Songs for the Struggling Artist

I am without much voice today so I'm rebroadcasting an early episode. Believe me, none of us want to hear my "Easy like Sunday morning" today. And because it was the Grammys yesterday and a lot of people are talking about them, I thought I'd reshare this one. * In the old times, the fairies roamed the green hills. They were powerful and mischievous. There were many varieties of f...

For years I’d been seeing discussions of “SEO” all over my websites. Every company seemed to want to help me improve this SEO business so I eventually looked it up to  try and understand it . In case you don’t have six websites the way I do, (I am a maniac. They’re  here ,  here ,  here ,  here ,  here  and right here) or maybe you’ve never encountered SEO before or maybe SEO stands for “Sexy Elep...

On my way to go see a dance piece, I stopped off at the Drama Bookshop and noticed that they had a collection of plays written by my old friend. I figured I should buy it, since I have a goal to dedicate a shelf, nay, a bookcase, to the work of my friends. Also, I wanted to read the plays. Over the years, we’ve been less in touch so I haven’t managed to see everything or read everything. In our tw...

The scene is a flashback. It’s looking like the 60s because the teen is in a silky turtleneck mini dress and the mom’s hair is up, cocktail hour style. But the song is Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name” which came out in 1973, so probably it’s supposed to be 1973 and this group is just rocking their clothes from eight years ago. I mean, that’s how humans are, sometimes. They wear their clothes from the pr...

When I heard (in an Audio Drama group), about the AI descriptions taking over podcasts on  Goodpods  (a podcast platform), I headed straight over to see if my audio drama ( The Dragoning ) had been subjected to this treatment. It was not, so I moved on with my week, not thinking much of it. Then another audio drama group began to talk about how outrageous and wrong these descriptions were and how...

There are about thirty artists in the classroom that is not designed for a lecture but is being used for one anyway. We are required to attend this information session in order to be eligible for our local arts funding. It is a two hour Power Point presentation about how to fill out the grant form. About an hour into it, the facilitator asked “Are we having fun?” and the silence was deafening. The...

This week I found out I had reached the #4 spot on the Singer Songwriter charts in Queens. This kind of success doesn’t come around very often in my life so I thought I’d share what I did to make it happen. You know what I did? Absolutely nothing. Not one single thing. Last week, I got a notice that, since I hadn’t logged on in so long, Reverb Nation was going to suspend my account. So I logged in...

As you might have surmised, I listen to a lot of podcasts. I used to do a podcast recommendation of every episode of my own podcast. While True Crime isn’t my top genre, sometimes it can satisfy the itch for an involving, multi-layered mystery. There’s not always a solution or resolution (which I do not find satisfying) but the journey there is usually very compelling. There are a lot of great sho...

Over a decade ago, my friend wished I could be there to sing her baby some lullabies so I recorded some and wrote one specifically for him. Then I burned those songs onto a CD and put them in the mail. I did this for a fair number of my friends with babies for a fair number of years. Then some of the parents of those babies wished they could listen to them  on Spotify  and so I put them up there a...

Sometimes you have an awareness of the historical quality of the moment you’re going through. I had a very clear sense that things would never be the same after the eleventh of September, 2001. I could feel the day being engraved in the land, in our memories, in our timelines. But a lot stuff doesn’t FEEL significant while it’s happening, especially childhood events, even if people TELL you a mome...

When I was in high school and dreaming of being an actor, I read a lot of the major acting texts. I read Stanislavksi. I read Stella Adler. I read Uta Hagen. I read Sanford Meisner. I was particularly enchanted with the Meisner book and tried to square it with the Meisner exercises we’d done at the Governor’s School for the Arts. They didn’t QUITE connect and I could never really apply what I lear...

After I finished writing  my novel for kids , I realized I was not particularly well versed in what kids were reading these days and so set out to read all the contemporary middle grade fiction I could get my hands on. Top of my list:  The Secret Keepers ,  The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place ,  The Bromeliad Trilogy ,  The Girl Who Drank the Moon  and  Miss Ellicott’s School for the Magical...

