Filed under: art, community, technology, voting, writing | Tags: clicks, Ezra Klein, Internet, Jezebel, journalism, local news, New York magazine, Rebecca Traister, Search Engine, tech, The Onion, weird quirky websites
The podcast I was listening to was about the crisis in journalism – about how so many news sites were disappearing, how so many journalists are losing their jobs and about how the landscape was changing so dramatically and not for the better. (This country has lost one third of its newspapers and two thirds of its journalists since 2005 and it is accelerating.) I was only half listening – truth be told. I was still pretty wiped out from COVID and I was dozing a fair amount. But then – after a history lesson in how journalism was funded and then how that landscape shifted and then shifted again – I sat bolt upright at a concept the guest (Ezra Klein) brought up. He said we should not think of ourselves as consumers of the internet but as generators. His feeling was that we are all rather passively engaging with the internet, without realizing that we are creating it while we do that. Basically, the idea is that we are creating with our clicks. What we engage with and look at and pay attention to is the internet we create. If I want to see local news, I have to subscribe to local news – or at the very least – visit local news sites. If I want more independent media, I have to read independent media. I can’t just wish for these things to exist.
I recognize my own behavior in this. When Jezebel was shut down, I was pretty upset! RIP the last popular feminist media! But I hadn’t visited Jezebel in ages. Truthfully, since they were bought by G/O Media – they were starting to fall apart. But even before then, I wasn’t over there much. I appreciated that Jezebel existed but I didn’t do anything to help continue its existence. (I learned while researching for this that it is coming back via Paste Magazine. Hooray for Zombie Jezebel!) As Klein said, if you want the publication to continue you have to read it. If you want the podcast to continue, you have to listen to it. If you want an internet with blogs and independent media, you have to read them. We create our own internet.
In other words, wailing about the evils of social media while continuing to scroll through it for hours, doesn’t help create alternatives. If we go through the portals of social media to get to our media, we are enforcing the need for social media to filter our media for us. I do this. And I get the internet that I create – a world filtered by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Bsky, Mastodon, etc. If I like something, I can’t wait for it to show up in a feed, I have to go directly to it. Additionally, Facebook has been showing people less and less news in their feeds. This has throttled traffic to news media which has, in turn, lost them a lot of advertising dollars and threatened their existence. Or killed it entirely. If I want it, I have to go to the thing and click there.
I have often thought of this from my own perspective of my needs as an artist, engaging with the internet. There are a lot of people who express that they’re glad I do what I do but only a handful that engage with my work and even fewer that support it. This is as true of my off-line theatre making as it is with my podcasts, my blogs or music. I know directly what happens when people don’t engage with my work. (I feel bad mostly.) But there have definitely been times where the direct line of a project living or dying is very clear. Our first season of our first audio drama, The Dragoning, took almost a year to finish because the funding was so slow to come in. We weren’t holding episodes back because we wanted to be withholding – we just literally couldn’t make a new episode until we reached the episode budget. Eventually, we got there. And the show has charted around the world. But it was clear there was a big disconnect for a lot of people between support for the podcast and its ability to be made. And it’s not just about money. If more people had listened to the show, (downloaded the show, even put it on play and walked out to do something else), if we’d gotten more numbers, perhaps we could have found some funding through advertising. But podcast advertising is a numbers game and if you’re not getting a minimum of a thousand downloads an episode, it’s not a game you can play. I had ads on the podcast version of this blog for a week and a half and made a grand total of $1.38. It’s very clear to me, as a creator, how peoples’ investment can make the life or death difference in a creation. I don’t know why I hadn’t really put it together as a user of the internet.
As Klein put it, “If you want Pitchfork to exist, you have to read it.” Anything we want on the internet (and I would argue, out in the world, too) we have to engage with it. Ezra Klein on Search Engine:
“Every time you read one thing over another or watch or listen to our spend time on, you are creating more of that thing and less of other things, right? There is still some money that comes from just, like, your attention. Then a level above that, when you pay for anything, when you become a member or subscriber, then you’re really sending a signal to generate more of that thing and not of the other.”
We turned the vibrant disparate quirky internet into a series of social media sites. And if we like that – cool – that’s what we have. But if we want other things, we have to engage with them and we also have to pay for them. I really want to do this. I want more art; I want to pay for more artists. (I’d love to support my fellow artists on Patreon: like Alexandra Scott, Betsy VanDeusen, Dance Naked Creative, Monica Byrne, Michael Harren and so many more.) And when I start to make a living wage, that’s the first thing I’m going to do. Meanwhile, though, to create the internet I want to see in the world, I have to actually click on my values. I can’t just like the funny Onion headline on Twitter, I have to click on the article and go read it – on the Onion’s website. If I want more Onion, I have to read the Onion.
But this is the thing, though, I used to read the Onion cover to cover when it was a paper publication I could just pick up on the street. Now I have to remind myself to click when I see an article go by on social media. And once I get over there, I don’t read that whole issue. I just read what I came for and get out. I’m guessing we’re not going back to paper but it was a lot better for some things. I currently read every issue of New York magazine because I subscribe to it. It comes in the mail and then I read it. For me, subscribing means I get both local news and a way to voice my support for one of my favorite journalists (Rebecca Traister, who writes there). I know other publications languish because I chose that one. That’s my current vote – since I don’t really read much news on the internet. Which I guess is also a vote. But if I want the old quirky internet full of funky weird websites, I have to visit those!
Oh hey, if you need some ideas on stuff to click on, I put a bunch of links in this piece. Click away!
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Filed under: Acting, business, community, Creative Process, theatre | Tags: Acting, actors, Actors Access, Backstage, casting, headshots, job listing, resumes, Show Business, theatre
In the past few years, when I’ve made theatre or audio drama, I’ve mostly drawn on people who were already in my circle or in the circle of my circle. This is generally my preferred way of doing things, as it allows me to avoid the more businessy side of the business. (I know it’s show business but for me, it’s art.)
But this time, neither my circle nor my circles’ circles were big enough to do the job of casting my show. I had to engage with some casting websites. The last time I went to a casting website was 2018 and they’ve changed a lot in the intervening years. They’ve also changed a lot since I started my company.
In the first few years, back in the early 2000s, we would post a listing in Backstage and then actors would send us headshots and resumes in the mail. We’d sort through them – make stacks – and literally call them in. On the telephone.
