Songs for the Struggling Artist

What’s funny is, I like editing. I’m not sure why I was dragging my feet around editing our book. I’d already made some major changes. The big re-structure had already happened. But somehow I couldn’t bring myself to sit down and fix up some details.

I finally decided I needed to buckle down, though, and instead of getting into the document, I watched a movie made in the year our book was set. It was a great movie and I thought it w...

Back in college, I took a class in producing, as I thought it might come in handy in my future theatre career. The class involved running the student run space with four other students. One of them was an egotistical narcissistic asshole so I quit the job and the class after the first semester of it.

I’d forgotten most of this drama until I saw a friend who also considered walking away. She wonders if she should have quit and I wond...

When I went to go see my friend in a show at Jeffrey Horowitz’s theatre, TFANA, I had a wild experience with a velvet rope they’d set up after the performance. I wrote about it. But I didn’t name the theatre but now that I’ve read those emails from Horowitz to Epstein, I feel like the two things are connected. Because that velvet rope they set up was to cater to people like Jeffrey Epstein, if not exactly him, and to keep out peopl...

A few weeks ago, I started receiving alarming emails about renewing my health insurance. “Renew now,” they said, “Or you risk losing your health insurance!”

I can’t risk losing health insurance so I got right on it and logged into my NY State of Health account to take care of it. When I got into the system, it told me I could not renew for another two weeks. Several more panic inducing emails arrived and there was literally nothing ...

I didn’t want to be a Giving Tuesday party pooper so I waited to post this until after giving season. I hope all my non-profit friends got lots of donations this year! But I did write this on actual Giving Tuesday. Am I a spoilsport? Maybe.

Because I run a non-profit, I feel like I ought to make a pitch for us every year around this time. It feels like an exercise in futility but a lot of things feel that way, so maybe I should do i...

I saw an adaptation of a Thornton Wilder play at The Public and it made me real mad. My only comfort is that apparently Thornton Wilder used to get real mad at everything he saw as well, so I guess I’m in good company.

The show was an adaptation of The Skin of Our Teeth, which, for the most part, just involved throwing some songs into it. It was mostly harmless, I suppose. I’d never seen The Skin of Our Teeth and this production mad...

Occasionally, I’ll get responses to these blogs that suggest some further clarification is necessary. I wouldn’t have thought my piece about types would have been one of them. But it has become clear that the concept of types is not immediately obvious to those who don’t work in show business. I’m oddly touched by this. I love the notion of being free of the idea entirely. Types, for actors, are useful but sometimes oppressive cate...

While reading a book about the history of the Bluestockings, I was thunderstruck by this quotation from a “conduct manual” for women from the 1760s. It said, “Your business chiefly is to read Man, in order to make yourselves agreeable and useful.” This was the advice for women, then, to help them steer clear of the danger of reading books and becoming (gasp!) the dreaded Learned Ladies.

To keep reading ⁠⁠⁠Women's Business⁠ visit...

I recently decided I wanted to get back into acting and to do that I felt that I needed to get headshots taken for the first time since I was 21. In approaching the task, I confronted a question I hadn’t considered for many decades and that question was “What’s my type?”

To keep reading ⁠⁠My Type visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog.

This is Episode 475

Song: Not Your Type

⁠Image is my headshot by Kacey Anisa Stamats

To suppo...

Really, I’m jealous. I wish I felt as hopeful and pumped up as so many of my friends and family around the world are about the election of Zohran Mamdani. I wish I felt like you felt. I mean, yes, I voted for him and I am very glad he won but as many of you know, I have some complicated feelings about my state assembly representative and I just can’t share everyone’s enthusiasm.

To keep reading ⁠My Local Race Goes International⁠ ⁠(...

Many of us weigh down our works with our hopes and dreams that this one will be the one that changes everything. We make something hoping THIS one will turn things around. THIS will be the project that changes our lives. We can’t just tend to our little art plant, hoping it will grow; we tremble, doing everything we can to make THIS be the thing that turns it all around.

To keep reading My Art Won't Buy Me a Car ⁠visit the Song...

It suddenly dawned on me that the image on the stairs was not an advertisement but part of the exhibition I was on my way to see. If I hadn’t known, I’d have thought they were ads for some kind of clothing line or vitamins or something. The images were lovely but the context troubled me. It continues to trouble me so I thought I better write about it to try and work out why.

To keep reading ⁠⁠⁠A Blurry Line Between Art and Advertisi...

Usually, I skip the ads on a podcast but I think I had my hands full so I couldn’t hit the advance button on this one episode. I figured the ads would be over in a minute or two. But they just kept going. “Jesus!” I exclaimed, “How much money do you guys need?!”

Not long after, they uploaded a crossover episode in which they tried to solve the problem of how to ask for money.

To keep reading ⁠⁠Money and the Little Guys in Podcasting...

It’s possible that I should stop listening to interviews with famous people. I have heard hundreds and hundreds of celebrities explain their successes and chart their journeys and I may have had my fill. All I can think of is those planes with the bullet holes and Survivorship Bias. Are they actually connected?

I started to think about those planes while listening to an interview with Christopher Guest on the WTF podcast.

To keep r...

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...