Songs for the Struggling Artist

This is going to be a regular thing now, isn’t it? This thing where Millennials play Gen X-ers now? This is going to happen a lot from here on out, I’m starting to realize. I’d already watched seven episodes of Fleishman Is in Trouble but it hadn’t been bothering me much. I was too pre-occupied with how it compared to the book and what had changed and wondering if I felt differently about it as a...

A week before my scheduled appointment with the woman who was to be my new neurologist, I found out that she explicitly refused to refill my migraine meds. I’d been having trouble getting the refill for weeks and finally got word that it was intentional. This medication significantly reduces the numbers of migraines I get and is a key component to my maintaining a decent quality of life. Refusing...

Sometimes someone you love makes a work of art of which you are not a fan. You wish you liked it but really, you think it stinks. If it’s a piece of performing art work, like some theatre or some dance or some music, you might sit through it trying to understand why this person you love has worked so hard on something so terrible. This feels bad. Sometimes we don’t go and see the work of people th...

It was the publicity photo that filled me with rage. In it, star reporters, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, stand like bookends around actors, Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan, who are leaning on a ladder. I’ve got nothing against ladders or any of the people involved but still the photo made me mad. Here we have two of our Gen X heroes, two women who heroically chased down a thorny story, putting thems...

Finally, after three more endings, I have finished this book. In addition to the last chapters, I also read the acknowledgements. If I’d known how furious the experience of reading all this would make me, I would not have read it before bed – but alas, there I was at 3:18am, raging at the ceiling. The book itself turned out to be pretty low impact. The sister turns dragon and wins a Nobel Peace Pr...

If you’ve been playing along, I’ve been reading this book due to its weird commonality with both my dragon blog and my audio drama . You can read or listen to Part One and/or Part Two . I will spoil this book for you so if you want to be surprised by anything that happens, skip this one. Not that that would be a big deal, actually. NOV 8 I’m back in the game with When Women Were Dragons . I had ap...

Around about the time I was coming of age, my hometown was becoming a scene. Our hometown band was about to hit the mainstream and art was seeping out of every corner of the place. There were plays in bars, on the street, in art galleries. There was an artist who sold his paintings for $3 and also painted the walls and restrooms of restaurants all over town. His work was everywhere. It was a heady...

Maybe it’s the weather today, which has a kind of air that feels like San Francisco, but for whatever reason, I flashbacked to the time I met Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It was my first time in San Francisco, and I’d already been to City Lights, hoping to lay eyes on him, this poet who’d inspired me in my teens. I used to make artworks out of his poems. I’d photocopy my favorites, paste them to a newsp...

It’s been a while since I’ve been in a classroom but an interview about my time at BAM and a journey through some old files have gotten me thinking about it some. It feels like I miss it a little bit and I’ve been trying to work out what part of it is still calling to me. I’m not nostalgic for being in a classroom. I suppose I miss being with the students some but I don’t miss the toxic environmen...

It was the shoes that made me suspicious. It was either the kind of story that was true and became the central story of this woman’s history OR it was entirely invented. So I went looking for some historical context for The Empress , a German TV show about Elisabeth of Austria. I learned a lot, though found nothing about the shoes. I’ll come back to them later. The show is delightful; I’m not goin...

When I ran my Metrocard through the turnstile, it came up Insufficient Funds and I frowned and looked around for the machines to fill it up. (I was not in my usual station so it wasn’t immediately obvious.) As I walked away, I heard this police officer call me back. There’d been three of them lounging by the turnstiles and one of them had come forward and was offering to swipe me in. I was baffled...

In an interview about my work in Shakespeare education, I was asked what we did to make Shakespeare accessible to the students. I couldn’t help but laugh. To me, it’s like asking, “How do we make hip hop accessible to the students? How do we make Marvel movies accessible?” You don’t have to make Shakespeare accessible. It just is. Does everyone love it? Nope. That’s ok . Not everyone loves Marvel...

The video made me cry. It was clearly meant to – and it succeeded. It’s the one where the young man asks the stranger – an old man with his walker – if he’ll go to Disneyland with him and they go to Disneyland and have a fantastic time and at the end, the old man (100 years old, a veteran, we’re told) tries to express what the day has meant to him and cries. He says he thought his life was over. I...

