Songs for the Struggling Artist

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...

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...