Songs for the Struggling Artist

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 f...

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...

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 u...

There was this article in the New Yorker a couple of months ago that I really hated. It was a profile of an influencer and I nearly quit reading it multiple times. But somehow, because it was about someone I really do not understand, I felt like I should stick with it to try and learn something. To keep reading ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Seven Pages in the New Yorker⁠⁠ ⁠visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog....

The episode ended with a child falling out of a window, which was a hell of a cliffhanger. This episode with the child was the ninth episode of this Swedish show and I thought, “Damn, the Swedes are hardcore to end a season this way!” It felt like a lot. To keep reading ⁠⁠⁠⁠ A Cultural MisReading of TV ⁠ ⁠visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 477 Song: Lovefool ⁠Image of...

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 re...

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...

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 ⁠...

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...

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...

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 ⁠⁠ Mo...

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...

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 f...

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 s...

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 h...

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. Th...

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 audi...

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 terri...

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 w...

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...

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

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...

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...

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 so...

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 th...