Back around 2018, we’d post a listing on Actors Access or Backstage and we’d get digital submissions from actors. Actually, back in 2018, I didn’t even post a listing, I just searched for actors and messaged them if I thought they’d be a good match. It was a little like a dating site – but with a project instead of a person. Writing a job listing would be like writing a personals ad. Sometimes finding people for your art is personal.
In attempting to post a listing this time, I found the systems to be much more codified. Posting a listing required things to be expressed in certain formats and structures that had very little to do with my show and what I was looking for. I filled out all the forms in the Casting Call section of Actors Access, clicked all the boxes and submitted it. The next morning, I got a full page of things I needed to submit in order to have my listing posted. It was such a prohibitively long and onerous list, I just abandoned Actors Access entirely. I went over to Backstage and filled out similar information and checked similar boxes. When I finally got through all the e-forms, I discovered I would have to submit to a background check in order to post my listing. I have had many background checks in the past, due to my work in education, but I’m a pretty big believer in privacy so I was not keen to provide all my personal information to a corporation. But I was worn out from filling out the same onerous info twice over already and I needed some actors so I sucked it up and gave my permission for the background check. (I passed btw. In case you were worried.)
I say all this to say what a giant pain in the ass it was just to post a job on these sites. And I got significantly fewer submissions from actors than we did back in the day when it was a lot more of a hassle to mail them. We think all this technology will make things easier and better but I am not so sure.
I know actors get frustrated by how hard it is to break into circles that are already established. I’ve heard many actors say, “How is someone without connections yet supposed to get any?” “Why don’t more producers post open calls and opportunities to submit?” And this digital funneling of casting sites is the answer. It is a pain in the ass to do it, and now, not only is it a pain in the ass, it’s invasive and bossy. If I can avoid these things, I will. No question. Now more than ever.
On a friend’s Facebook post someone suggested that actors use their Actors Access page as their website – and I told this tale of giving up on using that site due to its onerous barriers. (I was just trying to say that hiding your calling cards behind a thorny barrier might not be a great idea for getting work.) An actor responded that all actors appreciated the background checks of producers, to save them from scams and predators. Sure. Okay. I’ll address the scams and predators in a moment. But I’m an actor, too, and I actually do not appreciate background checks in this context. I’d rather be in a place where everyone feels welcome, where producers post their gigs freely and easily and everyone can find each other as simply as possible. As an actor, I want anyone who is trying to hire me to be able to do that with as little in the way as possible. I want the same for actors when I am the producer.
I know there are creeps out there. There were even creeps twenty plus years ago when we did all this through the mail. That’s why a lot of actors had answering services – so if a creep got ahold of their headshot or resume they couldn’t just call you up at your house. A background check is not actually a useful guardrail against creeps, scams and predators. In order to flag up a background check, you’d need to be a convicted creep, scammer or predator and I’m sorry to tell you that the percentage of those who actually get convicted is negligibly small. A background check is really a protection of the corporation against getting sued.
I want actors to feel safe, of course, but I think background checks may be providing a false sense of security. And it is not in an actor’s best interest for the people who want to hire them to have to jump through so many fiery hoops. Inevitably, there will be fewer opportunities to submit to when that happens. And it will privilege the producers who are less likely to hire the new arrivals and the young. The producers in the system have a system. They probably have an assistant (or several) to navigate this website. It is indie producers who will disappear, who will just turn to their own circles and I don’t think that is good for the field as a whole.
And ultimately, will a background check keep you safe from the next Harvey Weinstein? (The current Weinstein, sure. He’s got a record – but the next one?) The next Harvey Weinstein already has a gold star next to his name in the listing. He’s a golden boy. He’ll pass a background check with flying colors and then go on to assault everyone in sight. Scott Rudin has never been arrested, would probably ace a background check, but the reasons to not work for him are legion. But people would still line up to do it. I know most actors would rather hear from the next Harvey Weinstein with his gold star jobs than me, this little indie off-off operation. They don’t mind if people like me don’t get on those platforms anymore. But I do think it’s worth thinking about what those sorts of decisions, disappearances and steps back do to the field as a whole in the long run.
I learned (from an indie voice over casting site) that Backstage (along with several other casting sites) is owned by a Swedish private equity firm called EQT Partners. Let me tell you who I really don’t think has actors’ best interests at heart. It’s a global private equity firm in Sweden; That’s who really doesn’t care about theatre in New York City and we’re just letting it roll, never batting an eye.
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Filed under: art, art institutions, community, theatre | Tags: downtown, indie, loss, Next Wave Festival, off off broadway, Public Theater, theater, theatre, Under the Radar, weirdo performance
My friend and I enjoy coming up with more accurate names for performing arts festivals here in NYC. You like the Next Wave Festival at BAM? Me too! We call it the Previous Wave, though, because almost everything in it hit its stride 30 to 40 years ago. Which is not to say it’s not good! Pina Bausch’s company still performs her work with integrity and style. But Pina Bausch died 14 years ago and the last time she was a new up and coming artist was around about 40 or 50 years ago.
Now everyone’s talking about the Under the Radar Festival recently, due to its being canceled, either permanently or temporarily. My friend and I used to call it the Directly in Line with the Radar Festival due to its shows mostly being works and companies already receiving a fair amount of attention, often European. That is, directly in line with the radar if you happen to have a radar that detects weirdo performing arts. Most of NYC’s Indie Arts scene could be standing directly in front of the Public Theater (home of Under the Radar or UTR) waving our arms and shouting, “Hey Radar! Run that radar this way, would you?” But somehow almost everyone I know was under Under the Radar’s radar.
I’m not trying to spit on UTR’s grave. I’m just as sad as everyone else that this festival has been axed. It is a great loss. They put up genuinely interesting work and often the kind of work you couldn’t find in any other venue in NYC. They were sort of the last hold out for putting up weirdo performance here. It was a place for weirdo performance to go to the market and to get written up by major publications. You could rent a space and produce your own weirdo work somewhere but to be sure someone would actually see it? You couldn’t do better for your weirdo performance than to get it into the Directly in Line with the Radar Festival.
But what’s becoming clear as the memorials for UTR come in is that the shows in the festival WERE Under the Radar for a lot of people. If your radar is calibrated for Broadway and Big Presenting Houses like BAM and St Ann’s Warehouse, then the shows at UTR WERE, in fact, Under that radar, which is starting to feel like the only radar that matters any more.
