Filed under: American | Tags: American, Boston, bus, Canada, international, National Passport Office, obstacles, passport, travel
I’m sitting outside the Tip O’ Neil Federal Building in Boston. I’ve got another hour before I can get in line to pick up my passport, which is the reason I’ve come here. Not just to this building but to Boston. I feel very sure that there is someone from Boston sitting outside the New York passport office at this exact moment. They can’t believe they had to travel all the way to New York to renew their passport while I’m still shocked I had to travel all the way to Boston.
American government systems can get a little bit silly sometimes and the passport system is especially silly right now. I’m sure there’s some dumb software issue that explains why a person from Boston is compelled to get their passport in New York and I’m compelled to get mine in Boston. It is clearly more efficient (or at least habitual) for the passport office to do it this way – even if it is very silly.
Because I’ve called the National Passport Office every day for the last two weeks, trying to avoid this trip to Boston, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with a lot of people from this office – not about anything, of course – but I’ve exchanged some words. They have been universally nice and relaxed, despite the fact that most people calling are probably super stressed out and anxious, especially after dealing with the infuriating and confusing phone system that mostly hangs up on you, sometimes lets you through only to hang up on you and sometimes puts you on hold for an hour and a half. The actual humans I saw at the Boston office were equally nice and chill and frankly I do not understand how that is possible.
Every other time I’ve had to engage with a system this big, the people in it are frazzled and irritated. I’m so used to being treated suspiciously and defensively in those sorts of situations, I found myself a little baffled by the Passport Office – which is ruthlessly inefficient but somehow pretty nice about it.
And yet –
Hang on a second –
I had to go stand in a line for half an hour to retrieve my passport so I’m continuing these thoughts back home at my local café the next day.
And yet – I couldn’t help thinking how needlessly cruel this system is, how inconvenient for almost everyone, how this explains why so few Americans travel abroad. I’ll take you through my passport renewal process and I think you’ll see why.
So, our passports need to be renewed every ten years and if you haven’t traveled internationally in, say three years, due to maybe a global pandemic, you will have no reminders that your passport is expiring. No one sends you a postcard or email or text that says, “It’s time to do this again!” You can’t put the expiration on your desk calendar (unless you maybe have a decade long calendar? I don’t know.) and the phone you had when you applied last time is not likely to be the one you have now. So if you’re someone like me, you find out your passport is expiring when you pull it out to double check the passport number for some travel plans. I had about a month and a half before expiration when I discovered it. You’d think that would be ample time to do a short bureaucratic task. It would be, for pretty much anything else, but for passport renewal, it is already way too late. To get an expedited mail-in renewal through a company that specializes in these things, I’d have needed ten weeks lead time, at minimum. So, I had to wait until my trip was 14 days away to call and make an appointment at a passport center. My travel date was on a Sunday and the Monday was a Federal Holiday so it was twelve days to departure for me by the time I was even allowed to make a phone call. After being hung up on multiple times, all day, I finally got through to a person late Tuesday evening, which is when I learned that the only appointment I could get would be in Boston or Vermont. Again, I live in New York City where there is a passport office, where I renewed my passport ten years ago, with a lot less drama. Anyway – I’d seen the news stories about peoples’ nightmares getting their passports so I didn’t argue too much and just accepted my Boston appointment for the last possible date before my flight. I called and called, hoping someone would cancel in New York in the intervening week and a half but no – I got myself on a bus and took myself to Boston.
Was it a real pain in the ass? Yes! Did it cost $55 for a one way ticket? It did. (($83 for the trip back but more about that later.)