This book I’m reading is not the first book to do this, but it is the latest and it is enough of a trend that, when it happened in this book, I may have said, out loud, “Oh no, not this again.” It’s this thing where novelists and screenwriters put a playwright in their piece. In these works, the playwright always becomes super successful and gets famous and rich and, I have to assume, receives all...

My storage unit was filled with show shit. That is, it was full of props, set pieces, costumes, puppets, mask molds, rehearsal materials, marketing stuff and lots of random creative remains. I hadn’t seen these things in a long while so when it began to emerge, I said, “Well, a lot of this is going in the garbage!” Meanwhile, it’s complicated. I saved a lot of this stuff out of a sincere hope that...

This is part two of my journey of reading When Women Were Dragons . If you want to know why I’m reading this, catch up with my questions around plagiarism here . If you want to read Part One, start here . And I’m just a fountain of spoilers so skip this one if you’re wanting to be surprised by anything that happens in this book. Now PART 2 September 4 I can really feel how Barnhill is a children’s...

In a wave of curiosity, I put myself on the waiting list for my library’s digital copy o f When Women Were Dragons , the novel that came out this year in which a dragoning is a featured event. (I wrote about this funny “coincidence” not so long ago .) The wait was going to be months long so I figured I didn’t have to read it – but it would be on my list should I want to. When it suddenly became av...

There’s a song by a young woman, that has emerged via Tik Tok, that is extremely popular, called “ Victoria’s Secret .” In it, she (she goes by Jax) reveals that the secret of Victoria is that she was made up by a dude. It’s a fun pop tune about body empowerment, with Victoria’s Secret at the center.  It’s a super catchy song and I recommend the video on her Tik Tok which is a flash mob video...

Mostly I don’t worry about respectability. I’m aware that I work in fields that lack a certain respectability and that by operating at the margins, I do not rank high on a lot of people’s respectability scales. I notice it particularly in the comments on anything that proposes providing support for artists (for housing, basic income, anything – “Why should we help these people who don’t even do a...

You will likely not be surprised to learn I was crazy for the Indigo Girls in my youth. When I learned to play guitar, it was Indigo Girls’ songs that I particularly focused on. I didn’t learn the entire Nomads, Indians and Saints songbook but I got pretty close. In those days, we bought songbooks. There were no chords on the internet since there wasn’t much internet. Somehow in the last couple of...

In case it’s not completely obvious, I’m a fairly conflict averse person. I hate when people argue. I get anxious when tensions rise. I do not enjoy a debate. I would almost always prefer to exchange smiles then to exchange “words” with anyone. Sometimes, on-line, people will think I like heated “discussions” because I have strong opinions and I express them through this particular medium. Just fo...

When I started my first podcast six years ago, I quickly discovered that it was a low engagement form. Podcasts aren’t easy to share and the platforms that they’re on, and the medium they’re made of, don’t make it easy for people to respond. If you’ve ever been listening to a podcast and felt the impulse to share it, you know how challenging that can be. My listeners manage it with tweets and retw...

I was thinking about how important the study of fiction has been to me and to my peers and what a shame it is that these muscles have been un-exercised in many American schools. I was thinking about it because I was on a jury and the process of deliberation felt familiar somehow and it wasn’t just because I’ve had to teach 12 Angry Men a few times. One of the things that surprised me about my fell...

If you’re not a theatre nerd, you may not be aware of the stature that Peter Brook, theatre luminary who recently died at age 97, had with us theatre folk.  His book, The Empty Space , is the sort of text your theatre friends are likely to wax rhapsodic about. It has changed a lot people’s lives and inspired many a theatre maker to make more artful, high minded art. The Empty Space encou...

I'm out of town so I'm re-posting an episode from 2019 that I felt could use another go. I've been thinking a lot about this again this week. Here's This Hour's for You from September 2019: I read Brigid Schulte’s article, A Woman’s Greatest Enemy? A Lack of Time to Herself , and something snapped. I am not just taking time for myself, for my art, though it can feel that way. I am also taking time...