If there’s any comfort in the death of UTR, it’s the outrage and elegizing at its demise. We didn’t do this when we lost venues like Todo con Nada, Collective Unconscious, Collapsable Hole and Galpagos in Williamsburg, The Theatorium, Culture Project, Surf Reality, Manhattan Theatre Source and on and on. (Well, the League of Independent Theater has been documenting these, bless them.) There wasn’t an outcry when we lost the COIL Festival or American Realness or FringeNYC. What seems to be happening is that UTR, in being one of the last ones standing, is standing not only for the loss of itself but all that was lost before it. It is the shit cherry on the top of the shit sundae of the NYC theatre scene. Before, most people were not talking about “downtown” theatre and indie theatre and off off theatre and avant guarde and all sorts of stuff just being pushed further and further to the sidelines until it felt like it would disappear. A lot of it has disappeared. I suppose Under the Radar was somehow the last straw but I guess a lot of people on both sides of the theatre divide had something invested in it. Those “uptown” folk liked to go downtown to see the radar friendly weirdo performance art and those downtown maybe hoped that one day the radar might fall on the them. On us. I used to faithfully send invites to the UTR office just like everyone else. It was good to have a place to dream of seeing one’s show one day.
After twenty two years of making theatre here in NYC, I certainly didn’t have a single hope of one day being presented in the UTR festival – nor any other festival that wouldn’t charge us an entrance fee – but I liked to go see what was in direct line of the radar, in just the same way I enjoy going to see shows from the Previous Wave.
And this isn’t about wanting to see younger “fresher” artists or something. I would probably be more excited to see a 90 year old artist making their BAM debut with something really next wave, or below the radar line, than someone doing stuff we’ve seen before but, like, young. I would be thrilled to see things that are truly Next Wave or truly Under the Radar – but theatres, like movies and TV, are compulsively putting out the things that sold well in the past rather than taking actual risks on innovative stuff. Slowly but surely all the venues that allowed for more marginal artists have been disappearing, along with press coverage for them and all the structures that might allow true innovation to thrive. That’s the really big loss – but it is long lost, ages ago – this is just the latest and most visible loss. I’m glad we’re talking about it and I mourn alongside the rest of the theatrically bereaved.
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Filed under: art, community, Creative Process, dreams, economics, theatre | Tags: academia, graduate school, NYC, sustainability, theatre, theatre company, theatre making, toxic
Once upon a time in New York City, my friends and I started a theatre company. We’d have readings and rehearsals at our apartments. We made molds for masks in my kitchen. We had snacks and drinks and a generally lovely time. We wrote our first fundraising letter at Yaffa Café in the East Village and rubbed one of their buddha statues’ bellies for luck. The bumps in the road were quickly smoothed and we threw some fun post show parties. We also made some pretty kick-ass magical shows, if I do say so myself.
It went like this for a few years but then issues of sustainability started to become more serious. There were the questions of how we could sustain the work as the city got more expensive – and the questions of sustainability in our personal lives, in the things we did for money, or our relationships got very loud. I could see that my career as a teaching artist was not going to be sustainable either so I decided I needed to go to grad school so I could bring myself and my company to the next level.
But what WAS the next level? Was it a particular marker of success? Was it financial stability? I hoped those things were possible. I thought they would be – but I think I was looking in the wrong place.
I went to graduate school thinking that a credential might offer me the possibility of a life in academia where I could bring my company along with me. Part of why I chose the program I did was because one of our teachers was doing just that there. She ran the dance department and her company, in residence, performed there at least once a year. I was interested in that model. But then I went there and saw what was happening and a couple of months in academia killed that dream fairly quickly. It was not for me. Somehow I’d imagined that making art in a college would be intellectually rigorous and artistically supportive – instead it was lazy, petty, toxic and insular. And hardly anyone was having any fun.
If there’s one thing that I relied on heavily and enjoyed pretty consistently when I first started making shows in New York, it was the abundance of good will. We didn’t have a lot of money to pay our people but we worked hard to have a good time and we really had a good time. We generally really liked and admired one another and lived in an atmosphere of mutual respect.
In graduate school, every decision I made was challenged and not in an artistically interesting way – more like everyone constantly questioned my judgment and respect was in short supply. I had to fight for even the smallest things. There were power struggles – like when faculty members accused me of “stealing” their actors. There were issues with the shop. There were issues with the teams. I heard that the entire design department discussed if I “knew what I wanted’ because the costume designer had given me capes and tights in her designs, over and over again when I explicitly reiterated that I wanted no capes and no tights, over and over and over again, every time we met. I was open to a lot of things but if there was one thing I knew for sure it was that I did not want to see any tights or capes. Despite my best efforts, my actors were in capes and tights in a terrifying array of rainbow colors for their fittings. None of us were happy about it. I let the designer have a couple of capes in the end because I was so sick of fighting. Every good thing begun there turned rotten eventually.
I’d gone there hoping to figure out a way to make my life and my company sustainable and I came out ready to quit theatre entirely. I didn’t.
And in the intervening years, I have made a lot of things I’m proud of but it’s been a long time since the spectre of toxic theatre-making hasn’t haunted me.
When I first started in NYC, I really felt strongly that enough good will could over come any hardship. We had issues here or there; they weren’t a big deal. But my immersion in toxic methods and patterns in grad school and beyond made it hard to create with any kind of genuine optimism. Even with the nicest, safest people, I was braced for disaster.
It’s taken a long time to clear my system of all the disorder that my time in grad school created. The program was only two years but it has taken fifteen to sixteen years to re-set all the damage it caused. If I had it do all over again, I wouldn’t go. The degree has done almost nothing for me. It gave me a handful of underpaid college courses as an adjunct and that’s about it. It did nothing for my personal sustainability and almost killed my company entirely.
But I didn’t set out to write about why going to grad school was a bad idea for me. I’m here to tell you about those magical first years when we were awash in possibility and confidence and love and hope and how this year, for the first time in a while, I could remember what that felt like.
I know from this side of things how incredibly rare sustainability in theatre is. I know a lot more about the business of theatre making and what it takes to make a living wage from it. The landscape for the arts has changed a great deal over the last 20+ years. I have a much clearer sense of how all of it fits together and where there is space to hope and dream and where there is opportunity to advance and where there is not.
I have become wildly less ambitious than I used to be – at least, less ambitious in the usual way. I no longer dream of a big Broadway debut. But I suppose I have become more ambitious in that I am striving for a kinder, warmer, more human and more fun way of doing things.
When I started, I really thought that the way it worked was – you made something really cool and a big shot (or a big shot’s assistant) came to see it and then good shows would be magically transported to Broadway. It was a very sweet naïve sort of dream. But not harmless, though – because I kept feeling like I failed when I made things and they didn’t “go anywhere.”