But I’ll go ahead and let you know now that I DID get the passport and it DID work for the first phase of my journey because now I’m writing the next phase of this at a table in Terminal Five at JFK but it was touch and go there for a while. I mean, you know what I DON’T want to do before I take a big international trip? Take a trip. I lost two days to the journey and while I love Boston and would have enjoyed hanging out there, how this trip went down was: I put down my phone from my last attempt to change my appointment location on Thursday morning and then kicked in to gear, buying my bus ticket, checking in with my kind (last minute) hosts for the night and gathering my things so I could be gone for two days. The next day (after a pleasant evening with my hosts) I was kindly given a ride to the subway stop, with plenty of time to spare to get to the hard won passport appointment, but then the train just sat there – for ages – my ample cushion of time rapidly decreased. So I downloaded Lyft and booked myself an expensive ride to the passport office where I made it just in time. I got quickly checked in and while I waited in the long line for picking up my passport that is surely the same every day for them but highly unusual for all of us, I checked the times and prices for buses back to NYC and noted a 4:30 for $68 – more expensive than my trip up but fine, good. Passport in hand, I made my way to the bus station, and when I got there, found that the 4:30 bus was now $83. I bought a ticket and then waited the half hour until I could line up for the bus – and proceeded to stand in that line for 45 minutes when we finally learned the bus was canceled and we were all rebooked on crappier less direct buses. I returned to NYC 35 hours after I left, having lost two days but gained a passport and a nice evening with a lovely family.
The things is, as much as a pain in the ass as this was for me, and as needlessly expensive – I know I was lucky to be able to do it. While it sucked to have to lose two days of my life right before a trip, I could do it. But I couldn’t help think of other people. What if I had kids and needed to suddenly find two days of childcare? Or find bus tickets for more than just me? What if I had a job that wouldn’t give me the time off to do a last minute errand to another city 4 to 5 hours away? What if I’d had jury duty I couldn’t get out of to go get my passport? What if I had a disability that makes travel extra challenging? Oh, wait, I do have a disability that makes this kind of travel challenging! (Luckily the new meds are working well and I managed to get through this without puking.) I know it’s got to be the case that not everyone can make this kind of journey. Someone might be able to scrape together the funds for the passport fees and the expedited fees (anything less than ten weeks away will need to be expedited) but not be able to also cover the travel expense. Here are my expenses. $55 bus to Boston, $7.20 for the subway (including the trip I didn’t take because the train didn’t come) $40 Lyft to appointment, $83 bus back to NYC – plus various meals and snacks. That’s $185.20 not including the food and other expenses. My expedited passport was $190.00. It’s a lot of money just to get out of the country for a little bit. And add in the time cost of all this and you’re running into some serious expense. It’s out of reach for a lot of people. And maybe you’re thinking, “oh come on, just give the process the six months lead up you’d need to renew and it’ll only cost, like $79 ($60 for the passport, $12 for the photos, $7 for the postage). Just make sure you have nowhere to go in that time because you have to surrender your passport for this six month process.” Sure, it would be great if everyone could keep track of this sort of thing. But the bandwidth for people dealing with scarcity is significantly diminished (read Scarcity if you doubt this) so someone without significant money is much more likely to be in a position to need a passport in a hurry.
It starts to feel like a sinister way to keep lower income Americans from leaving the country. And maybe this is smart because maybe if they got more opportunities to travel, they’d see all the places that do a much better job at participating in the global culture, that have better safety nets for its lower income citizens and better healthcare (and transportation and safety and so on). Maybe all these obstacles are part of some cynical plot to keep our citizens locked into the same narrow patterns of behavior. It can sure seem that way but it’s probably just a big bureaucracy, understaffed and underfunded by the government-hating previous administration, just doing what they can…and not worrying about all the people that are left behind.
This piece has taken me so long to write that I am now on a small island on the West Coast of Canada, sitting on a pier, enjoying the spectacular view of the ocean and the mountains and this pier not only features an excellent coffee shop but also public washrooms. Across America, you would be hard pressed to find places to pee that won’t require spending money. America is unconcerned with its citizens basic needs. You realize that when you travel. Maybe that’s why they make it so hard to do.
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Filed under: American, economics, Healthcare | Tags: American, disability, doctors, health insurance, Healthcare, medicaid, medical system, medication, migraine, refill, strict policy
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 my access to it was essentially guaranteeing me pain, suffering, loss of work, loss of pleasure, loss of comfort. It is an incredibly cruel choice for a doctor to make. A migraine specialist (which this doctor is) should know that and she either doesn’t know that (which is troubling) or she doesn’t care (also extremely troubling).
This experience has shaken me in a wide variety of ways. The first way was to give me two entirely avoidable migraines. It would have been more but I took some expired lower doses of my meds, which helped a bit – but then they just fizzled out two to three hours before the next dose so I was having to calculate how much earlier I needed to take the meds each day. Is taking expired medication dangerous? It’s not good, no – but probably not dangerous, just less effective. I googled what to do when you your doctor won’t refill your medication and I got on to GoodRx and managed to get a 90 day supply. So – hot tip if you’re in this position – this is an option. Not a great one – a medication that normally costs me a dollar cost me $30 and was not a long term solution. But I got it in my hot little hand and then I canceled my appointment with the sadist doctor.