After reading a bit about the history of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (because of questions that came up after watching  The Empress ), I learned of another Empress Elisabeth (AKA Sisi) project in the pipeline. The film,  Corsage , was reported to look at the darker side of the empress, dealing with her fatphobia, her tightlacing and obsession with her extremely long hair. After the overly romanti...

I’ve been thinking a lot about this thing someone said to me when I was in graduate school. I’d just performed a role I’d always dreamed of playing ( Imogen in Cymbeline ) and at the cast party was propped up on some chairs resting the ankle I’d twisted during the show. A faculty member came up and complimented my performance (those compliments are lost to my memory) and then said, “I don’t know w...

By the time I signed up with Patreon, I’d had about thirteen years of fundraising experience. Having started a  theatre company  in 2001, I’d explored all kinds of ways to fund our work. In the beginning, it was just writing letters and asking for help. (Weirdly, still the most successful method.) Then, as the internet became more integrated into our lives, we watched Charity Donor Portals come an...

A writer of my acquaintance recently had  an op-ed  published in the Washington Post about theatre and what should be done about the death spiral it seems to be in. In the piece, she proposed some ways to fix some of the problems the field has found itself in. She named the difficulties, the history and offered a solution. In watching the response to the article roll in, I was struck by how those...

While I am a big fan of having an artistic  practice , (the kind where you just do your art, whether you’re in the mood or not), I’m also a big believer in the power of staring out a window. I think a full artist’s life is a combination of the two – periods of dedicated work or practice and periods of staring out the window. I fear, in our (metaphorically speaking) productivity obsessed world, tha...

The barista at one of my local coffee spots noticed I’d been gone awhile so when he asked, I told him I’d been in Crete at an artist’s residency . He’s from Cyprus so we had a good old chat about food and language and weather and then I went outside to drink my coffee and write. Mid-write, a man walked up to me and said, “Did I overhear you say you were at an artist residency?” “Yes,” I said. “Oh,...

Because my play is about Cretan history and the neighborhood I live in is full of Cretans (and other Greeks), I figured I should apply to my local arts council for some hyper local funding. That is, New York State or New York City funding would be too broad, I would need Queens funding. So I went to the Queens Council on the Arts’ website and all that was there was a little box for putting in a pa...

At this evening of art, artist after artist talked about feminism as a key to understanding their work. “Ok,” I thought, “I’m in a safe crowd. There’s no reason to soft pedal the underlying feminist ideas in my work when I talk about it. I’ll just lay some things out that I usually obscure a little bit.” So, thinking I was in a feminist crowd, I talked about some feminist stuff and explained some...

In the past, I’ve made my own residencies – with the assistance of my friends’ generosity of space. These self-styled residencies have always been highly focused and productive dives into a project. But this time, at my first official residency (i.e. not one I made up) I found something quite different than the ones I invented. Funnily enough, I found this group residency not nearly as productive...

You might be surprised to learn this if you only know me through the blog (or podcast) but once upon a time, I could be counted on to create a bubble of good time around me. It’s one of the reasons it’s not a terrible idea to invite me to your party. (Remember when I asked you to  invite me to your party  a few years ago? Back in the before times?)  I may tend toward rage, fury and righteous indig...

There are so many reasons  I’m glad to be alive in JUST this moment. There are abundant stories to read or watch. I can listen to music anywhere I go. Podcasts are a thing. Migraine  medicine  is really taking giant leaps ahead. It is a richer world in terms of diversity and representation. So much progress has been made. But as my 50th birthday looms ahead, I find I am also in a kind of mourning...

I used to be the kind of person who tried not to take any medication. If I had a headache, I’d try to avoid taking anything for it out of some sense of nobility or stoicism. Maybe I thought it made me strong to suffer? Maybe I thought it somehow made me a better person? Now that I know that some of those headaches were probably migraines, I understand that this was exactly the wrong strategy. Pret...

At some point in my youth, my school brought in these Kid News Shows that we would watch at the start of the day. Logistically, I don’t know how this was possible as we were still in the AV cart era and there surely weren’t enough TVs for all the classrooms. Maybe it was a weekly experience? I don’t know. But I remember these kid reporters. They always seemed a little absurd to me, like, they were...