The thing that I’d like to go back in time and tell myself was that the thing itself was the gold. The process, the fun, the parties, the rehearsals, the hanging out and making something we were proud of – THAT was the miracle. I’m sure the me of twenty years ago would have rolled her eyes at a future me coming to tell her to enjoy every minute. But it’s not so much that I’d want that earlier version of me to enjoy it while it was happening, because I WAS enjoying it while it was happening. It’s more that I wish she could have continued to enjoy it while she was on a roll, to have continued to make work with people she liked in an atmosphere of mutual respect and appreciation, even if it meant giving up some of her ambitions or getting a different kind of day job. If I had it to do over again, I’d have let my hopes for sustainability and professionalism drift away and just luxuriated in our process. It’s possible that might have actually led me to the success I’ve found so elusive. But if it didn’t, I’d have had a lot more years of very pleasurable art making. That’s the dream for my younger self now. And maybe this self too.
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Filed under: Acting, advice, art, clown, comedy, community, Creative Process, dance, music, musicals, theatre, Visual Art, writing | Tags: effort, failure, Love, pride, process, terrible, theatre
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 that we love just to avoid the feeling. It’s not so much that we’re afraid to have to talk to them about their terrible work afterwards – it’s just that we don’t want to sit in the theatre or stand in the gallery or in the concert hall wondering how our loved one could make such a thing.
I’m sure a lot of my friends have had this experience with my work, too. I don’t like to think about it but I’m pretty sure I’ve lost friends because they just hated my show and they didn’t want to deal with me later. I have a fairly long list of people who came to see a show of mine and never spoke to me or saw me again. This shit is personal.
But what are we supposed to do?
We all have our own taste and if we really care about art, we have our opinions that rarely align fully with others. That’s how we create original stuff! We all have our own aesthetics and sometimes people who love us personally hate what we make. I wish it weren’t true but all evidence points to a complicated mess of love and art and hate all mixed up.
Unfortunately, I’ve often found the way to deal with this is to just not see (or read or listen to) things. I don’t have to feel bad about how I feel about someone’s work if I don’t see it. The problem with this strategy is that I pull myself out of community by doing this. Theatre, for example, runs on reciprocity. I go see your show, you come to see mine. If I don’t go to shows, where is my audience going to come from? If I don’t go see your show that I’m definitely going to hate, how can I expect you to see mine? That you will, likewise, hate? This is a problem I have been wrestling with for decades.
I think I have cracked it for myself now. Watching the show of someone who I love and respect, trying to figure out why they thought this was a good idea, I realized that it was beautiful. The show itself did nothing for me, I promise, and I wish it had and I’m sorry. But the FACT of it? The FACT that all these people came together and worked so hard, with such diligence and passion and belief in their purpose? That fact is gorgeous. It is tremendously difficult to do and the fact that people do it, typically for very little reward, is fucking beautiful. It doesn’t matter if I like it. I don’t like most things. I wish I were more catholic in my taste but I’m not. So – what I feel like I’m going to lean in to is just the joy of watching people make things, to celebrate bad art as good in the larger sense.
I’d like to approach the work I see in the future with the grace that I give youth and community theatre productions. A lot of people I knew in my theatre-soaked youth, who made fun of my obsession, who thought I was a weirdo, now have kids who are in school plays, who’ve become dancers, musicians, actors, singers and these parents are so PROUD of them, bless their hearts. And I’m sure all those school plays are awful. I feel like I need to tap into a parent’s pride when I experience bad art. Because I am proud of everyone who fights through the forest of challenges to actually make something. I wish I liked what they make but maybe pride is enough. Maybe loving their love is enough.
If you’re someone I love whose work I’ve seen, this post is not about you. YOUR work, I love. And I love that you made it. And I’m proud of you.
We want people to love our work, of course we do. We want them to think we are brilliant and we only make marvelous things. We want to believe all that work leads to stellar shows. We want our work to be so good no one could hate it. But – sometimes, especially in the trenches of underfunded art, we don’t achieve the masterwork status we were aiming at. And if you feel bad that I might not be crazy about that artwork you made, just know I’m not crazy about Hamilton, either, okay? You’re in good company. Most people really love it. I don’t. But – I’m still proud of them for making it! And I’m proud of you too.
Photo by Jason Vail
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Filed under: art, Art Scenes, community, feminism, Gen X, grief | Tags: 90s, Believe Her, Charlottesville, cloche hat, Cool, Cool Chicks, Criminalized Survivorship, Dawn Powell, F Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby, Gen X, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Remedios Varo, scene, Steve Keene, The Great Gatsby, True Crime, vintage clothes
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 moment.
Into that heady moment, stepped a man who my friends and I called Gatsby, because he was always dressed up like a 1920s gentleman. He had an air about him – a man out of time. I live in New York City now, and here you’d never notice this guy. He’d slip into some faux speakeasy and you’d just think – oh sure, one of those – but then, there, in my hometown, this guy was highly visible. It was a scene then and Gatsby quickly took his place at the center of it.
I was part of the scene, too. I was in a play at the art gallery with the man who a couple years later became a rock star. I was in the play in the writer’s apartment. I was in the legendary production of Hair that happened in the ROTC building. I hung out at the restaurants where the cool hung out and I was in the Three Penny Opera featuring the hip alt bluegrass band as the orchestra. I played the old mother, at age 19 – but still. I was in it. I was there. But somehow I wasn’t really included most of the time. And it wasn’t just that I was young. Many girls much younger than me were seen on the arms of the cool guys, at the cool parties, on cool guys’ retro motorcycles. They were cool chicks.
Then, I didn’t understand why I wasn’t more IN the scene. I mean. I wrote poems, too, just like all the fellas. I played guitar. I was ALSO obsessed with the Beat poets. I also wore vintage clothes. (Hats especially! I was the one in cloches and such. I had a hot pink feathered one for special occasions.) I was doing so many of the things the cool guys were doing – not because I was trying to be cool but because that’s just where I was at. And yet…Gatsby never spoke to me. He probably didn’t know my name.
Decades later, in this era, I heard that Gatsby has been shot and killed by his girlfriend. The community heaved in grief. Many people I care about were devastated. There was a great mourning for the man and also the scene of which he once was a big part. It is beautiful and awful and nostalgic and odd and endlessly captivating.