This drama is all absolutely ridiculous and pointless, really. And what I’m wrestling with its connection to both economics and disability.
Why did this doctor make this decision?
I was told she had a “strict policy” – but why? My medication is not an opioid or anything that might be abused. It’s one of the most commonly prescribed medications out there. I felt as though I were being punished for needing the medication and also for not coming in to see the doctor before. But this doctor is nearly impossible to get an appointment with. Everyone in the practice is like this. I made the appointment in the summer and the first available appointment was in December. When I canceled with this sadist doc, the next available appointment I could get with someone who took my insurance was, again, six months down the line. If you cannot see patients, having a “strict policy” about seeing patients before refilling their meds is a guaranteed cruel double bind for patients. It feels as though there’s an odd kind of judgment of the patients, a kind of assumption that they are careless and lazy about their health.
I assume this effect is magnified for Medicaid patients like myself. I know doctors don’t make much money from us. That’s why my doctors are always leaving to go do more profitable things. (My last neurologist now runs an on-line migraine clinic where you can have easy access to your doctor for a membership fee of $22 a month plus $150 doctor visits!) Doctors, of course, make judgments about people who use Medicaid insurance. They assume we are dumb, irresponsible and careless of our health because we don’t have much money. They don’t make money from us so they don’t make themselves available for our care and so six months can be the shortest wait you’ll find. With my previous doctor, I’d have to make appointments a year to a year and a half in advance.
I assume there’s also a kind of ableism at play here as well. It’s a kind of tough guy, “migraine won’t kill you” sort of thinking – because technically that’s true – a migraine will not be fatal, at least not directly – but fatality shouldn’t be the only measure for care. I felt an implied sense of “you should be able to be without your medication for a while” – a kind of “you don’t need this” vibe. I have heard almost exactly this from a doctor before. And you know – I would LOVE not to need medication. What I wouldn’t give to make it so. I don’t like that I am entirely dependent on a medicine to have a decent quality of life. But I suffered through quite a few years of absolute misery trying to find something that would help me get back to a kind of normalcy and I feel very lucky to have found something. Not everyone does. To have it arbitrarily taken away because a doctor has a “strict policy” just highlights for me how necessary it is.
In fact, it’s made me realize that I do, in fact, have a disability. I have been in denial about this for some time. I felt like I wanted to be an ally for people with disabilities, but from the outside, you see, not as a person with a disability myself. But a week and a half without my preventative meds and I am out of commission. My medication is not as visible as a wheelchair but it is what allows me to get around and participate in society. It took years of trial and error to find the balance of medications to make this work. I felt like I was on pretty solid ground – until I was denied what I needed. Then I realized how disabled I am and have been. Migraine is an invisible disability and is also the second most disabling disease worldwide. It is incurable and can only be managed. Even with all my medication in place, my migraine tracking app tells me I am severely disabled. I mostly don’t feel myself so – because I’ve found a way to (sort of) manage them – but also, I’m pretty sure, because of ableism, I do not want to be disabled and because my particular disability is invisible, I can get away with pretending I’m not. But this incident with my medication has made me recognize an uncomfortable truth. I have a disability. When I fight for people who have disabilities, I’m fighting from the inside now. You take away our migraine meds; you’re taking away our mobility aids. Things like this are not “Nice to Haves” – they are “Need to Haves.”
As a way to deal with this drama with my doctor, I joined the migraine subreddit just to feel myself among others who might understand what I was going through. I didn’t post anything but I found such a wide array of experiences there. There were so many migraineurs there who have been dismissed, who have been told to toughen up and deal since it’s “just a headache” (It’s not, btw, it’s a neurological disease. Sometimes it’s not even a headache.) The community there made me feel lucky, actually, to have access to neurologists, medication and supportive friends and family. Many people have none of these things. The gaps in care, in this country in particular, are quite shocking.
