. We heard from a few, making sure that we didn’t call her a “feminist,” because that word didn’t exist when Frida was alive.”

I don’t doubt that a lot of people are invested in Frida Kahlo and I don’t doubt that her feminism is contentious – b...

As I stood on the corner, waiting for a walk signal, a tall man in a long coat came to stand next to me. When the light changed, I started to go but then noticed that this man next to me was waving a car to go ahead of him into the street before us. The car hesitated. I suspect the car could see that there were two of us waiting to cross, only one of whom was waving, and pedestrians have the right away. The tall man was insistent, ...

In the days before the election, my friend made a LOT of phone calls on behalf of the Harris campaign. He spoke to quite a few people who were truly undecided. They really exist! He told me about someone who said, “I just don’t know anything about the candidates.” And I was so jealous of them! How is it possible to avoid knowing about these people? I do not TRY to learn a lot about these folks – but it feels like it’s just in the a...

When I first got a computer, I gave it a name. I don’t remember which one came first, Bertram or Mr. Finkelstein. I believe I named my hard drive in college; It was the Stinky Cheese Drive. I don’t know when I stopped naming my computers but I think it’s been a few years at least.

Then the other day, I told my friend I was going to go check in with my digital world and he said, “Oh, are you going to go look at your Good News Machine...

The main reason I wanted to see The Blood Quilt was because it was about a family making a quilt together and having made some quilts with my family, I was interested. I don’t see a lot of plays about stuff I know about so I was curious. Would I gain some insight into my own experience? Discover some hidden metaphor in my family’s crafting? Would I learn something about crafting – or maybe the craft of playwriting?

To keep reading I...

When I graduated from college, I went straight into my first acting job which was a six month Shakespeare tour that was pretty intense. It was very full time. But then, when I wasn’t re-hired there, which had been my plan, I was suddenly out of work and out of a structure for my time. It threw me for a big loop. I began, then, the process of hustling to get more acting jobs, but also the process of making sure I continued to create...

I don’t know if I hadn’t cried yet about therapist-in-chief being elected again or if I’m just forgetting all the other times I’ve cried before, but I do have a sensation of not really dealing with or processing this reality thus far. I’ve been pretty numb and disassociated. I know that much. I didn’t even mention the forthcoming transition of power in therapy a few days before. Oh, Trump? Is that happening? La di da.

Anyway – a cra...