I want to be clear that the facts of this case are more or less in and they are tragic and sad but I’m not here to talk about the facts of this case. What I feel the need to unpack is my own journey with both the news and the history of the scene and how they intersect.
My first response to this dramatic circumstance was to mourn with those who were close to him, to mourn the symbol and the past he took with him. I immediately assumed that the dominant perception that his girlfriend was crazy was correct and that that was the whole story, because that’s what those closest to him thought.
But then the podcast I’d just finished listening to (Believe Her) came to mind, in which a young woman had shot her abuser, an outwardly gentle man who none of his friends could imagine hurting a fly but who routinely assaulted his girlfriend and posted his assaults to Porn Hub. I didn’t want to assume Gatsby was somehow involved in his own murder but I also could easily imagine how he could be. I didn’t really know him after all.
And once I’d thought it, I couldn’t help searching for evidence in one direction or another. I looked first at my own experience with him – one wherein I was invisible, one where he spoke to my friends who looked like models but not to me and I recognized a pattern of behavior I have seen over the years in other people. Those who don’t see women as people are historically the most dangerous. I just read this article about the court case around the Shitty Media Men list and writer Claire Vaye Watkins says, “I am saying a sexist negation, a refusal to acknowledge a female writer as a writer, as a peer, as a person, is of a piece with sexual entitlement.” This is what raised my antennae.
Gatsby had a reputation for dating a lot of young waitresses. In a small city, dating young waitresses is like dating models in a big one. It reflects an interest in aesthetics beyond other characteristics. And again, I want to be clear. I did not know this man but it was easy to extrapolate, to guess, to wonder.
Approximately 30% of the women in prison for murder are criminalized survivors – that is they defended themselves and the state locked them up. Not a lot of women kill for no reason. The latest news suggest that this woman did. But I couldn’t help noting other factors that made me nervous about just assuming things were as they seemed. Gatsby’s girlfriend was a 38 year old circus performer. He was a 53 year old finance professional. There was a disparity of age, finances and experience that suggested a power differential. Gatsby had a gun collection – one of the guns was the murder weapon. So, I guess he had a loaded gun collection? Or at least a bullet collection alongside the gun collection? Maybe lots of kind gentle men you know own a lot of guns – but in my experience, a man with a lot of guns is a man to be wary of. So – Gatsby’s crazy girlfriend murdered him with one of his many guns.
And it is awful. It is. But it was wild to watch a community of people – many of whom I used to know – unravel around the situation.
Apparently other women had noticed that it was mostly men who were openly grieving his loss. Other women wondered, aloud – un-like me, if there could be more to this story than “crazy girlfriend kills partner.” One woman leapt to the defense of the grieving men saying they were probably more feminist than a lot of women she knew. And probably that is true for her and I’m sorry she knows so few feminists but sorry, no, this would not be true for me. A lot of these dudes, though I have a lot of affection for them, aren’t demonstrably feminist. They’re maybe not actively sexist but I’ve not seen much feminism from them. Granted, I hang out with mostly feminists these days so my bar is high. Just being a mostly nice guy doesn’t qualify you in my book. These guys were the scene back then and despite being a lifelong and active feminist, I would never have made the mistake of mentioning it to this crew at that time. Maybe things are different now. I hope so.
The community – the one from the past and the one of the moment – were sort of running into each other and from my distant post in NYC, far away from this, from my hometown, from my own nostalgia for that bygone Gatsby era, I felt as though I were watching a community car wreck in slow motion. There were a lot of heartbroken Gen X and Gen Jones men in incredible wrenching mourning for their friend and a lot of Millennial women trying to sort through the mess – some loudly making assumptions, some defending, some grieving, too.
Was Gatsby a gentle man or a closet abuser?
The man was cool and very visible. So a lot of people had opinions. In the True Crime podcast version of this story, we’d hear from all of them and decide for ourselves what we think. Having not had any contact with this guy in decades, I have no idea. He was an icon in a small community. That comes with some baggage, I imagine.
This is the thing, though, that I keep returning to. I hung out with some of these guys in the apex of this heady movement in the 90s. Some of them saw me and some saw past me. They didn’t think I was cool but women weren’t really at the forefront of this scene. They were barely in it at all.
There were some cool chicks around though. The cool chicks then were a different sort of girl. A lot of them were very vulnerable in some way. I went to the house of one of these guys one time and when we got there, there was a girl in his bed. He told me she’d just run away from home and had nowhere to go. She was in high school. He was in his 20s. There was a lot of this sort of thing in those days. The cool chicks drank a lot and smoked like chimneys and now I realize that they were likely also processing an abundance of previous trauma. A girl like that might finally go “crazy” in her 30s. A lot of these guys wanted to “help” these girls. But they also wanted to have sex with them and I’m going to guess that sometimes these things did not sensibly go together.
Where do I fit these memories in the True Crime podcast version of this story?
What I keep returning to was how uncool I felt myself to be among a lot of fellas who were into a lot of the stuff I was into. As a young woman, I was not IN the scene. But now I know what it feels like to be seen as an equal, to be genuinely cool to my fellow artists – to have a mutual artistic experience. The scene was a boy’s club. In those days only cool chicks were allowed. I literally cannot recall a single identifiable woman from this scene. This is not to say that they weren’t there. I don’t remember everything. I didn’t know everyone. But I was on the look out. If there’d been a woman to look to in this movement, I’d have locked on like a lobster. My sense is that women just weren’t really included as visibly as the men. If you were a woman in this scene then, I’m sorry I didn’t see you either.
This has happened throughout history in arts scenes. Remedios Varo was a surrealist. She was at the salons. You can see her included in Exquisite Corpses. You can see her work on their themes. She was in it. But read a book on Surrealism and she might only get a passing mention as Benjamin Péret’s lover. She was IN that scene but never seen as an equal part of it.
She and Leonora Carrington made their own scene in Mexico City, I think. They may not get a chapter in the Art History textbooks like the male Surrealists do – but they built their own world, where they weren’t the girlfriends of the cool guys – but the center of a magical realist world.
It feels like, scenes are for men and the cool chicks who hung around them. Being part of a scene that was once a genuine SCENE was exciting. I do have tremendous nostalgia for that moment in time but it is accompanied by a strange lacuna. On reading the newspaper article about Gatsby and the scene, I had the strange sensation of having been there but always just out of frame. The play in the writer’s apartment that Gatsby sent a typewritten note about? I was in that play. I was kind of the center of it. The band that Gatsby promoted? I was in those audiences a lot and I was in that musical where they were the orchestra. I’m there but not there. That’s what it was like to be in the scene then. I could stand, center stage, sing my heart out and still be entirely invisible.