I’m lucky to live in a major city with multiple neurological practices – so when the first one didn’t really work for me, I was able to go to a second. I may have been shuffled among doctors such that I have now seen six neurologists since 2016 but I have also been able to see six neurologists when others may have only one neurologist in the area and they may not have any expertise in migraine. If someone in that sort of situation is denied a refill of their medication by their doctor, they can’t just go see another one, the way I did. (Not that I had a lot of choice, very few of the neurologists at the neurology center take my insurance but still, I had a couple of options, even with my Medicaid limitations.)
Everyone I talked to about this situation that was IN the system seemed shocked that I canceled my appointment with the doc who denied my meds. “You’d have only had to wait another week!” they said. But I felt very clear that I would not receive good care from someone who would make needlessly cruel choices. I also wasn’t sure I’d be able to avoid yelling at her (or worse, not yell at her) and that’s not the way I wanted to meet someone new.
I was not scheduled to see the doctor to whom I switched for another six months, as it was the first available appointment, but when my refill came across her desk, the new doctor had her assistant book me in for a video appointment for the next day so she could go ahead and refill my meds with confidence. It was done so gracefully and with care. She may, in fact, have the same “strict policy” that the first doctor had but rather than make me suffer, she made space to see that my continuity of care wasn’t needlessly disrupted. It was generous and kind and after all the pointless drama, it was exactly what I needed.
The profit motive in healthcare is horrible. We all know it’s horrible. Those who are poor and those who are on things like Medicaid (of which I am one) know it even more acutely. Those who are disabled (again, of which I am one) are also more aware than most of how the healthcare system is constantly devolving due to the profit motive. People are denied life sustaining medications every day – by their doctors or their health insurance. (I have had multiple medications denied multiple times as “not medically necessary” by my health insurance, sometimes after years of use, when they are literally the only thing that work.) The cruelty and immorality of this system is overwhelming to consider. I want to fight it but it’s so commonplace, it feels like fighting the rain. It will fall, over and over again. It feels as though there’s nothing to be done. But our healthcare system is not rain. This a choice we, as a country, have made and continue to make. Other countries prioritize the health of their people. Some do a better job of caring for the most vulnerable than others but at the very least the intention is there to care for everyone.
There are so many advocates for medical justice. I’m only beginning to become aware of them. I’m so grateful for their work. I don’t know how I can help them yet but I do know that the cruelty and ableism built into our current system needs to change.
When I was in the middle of the worst of this mess, I looked up the reviews of the doctor who denied refilling my medication. She had a two out of five star average and one patient had written “This is the worst doctor in NYC.” (Do you know how bad you have to be to be the worst doctor in NYC?! Very bad.) So it’s clear that I made a good decision in switching, for a multitude of reasons and I’m lucky as hell there was another kinder doctor to switch to.
Until the migraine situation kicked in for me in 2016, I had been a very healthy person. I went for years without health insurance because I never needed to go to the doctor. It was easy not to worry about how messed up our medical system was because I didn’t have to deal with it. (Though of course our medical system being so profit driven was the other reason I didn’t have health insurance before the Affordable Care Act so you know…it actually WAS impacting me.) I have to deal with the medical system now. There are those who make it smooth and those who throw needless obstacles in the road. The obstacle throwing ones, like that doc I never met, create suffering, fury, migraines and blog posts like this one. The kind ones simply help us.
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Filed under: American, feminism, movies, theatre | Tags: American, American Buffalo, cinema, macho, Ray Liotta, theatre, True West, WTF podcast, WTF with Marc Maron
When I saw Ray Liotta had died, I was shocked and saddened. I was a fan of his work and he seemed like a good human. In his honor, I listened to an interview he did with Marc Maron on the WTF podcast a few years ago and enjoyed learning more about him and his journey. It did make me think, though. And it did make me wish for change in the way we do show biz. Apparently, Liotta had no real interest in acting when the opportunity to do it presented itself to him. He got talked into auditioning for a show because of a cute girl and stuck around because a teacher encouraged him. Nothing too crazy there. I’ve definitely heard this sort of story before.
