Songs for the Struggling Artist

Disculpe, pero – I cannot stop watching Spanish television shows during this pandemic. This is the third time, I know, but I’m on my fourth Bambú show and watching it (and the others ) has made me think about something I had never really considered before. It was during the finale of Season 2 of Velvet (a show about a high fashion couture store in Madrid in the 50s) that I thought, “watching that...

I overheard this old school New York guy talking with an old school Eastern European lady at my local bagel shop. He said to her, “You can’t live in fear,” after she expressed her concern about the virus. He was telling her how he went inside for a dinner party and she expressed her disapproval. She doesn’t see her friends. She doesn’t go out. What is he doing? He tells her she can’t live in fear....

Because I come from theatre, I am used to immediate feedback. I am used to people who attended the show, waiting to talk to me after, so I know they were there. When the houses are small and I’m onstage, I know who was there because, I can see every single face in the crowd. Even if only a handful of people actually say something nice, they, at least, all give us some applause. They came, they saw...

A mystery just cleared up before my very eyes. I was reading the alumni magazine from my grad school and there was an article about a brand new artist residency set up by some funders. The story was really about the funders and this generous thing they’re doing. It sounds nice enough – but what popped out at me was the description of the application process as highly competitive. This explained ma...

Someone asked me what my next project was and I panicked. “I don’t know! I don’t have anything lined up! My well has run dry! The last thing I wrote is probably my last thing ever! It’s all over.” But then I realized that last year, at almost exactly this time, I had a similar panic. I wrote a piece about it that has been one of my most popular podcast episodes and of course the well hadn’t run dr...

There’s an article about Gen X thriving in these pandemic times that came out back in March when the lockdown started and has been making the rounds again recently. I haven’t read it since it came out but I remember it as “We’ve been training to sit at home alone eating pop tarts our whole lives. We’re built for this!” If I remember correctly, it spoke to Gen X’s ability to stay home and keep ours...

I’m going to talk about snot today. I’ve been trying to formulate thoughts about this abhorrent coup attempt that just happened but snot is a lot less disgusting so I’m going with snot right now. Why am I writing about snot? Well, I was reading an article about the best movie performances of 2020 and they were talking about Viola Davis’ work and said, “Davis has never been hampered by vanity, as p...

In the comments on the Gothamist article about 4,500 Teaching Artists losing work, someone said “Do you mean Art Teachers?” Here was a major publication addressing what was once my profession perhaps for the first time and the comments all suggested a complete and total lack of awareness of what the job was. One comment suggested all these out of work artists go join the army. Nice. Nice. And also...

After I became obsessed with Cable Girls , Netflix suggested a show called High Seas ( Alta Mar ) to me. It was by the same team, I came to discover, and I was quickly hooked. (Sisters solving murders on an ocean liner in the 1940s? Are you kidding me? Yes, please!) I got curious about the making of this show after watching the third season in which a deadly virus was brought on board – like, is t...

Prior to my deep dive into Gen X-ery, I honestly didn’t think about our generation much at all. It was one of the last things I considered in my identity, particularly in my artistic identity. I have a very particular aesthetic and, I’m given to understand, an identifiable one, as well. I would have called that MY aesthetic, not a Gen X aesthetic. Then the stats for my audio drama podcast ( The Dr...

I thought I should sum up this bananas year as I might want to remember what it was like for me, being all historical and everything. So I did a little month by month re-cap to finish out the year. * Happy New Year! Cheers! It’s 2020! What a nice round number this is! Maybe this’ll be my year! Twenty Twenty, so exciting. Oh yeah, January and already things are looking up! I’m back in the rehearsal...

Well, well, well. Would you look at that? Howard Dean decided to come for Generation X on Twitter. He claimed we were a moral shipwreck and as evidence, cited all such examples as the recent additions to the Supreme Court, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Well, yes, those people are all Gen X, sure. And Dean deleted the tweet after Gen X roasted him soundly – but of course, as your Gen X blogging source,...