It turns out that the crazy girlfriend shot Gatsby in his sleep. She shot him with his gun, called the police and began livestreaming. It’s an awful situation. The end of the True Crime podcast is just sad. It’s just really sad. All it is is sad. But ultimately this is not about Gatsby. Just like The Great Gatsby is not really about Gatsby, is it? It’s the world around him. It’s the scene.
And you know something? F Scott Fitzgerald was in a scene. Maybe he WAS the scene. But my favorite writer of the period, Dawn Powell, was born the exact same year and wrote truly remarkable novels and plays that were well received at the time and never felt herself part of the scene. Not Fitzgerald’s scene and not the theatre scene, which Powell longed to be a part of, as well. (Read her diaries for lots of these sorts of moments.) She was so much not a part of scenes that her work went out of print for a very long time. Meanwhile, no one gave a damn about The Great Gatsby when it first came out but the scene grew in retrospect and now few American students can escape reading it.
Of course, I long to be a part of a scene again but I want it to be one where women are full artistic participants and not just the cool chicks at home in an artist’s bed. Thinking about Gatsby sent me down a lot of paths I haven’t visited in a while and I see them a lot differently than I did decades ago. A scene shifts in the rearview mirror – it gets both a glow and a sharper focus.
I learned about Gatsby’s death a few hours after I wrote about meeting Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I’d been thinking about one of the most famous art scenes in American history and about what it was like to be a woman trying to just be seen by someone from it for a moment. I was patronized by a man who hung out with the Beats but was so confident in his position in a scene that he preferred not to be called a Beat poet. There was a chiming quality of these two things for me. These were highly visible men in artistically exciting times and just out of the frame, just a little blurry and off to the side, I’m sure there were many women who longed to be seen, to be heard, to be in the scene for real and not just there and out of focus.
Good night Gatsby. Good night Ferlinghetti. Rest well gentlemen. I’m so sorry for the loss of your loved ones. You made an enormous impact on a lot of people.
Now –
Ladies? Y’all want to start a scene with me?
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Filed under: community, Healthcare | Tags: cops, healthcare workers, Mystery, police officer, quirky artists, scrubs, Subway, turnstiles
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 but not about to argue. He told me to have a nice day and off I went, very confused.
As I rode home, I tried to work out why this might have happened. It did not feel like he was hitting on me in any way, so it wasn’t a pick-up move. Was it an attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of the NYPD with leftie radicals like myself? I didn’t think so. I don’t think the NYPD is at all worried about what we think of them. I’m pretty sure this guy doesn’t know or care that I’m very interested in defunding the police.
Was it maybe Help a Quirky Artist Day and no one told me? I don’t think so – though I do wish such a day existed.
Perhaps he’d mistaken me for a healthcare worker? I was wearing a mask and the dress I was wearing has been mistaken for scrubs before. (By a doctor! Who should know better!) This felt like the likeliest possibility. The officer’s gesture had the quality of one public servant helping another. And despite the fact that I have never seen scrubs with a skirt, there’s something about this green wrap-around dress that reads as hospital garb to some people. I was satisfied with this theory though I cannot prove it in any way.
I imagine that the cop felt good about himself helping out a healthcare worker – and I wondered how he’d feel if he knew my actual vocation. Would he take his free ride back?
What would it be like to live in a world where folks might be as happy to see an artist out in the wild as this guy was to help who he might have imagined me to be?
I’m certainly glad that someone out there is doing all they can for the healthcare workers they run across but mightn’t it be better to just pay our nurses better? To give them the time off they need? To have, say, a national healthcare system we can rely on and help workers care for everyone equally? Wouldn’t that be better than randomly giving free rides to people you perceive to be healthcare workers out in the world?
I’d wager that most struggling artists could use a free subway ride even more than a nurse could given that a nurse has a salary and possibly a travel allowance while most struggling artists are managing month to month on spotty freelance gigs, But I feel pretty confident that no one would institute such a program. Help a Quirky Artist Day will likely never come to pass.
I don’t mean to look a gift ride in the mouth but I can’t help unpacking unusual circumstances – and this was very unusual for me. Maybe for public servants, like healthcare workers, it is commonplace. Is it? I’m curious.
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Filed under: community, Quitting, Social Media | Tags: billionaires, content, creepy billionaires, Elon Musk, Facebook, Instagram, Social Media, Tik Tok, twitter
Twitter has never been my drug. I wasn’t into it when it started and I only begrudgingly wade in there now. I used to set a timer for ten minutes so I could get in and get out. I’m not a fan of it but it’s where a lot of people are, so I feel obligated to check in with it and participate. I feel the same way about Instagram and TikTok. I have about five minutes of tolerance on those platforms before I am done. Facebook is stickier for me. Most of my friends and family are there. I love them. I like to be where I can see them. But regardless of my personal taste, these are the places people gather in these times. When I want to know what’s happening right this second, I check what people are talking about on Twitter. When I need to share personal news, Facebook is the answer. And every single one of those platforms is owned by a creepy billionaire. The fact that ownership of Twitter is switching from one creepy billionaire to another one is disturbing, sure, but I’m not sure that deleting our profiles is the answer. (Especially since, as I learned on Twitter, if you delete your profile, you lose access to your stuff but the platform retains it.)
We’ve got battles to fight against these billionaire types and we need ways to gather and organize and unfortunately, right now, the way to do that is ON these platforms owned by billionaires. Until we have other gathering spaces, I think we shoot ourselves in the foot by cutting off our access to other people. Is Elon Musk going to ruin Twitter? All signs point to yes – but given his tendency to not follow through on anything, it might not get that far. And before he ruins Twitter, assuming he does, I think we need to gather ourselves there, subscribe to people’s newsletters, blogs, podcasts or whatever. I don’t want folks to leave Twitter, not because I think it’s so great. I don’t. I have never liked it. But I do recognize its power and the fewer people who might have my back there there are, the more dangerous it becomes for me in that space.