But it’s the reason that Liotta theorized that his teacher encouraged him that got me thinking. Liotta had always been a jock and, it sounds like, a fairly macho guy. His teacher responded to him because they didn’t get a lot of guy’s guys there in the college theatre department. He saw a kindred male spirit and a kind of rare bird that they needed on the stage. Liotta really wasn’t that keen on acting in the beginning but he got to play some very juicy roles at his university and it’s not just because he was good. I’m guessing Liotta’s college decided to do A Streetcar Named Desire because they had a guy who could play Stanley Kowalski. They did Taming of the Shrew probably because they had a guy who could do a macho Petruchio. Liotta got to learn how to act by doing some of the best roles in the canon and the college got to do some shows on its list. All very reasonable. Many a school will choose their season based on who they have in casting pool. I get it on all levels.
But it also troubles me – because while I’m glad we had Liotta’s talents to enjoy on the screen – the way the path was smoothed for him (when he gave not two figs for it at the start) and the way it is not smoothed for so many others, just doesn’t feel FAIR to me. The way the American Theatre (and Cinema) fetishizes macho men is disturbing, really. There are endless roles for them, despite the fact that the theatre is largely populated by women and gay men. “Fellas, is it gay to be into theatre?” Maybe a little bit! Yet in spite of the inherent queerness in the form, or maybe because of it, the macho man is embraced, encouraged and given pride of place over and over again.
The American Theatre is dominated by macho plays and macho actors. How many revivals of American Buffalo do we need? A lot, apparently. I loved True West the first time I saw it. And even the second and third time. Then there was that time I assistant directed a production of it at a college of 75% women. Enough’s enough. Anyway, Liotta wasn’t in the theatre for long – because this pipeline between the theatre and film was built for men like him. Macho men from the theatre get snapped up into film, which also has a high demand for men who could be mobsters and so someone who had no interest in acting at first could be swept up into one of the most prestigious careers around. And I’m glad that it happened to Ray Liotta because I’m happy we had him while he was here but I can’t help feeling sad for all the people who LOVED the theatre, who ate, slept and drank it, who would have done anything to have a shot and no one ever took them under their wing and helped them to a wide range of opportunities. No one ever chose a season based on their presence in the casting pool. No one saw them in a play and put them in a soap opera. No one ever saw them in a soap opera and put them in a prestige film. I hate looking at a class full of actors and knowing that the person most likely to find success will be the man most macho, no matter how much more talented or dedicated or passionate his peers might be. Sorry, ladies, non-binaries and gays, the theatre is dependent on there being thousands like you but it will always choose the macho fella who doesn’t care about it first. The theatre loves a cool disinterested man who can help it grapple with masculinity, I guess. Anyway – RIP Ray Liotta, even if I am a little mad about how your success came to you. One day I’d love to hear a story about a woman who just didn’t care that much about theatre but some teacher just had to have her in the show anyway and she became a big big star.
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Filed under: American, art, dance, pandemic, theatre | Tags: #cancelrent, American, dance, Dance Audition, Darwinian Economics, making it, pandemic, performing arts, possibilities, rent, Zeynep Tufekci
There was a moment there, in the early days of last year, where it felt like we could have had something different. In looking back at my posts from then, I see how we were poised on this needle of possibility. There was a funny kind of hope – a kind of excitement almost – that we could fundamentally alter how we do things. We could turn our weird dystopia of an experience upside down and have a transformed society.
It felt like there was a moment where we could have canceled rent, could have saved untold people and businesses, could have paid folks to stay at home and created a space for a transformative moment in society. There was a kind of giddiness in the possibility – a grappling with our values and seeing how we could have a society that really cared for one another. I feel like it was close enough to taste.
But of course – we didn’t choose that way. We chose to go full dystopia and let half a million people die, many more to get sick, or lose their homes or their jobs. It didn’t have to be this way. But it’s what we did.
I can’t say I’m surprised. I can get pretty cynical about our American default settings. What I was surprised about was how palpable the other way was for a moment. It was modeled by other countries, for one thing. There were many places that sent their populations home and paid them to stay there. There were places that swung into action in looking after its vulnerable populations. There were places that developed ways for the whole to look after one another, even in isolation. There were places that supported artists specifically – knowing their livelihoods were decimated. Watching so many countries find ways to help their citizenry gave me a glimpse into a world where our lives might actually be valuable, instead of disposable. It helped me imagine a kinder world – one that didn’t require the claws and teeth of a constant struggle for survival.