If you don’t work in the arts, it might be hard to understand why a really brilliant piece of work might make someone more depressed than a bad one. Sometimes, I find it baffling, as well. I mean, bad theatre can be instructive and liberating, if also infuriating, when you realize that it is not the quality of something that brings all the funders to the yard. And good theatre usually checks a box...

On the latest season of Pose, a group of the women go to a beach house. The star of the show stays out late and when she comes home at dawn, there’s a shot of her opening the gate from the beach to the house and despite the brilliance of the rest of the show, it is this moment I cannot stop thinking about. Why? Because the gate has a Magna Latch on it. This is a lock that you have to lift at the t...

Warning: Extreme crude-ness witnessed on the street which led me to explore the extreme crude-ness and expand upon it. Be forewarned. There is one crude phrase in this and you’re going to see it a lot. The day they called the election for Joe Biden, (What are we calling this day, by the way? It wants a name, the way there was V day.) I ended up at the spontaneous party on a random corner. People d...

I have cracked it. I understand why so many men are so reluctant to wear their masks. I understand entirely. (There’s quite a bit of reporting about this gender gap in mask wearing. I’m going to lean into some binary generalizations here for effect, but gender is a spectrum and I know these things aren’t true for everyone.) I solved the mask mystery at a café where I witnessed a man in a Batman ma...

Initially, I was just going to add a little note to my first Tips on Masks from a Mask Theatre Person , a little update, as it were. I thought it was going to be a sentence or two. But I got started and before I knew it, I’d written over a thousand words. So, I guess I had a few things to say on the subject, after all these months of mask wearing. I wrote my initial Tips for Masks a few months ago...

Warning: This post is going to be a little bit crude. I find the proceedings in the Senate to be very crude, so this is nothing compared to that – but if crude language isn’t for you, this might be one to skip. Hey everybody – the Heritage Foundation would like you to know that Amy Coney Barrett is NOT a handmaid for patriarchy. I saw a headline from them saying as such when I googled her name and...

There’ve been times when I’ve seen people respond to my work with, “You’re just looking for problems.” They want me to look on the bright side. “See the good in the world!” “There are roses and sunshine!” That’s why I decided to write this piece about kittens and fluffy clouds. Who doesn’t love kittens? The problem is – there’s not much to say about kittens except the fact that they are awfully cu...

From listening to the Bunga Bunga podcast, I learned that Silvio Berlusconi started as a singer. He was reasonably successful and having a great time when, apparently, his dad shamed him, asking him if he was really going to be a singer for the rest of his life. So Silvio Berlusconi quit singing. Even though he loved it. And became a shady ass real estate developer instead. This led him to becomin...

You all remember the guy who inspired my blog post about Sticky Benevolent Sexism ? (It was a few people’s favorite. It’s about the time this guy asked all the ladies to stand up so the men could applaud us.) Well, I just got an email from an organization that is trying to reckon with its own racism and sexism and this guy is apparently part of some learning group on the subject. In the email, he...

I’ve been going to this little sandwich shop in my neighborhood lately. It’s got a garden in the back and it’s usually pretty empty so I can take my mask off and write back there fairly easily. I never went pre-covid because it had table service and I didn’t really want a sandwich. But since I returned to Queens after almost two months away, I’ve been going a couple of times a week. It’s always th...

We did it. We watched the new Bill and Ted movie. The trailer made it look kind of charming and our Gen X nostalgia for the original was strong enough to put us in front of, what we knew would be, a very silly movie. And it was! They brought back all these cast members from the original. Ted’s Dad. Ted’s Dad’s girlfriend. A hologram of George Carlin. But significantly, despite the medieval princes...

While I was polishing up my blog about the power outage, I googled Tropical Storm Isaias to double check I was spelling it correctly. The request timed out but I figured it was just this thing the wifi does in our apartment where it gets moody about the distance between my computer and the router. After bringing it closer and then plugging in the ethernet cable and switching everything off and on...

Now that things are starting to open up a little, there are increasingly tough decisions to be made. There are negotiations to be had. There are choices to consider. “Let me know what you’re comfortable with,” someone said as we negotiated how we’d be together in this moment. But comfort is not the point. Masks aren’t comfortable. Keeping at least six feet away from people we care about is not com...