Fact is, I am largely invisible on Twitter. Most of my tweets there have just one like – and that like is probably my mom. (Thank you, Mom!) I continue to cast my net there because you just have to cast your net everywhere when you make “content” on the web. When the people I know leave a platform, my chances of getting more than one like on a post diminish significantly. I know a lot of people deleted their Twitter accounts so as not to add value to Elon Musk’s portfolio, which I understand completely. I don’t want to see that guy get richer either. But the value of one person’s twitter account is NOTHING to Elon Musk, particularly if you’re not doing big numbers there. If you have a thousand followers, I’m sorry but you make not a speck of difference to his bottom line. I am absolutely insignificant in his portfolio with my 927 followers (990 before Musk took over). I don’t matter to Musk. If I had a couple million followers, though, maybe I could make a tiny drop of difference. (Also significantly, these millions of followers would also give me power to do things like get a publishing deal.) But if most of my million followers split, I would lose all of my power to make a difference and Musk doesn’t feel it at all.
I think sometimes people get a false sense of their own importance on a social media platform. They think saying something on Twitter is like saying something to some friends in a room. They think their account is more powerful than it is. This happens whether someone has three followers or a million, though, I’m sure, the larger the numbers, the larger the effect. Getting likes and followers CAN equate to real world power. People have gotten book deals or TV shows from single tweets or just having a certain number of followers. But that doesn’t happen for most of us. Most of us are shouting into a void, heard by a handful of people, if we’re lucky. I’m putting out stuff all the time so I’m used to it. But I watch others share my stuff sometimes with all their hope and enthusiasm and then watch as my stuff meets the same indifference that I experience most of the time. They get one like (from me!) and then maybe their mom (or mine! Thank you, Mom!) and then the thing is over.
But even though they don’t get thousands of likes from sharing my stuff, it is very meaningful to me that they took the time to post it. If the people who do that sort of thing for me from time to time were to leave, there would be no one to share my stuff at all.
It’d be just me, a bunch of famous people and Elon Musk left on Twitter and probably at that point, I’d have to leave, too. Which would be fine if people were engaging with my stuff elsewhere but they’re not. The current public commons are these weird billionaire-owned platforms. You leave the public commons and you leave the rest of us, those of us who feel we HAVE to be there for the sharing of our work, on our own, without any support at all. Don’t stay for Mr. Musk. He’s ridiculous. Stay for those of us with a few hundred followers and tiny social circles. You may not have power to dent Musk’s portfolio but you are significantly powerful for people like me.
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Filed under: American, art, art institutions, business, community, economics, Non-Profit, theatre | Tags: Charity Blossom, crowdfunding, donations, fundraising, grants, IndieGoGo, Josh Battle, Kickstarter, Ko-fi, Non-Profit, potato salad, theatre company
My theatre company is over twenty years old. We started in 2001 and we’ve seen some things.
For our first show, we raised funds by writing a letter – yes, an actual paper letter – and we mailed it to anyone we thought might write us a check. This worked pretty well. I’d have to double check the numbers but it’s not impossible that it was the most effective fundraising we ever did. There are a couple of reasons for that, I imagine. One is the First Steps Toward a Dream Effect. This is the thing where people love to fund the FIRST something. They enjoy helping people take a first step toward a big dream. (They don’t love so much the slog of keeping something afloat.) But I think the other factor that helped this first show’s fundraising was just the moment we were in and the circles to which we had access.
It seems like it should have been harder in those days. The efforts that people had to make to donate were substantial. First, they had to open and read our letter. (Not a given!) If they wanted to donate, they had to get out their check books, write the check and then put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it and put it in a mailbox. There are a lot of moments for this process to get derailed. It’s a lot. It was not like clicking on a link, letting your credit card info autofill some boxes and then hitting submit.
When donating through the internet started to be a thing, we were very excited. It seemed like, by eliminating all those steps for people, we’d get so many more donations. It didn’t really work out that way, though. We saw charity donation websites come and go. (Remember Charity Blossom?) The donations got smaller and smaller and people who’d written us big checks never made it to the digital mailing lists. We didn’t have their emails. I’m not sure a lot of them HAD emails.
Then crowdfunding kicked off and everyone was so excited about its potential. In some circles people talked about it as a democratizing fundraising source. We wouldn’t need to depend on rich people to fund things anymore! If we got enough tiny donations, we could make a big difference! What a win for democracy! Poor people could pay for the arts instead of rich people!
But here’s the thing. You need a LOT of people to give you $20 to make up a 10k budget. You need 500 people, in fact. (Actually, given that all these platforms take a cut, you’ll need MORE than 500 to get there.) And for people without much to spare, even that $20 is a huge deal. It’s a huge deal for me. Most folks, no matter how much they like you or believe in what you’re doing, are not going to bother or they just don’t have it to spare.
If you want to really depress yourself as a theatre fundraiser, take a tour of the theatre fundraisers on a platform like Indiegogo. You’ll see a lot of folks barely making a dent in their humble 3k ask. Theatre isn’t a good candidate for crowdfunding. It doesn’t scale well. We don’t have compelling prizes. But crowdfunding is sort of the only deal anymore. Even wealthy donors expect you to eke out a bunch of $20 donations before they’ll think about sending over a few hundred bucks.
It feels a bit like crowdfunding has killed our ability to actually raise sufficient funds because sometimes a wealthy donor looks at how a crowdfundraiser is doing and thinks it’s not worth the investment. They see that we didn’t get 10 people to give us 20 bucks and they reconsider the 2k check they were thinking of writing us. In having our struggles be so transparent, we lose leverage. We can’t sell someone on a dream because they can see how little others have put in to it.
Crowdfunding, like a lot of things, has turned out to work best for things that are going viral. Remember that potato salad? Or the Josh battle? Crowdfunding also does really well in a well publicized tragedy – but it is terrible for the day to day art making. It is a very blunt instrument. It may be the only instrument at the moment, so we pretty much have to use it but it’s not very effective. Like anything in this capitalist world, your ability to fundraise is dependent on the wealth to which you have access. Your crowdfunding campaign does not depend so much on the content of your work but on the wealth of the people in your circle who will open their wallets for you. We had more access to those people two decades ago than we do today. Today, most of my contacts are fellow artists. We have a joke in the indie theatre community about how we all just pass the same $20 around between us.
To make a 10k budget, you only need 10 people to give you a thousand dollars. Big deal! That’s only ten people! But you have to know ten people who might have a grand to spare first. That’s the real kicker and why crowdfunding the arts doesn’t work. Not unless you only want work by and for the wealthy, which is what you get when you don’t subsidize the arts, no matter which way you slice it.