As a Struggling ArtistTM I have long felt the strong undertow of Darwinian Economics. It feels like my entire career in the arts is pervaded by the atmosphere of a herd constantly being culled. Life in the arts is a giant dance audition where you’re waiting for your name to be called to see if you’ve been cut or made the cut. If you make the cut and survive to dance another round, you do not mourn those who were cut in your stead, you celebrate and dance another day.
Many years ago, I remember one of my NYC theatre company peers declaring that if there were companies folding, it was for the best – because it cleared the field for those of us with survival skills. I pushed back on this at the time – I was concerned by the loss of our elders and how much the system favored the privileged and the young, to say nothing of the white and the abled. Survival of the fittest, in theatre, often means the survival of the richest and most privileged. It doesn’t make for good art. It doesn’t make a vibrant community.
Survival becomes a badge of honor and the badge gets more impressive the longer you wear it. You either make it or you don’t. And while we think of “making it” as the mark of success, it’s also just – did you make it? Did you make it out of the scary place alive? Making it can just be getting to the end of the movie when so many of the other characters were lost.
I sort of thought this was just an arts thing – but watching our various governments handle this pandemic, I’ve realized that it’s everywhere. But now it’s actually life or death. The arts feel that way but you won’t actually die if you don’t make the cut. You might feel like you’re dying in being separated from your art but you still survive. In real life now – if you don’t operate with a certain amount of privilege – you might well actually die. Those who fled to their second houses are living through a very different pandemic than the ones who continued to work in the essential (and dangerous) jobs. Those were the people who the culture deemed no big deal to lose. We certainly didn’t pay them much better for the risks they were taking. Hazard pay was haphazard and we lost a lot of people. One of the things I keep thinking about is something Zeynep Tufekci said in her article, “5 Pandemic Mistakes We Keep Repeating.”
The poor and minority groups are dying in disproportionately large numbers for the same reasons that they suffer from many other diseases: a lifetime of disadvantages, lack of access to health care, inferior working conditions, unsafe housing, and limited financial resources.
Many lacked the option of staying home precisely because they were working hard to enable others to do what they could not, by packing boxes, delivering groceries, producing food. And even those who could stay home faced other problems born of inequality: Crowded housing is associated with higher rates of COVID-19 infection and worse outcomes, likely because many of the essential workers who live in such housing bring the virus home to elderly relatives.
Individual responsibility certainly had a large role to play in fighting the pandemic, but many victims had little choice in what happened to them. By disproportionately focusing on individual choices, not only did we hide the real problem, but we failed to do more to provide safe working and living conditions for everyone.
The Atlantic, February 26, 2021
It is chilling to realize how ready to sacrifice others so many people are. This notion of personal responsibility allowed us to blame individuals rather than the systems that were killing off large numbers of people. The problem was not so much that the disease was intractable but more that our systems are so full of holes, we were bound to lose a lot of people through them and we did. But because as a nation, we seem to find the notion of disposable people acceptable, we just let them all get sick and let many of them die. It feels like somehow we’re in a war and are prepared to accept great losses for some reason.
One of the places that this country was seemingly fine to accept great losses was in the arts. The field has been decimated. The country just shrugged. No more arts? Fine. The Performing Arts have been closed for a year and only the most established and supported of organizations (or the smallest and most nimble) could survive such brutal depletion. But it’s just artists. No great loss.
It just – didn’t have to be this way. Certainly, we can blame part of it on the terrible leadership at the national level last year and also on terrible leaderships at the state and local levels as well. My governor cut funding to hospitals in the middle of all this. Does that make any sense? But as a people, I feel like we were all that dog with his coffee cup surrounded by flames saying “This is fine” when it was very clearly not fine. Much has been made of the great revealing of holes in our social net with all this. The pandemic has shown us so many failings. But it also showed us some hope for a different way of doing things there at the beginning. The solutions that were offered then would have fixed a LOT of things. If we’d paid people to stay home at first, fewer would have had to risk their lives out in the world and we’d have beat this thing by now. That simple choice would have been cheaper than all the scrambling stop gap measures that came after if we’d paid out the 1.9 trillion that just passed back in April of 2020, we’d already be back in business. But this country really does value money more than people. All those re-openings are not for people, they are for money. One of the riskiest things you can do is sit inside a restaurant – and yet it is one of the first things to come back, ostensibly to keep restaurants in business. But no restaurant can stay in business at 25% capacity. If we want to save restaurants, the way to do it is to cancel their rent. But landlords’ money is more important than restaurant workers’ lives and so the dystopia continues.