Crowdfunding demands an extraction of wealth from the artist’s community. Every time I put on a show, I have to go to the crowdfunding mines and extract a little wealth from the people I know. I know some folks have found a way to perceive this as obtaining their community’s investment in their work. I appreciate that perspective but I find it particularly challenging to see it that way in this moment where most of my community is in the performing arts and most of my community lost their jobs or their big plans or their dreams or their support. Now is not the moment to extract wealth from the performing arts community – even if you call it an investment. Same goes for a lot of people right now.
I know someone is thinking, “Hey what about grants?! Grants exist. Can’t you just get a grant?” Oh darlings. Yes. We have gotten some grants. Most of them were about $500. Very nice! It’s helpful! Not as helpful as someone just writing you a check for $1000 that you didn’t have to write several essays for but helpful! $500 is a very nice start and other funders like to see that you got it but there is not a grant in America that will fund your whole project. They want to see that you can extract $10k of wealth before they will give you $10k. The best way to get an arts grant is to show how much you don’t need one.
In my experience, it takes around 10k to do just about any significant art project. That’s with a shoestring budget. Shoestrings cost about 10k. For some people, donating that 10k would make less impact than the $20 coming from a struggling artist – but an arts organization lives or dies based on where that $10k might come from. Crowdfunding seemed like an answer and it’s probably not going anywhere but you can tell that it’s not an effective tool because you’ll never catch one of the big arts institutions using it. No one suggests that The Metropolitan Opera do a Kickstarter. They extract their wealth in a much more efficient way.
And yes, of course, I’m in the middle of trying to crowdfund a project right now which is, of course, why I’m thinking a lot about this. I feel extraordinary gratitude to the people who gave us their $3 or their $1000 and I really wish I didn’t have to ask them for it, just to make a piece of art.
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Filed under: art, clown, community, pandemic, theatre | Tags: Astoria, audiences, Bindlestiff Family Circus, circus, crying, Juggling, live performance, Open Streets, Street Theatre, tap dancing, tears
When I walked up to check out the booths at Open Streets (the program that closes down/opens up a couple of blocks to give the neighborhood more public space) I wasn’t prepared for a show.
When I approached the second block, I saw a crowd and a truck and then I saw some clowns getting the crowd fired for their circus. Their performance style was so familiar, I almost just walked away – feeling an habitual “I know what this is. I don’t need to watch it.” But then I found myself not walking away. And then I found myself not walking away for quite some time – and halfway through their opening sketch, I started weeping and did not stop until I finally pulled myself away half an hour later.
Was I watching and crying because the show was so moving, so good, so remarkable? No. I mean, the show was fine. It was perfect for the venue and earnest and sweet. I’m almost certain that the river falling out of my face had very little to do with the content of the piece. There is nothing particularly tear-jerking about a Chinese yo-yo or a tapdancing ring master.
It could be the audience. There was a big joyful crowd of people and the children did not hesitate what they were asked to repeat, “We want the circus!” I, for sure, was moved by that. Maybe it was also just seeing an audience at all? I’ve only seen one other show since March of 2020 so I have not been in many crowds, nor seen them. Maybe it’s the novelty, the preciousness of a people gathering together to watch some show people on a truck bed.
I kept trying to stop my tears, because it became a little embarrassing. My handkerchief got soaked. A man came out of the crowd and looked right at my dripping wet face and smiled a little bit. He had a knowing look about him – like he knew what it was about. Did he? Because I’m not sure I know what it was about. It wasn’t the girls pretending to tap dance in their sneakers, though that had its charms. I did not notice anyone else crying their face off at the street circus so this would seem to be a me thing.
I have been cautious about going back to the theatre, despite some really tempting offers for precisely this reason. I know that whatever I see in a theatre again for the first time is going to be seen through the waterfall of my tears and I’m being careful about what that show will be. I don’t want to miss the show itself because of my response to the experience.
The half an hour I spent at the street circus was about all I had the stamina for. The loud music was hard on my brain that was just emerging from a migraine and I ran out of tissues after a while. I’m going to have to ease back into performances it would seem.
I think it’s probably from love that I’m weeping. The thing is I love performance and performers. I love audiences and shows. I am show people all the way through and this pandemic has so thoroughly cut me off from that part of myself, I’m not sure there is anything for it but to cry.
The marketing team can declare “Broadway is back” all it wants but as far as I can see, it’s really out there, more or less by itself, with a few well-funded buddies. Small companies like the one I saw on the street in my neighborhood are much fewer and far betweener. This particular one has been part of the landscape of NYC performance as long as I’ve lived here and it is a relief to me to see them out here, still kicking and juggling. I may not recognize any of the people anymore but I know their history. I was there for some of it. I don’t really know how a small circus got themselves through this mess. I don’t know how I got my theatre company and myself through this mess. And I don’t expect we’re really through this mess so much as on a temporary reprieve. (I’m sorry. I know there is not a country on this planet who has opened back up and not had to shut back down right quick like.) Mostly, I guess, I try not to think about it – but sometimes the feelings about all that just make themselves known. The crying I was doing at the circus was very bizarre in that I did not necessarily feel sad or happy or moved. I couldn’t have told you what those feelings were. I felt disconnected from my own emotional world. It’s like my tears were flowing without me.
As an actor who can sometimes be called upon to cry, I cannot help but interrogate this new style of crying. It felt so involuntary. It was like when a strong wind blows in your face and makes your eyes water. I guess these are my new “watching a performance” tears. I don’t have to work up my particular feelings, I guess, just watch someone giving their all to an audience and the waterworks will flow.
I want to go back inside and see shows again. I love the red curtain. I love the wooden O, the wooden arch, the wooden frame. I love a black box and a dance studio. I long to return to all of them – but I have yet to hear an epidemiologist recommend it. I feel like folks are doing shows indoors again not because it’s safe and we’re ready but because Broadway producers want to make some money. I don’t blame them – there’s no support for anything or anyone – to put folks back to work is the only way to put food back on a lot of people’s tables. It may be safe-ish since everyone’s theoretically vaccinated and the audience is masked. It’s not the least safe space to be or at least it wasn’t until Omicron kicked off. Now shows that just opened are closing again. There’s something about the place that I love most in the world becoming so dangerous that it had to be closed, everywhere – that makes me feel like I need it to be thoroughly safe now.
Stumbling on a show two blocks from my apartment in the middle of the street is my dream of NYC come true. This is, definitely, what I hoped for when I moved here – and twenty years later, it happened. But only because we all had our little performers’ hearts broken in a big way last year. Based on the major waterworks that kicked off at the neighborhood circus, mine is still in need of repair I’d say.
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