Sorry. Living in a dystopia where people are disposable is kind of getting me down. But remembering that moment of hope, from early on, where we could have made other choices, actually gives me a little boost. We could still make choices like that. We don’t have to be in a pandemic to do it. We could live in a kinder world, one where everyone gets to dance and no one gets cut.
Also, the studio has been cut as well.
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Filed under: American, pandemic | Tags: American, brave face, No complaints, pandemic, Positive Thinking, suckage, suckitude, this sucks, virus
Hey everyone – just in case you hadn’t noticed, this whole situation really sucks. I know this seems obvious and it is. But the fact that it’s obvious and that we’re all experiencing it, doesn’t make it suck any less. It sucks. Totally and completely. I just thought it might be important to acknowledge the suckitude.
I’ve been seeing (virtually, of course, not so much IRL because I don’t see much IRL) a lot of people working really hard to be okay, to make a positive out of this giant negative and I’m seeing a lot of folks really suffer because of it. I think the American strategy of thinking positive and putting on a brave face is starting to really crack at the seams. I was in a shop the other day and when I asked the cashier how he was doing, he said, very brightly, “I have no complaints!” I found it very jarring, frankly. No complaints? Really? None? I did not say so, though. I just sputtered something, matching his cheeriness, like, “No complaints? Wow. Well, that’s great!”
I cannot imagine having no complaints. But of course, just below the surface of this very cheery statement of no complaint was a WORLD of complaints. He didn’t share them with me (nor did I expect or want him to) but he then told me that complaints were for home. Here, at his place of work, he must always bring the positive attitude. He told me he could not share such complaints with other people. I asked, “What if someone has the same complaint? Then you could commiserate.” But he did not see the appeal of this strategy.
I think he may not be alone in that thinking. It is very American to try and Positive Think one’s way out of a bad situation. It seems to have pretty much been the only strategy for dealing with Covid 19 that was employed by the Trump Administration. Think Positive! (“It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”) It continues to be the strategy a lot of Americans employ. The “I won’t get sick. I’m strong! I don’t need to wear a mask! If I just believe it hard enough, I will be fine!”
But even for those who are taking precautions, who are wearing their masks, who are staying at home, who are maintaining social distance, there’s a whole lot of Staying Positive work happening. (“I’m getting so much time with my family! I made bread! I can learn a new language if I want!”) But it’s getting harder and harder to put a positive shine on this business. I think we may need to find some release valves for everyone.
For me – just acknowledging that it sucks is helpful. Every so often just saying it out loud or texting it to a friend or shouting it while doing an interpretative dance can really make a difference. It SUCKS, y’all! This SUCKS. It sucks to wear a mask. It sucks to not see our friends. It sucks to be stuck in a tiny ass apartment with not one single comfortable place to sit. It sucks to have no theatre. It sucks not to be able to go to the movies. It sucks not to go to restaurants. It sucks not go to concerts. It sucks, it sucks, it sucks. It sucks not to be able to browse around bookstores. It sucks not to recognize people on the street. It sucks to not know when this madness will actually end. It sucks not to be able to sit in cafés and stare out the window. It sucks not to have any use for the lipstick I found in my coat pocket from last winter and still somehow don’t have the heart to remove. It sucks to have every single meal at the same table sitting on the same stool. It sucks to not really know what day of the week it is because it doesn’t really matter. It sucks to not see our families. There are a multitude of ways that this sucks that are beyond just dealing with the realities of the virus.
I think a lot of the people who are resisting the restrictions, who refuse to wear masks or limit their contacts are largely not used to things sucking that they can’t put a positive spin on, so instead of acknowledging the suck, they just get angry and refuse to participate.
The American way has historically been that when things suck, we just forge ahead, pretend that everything is fine – that there isn’t racism anymore, for example, that we’ve solved inequity and everyone can just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, even if they don’t have any boots.
I don’t think this is working anymore. I don’t think we can Positive Think our way out of this. Everyone I know is struggling. We’re hanging in there but it is hard. It sucks. I can’t pretend otherwise. I have complaints and I feel better every time I can share them with someone. What’s that saying? A trouble shared is a trouble halved? I’m not sure it works quite as well as halving a trouble but it does help and if you need to tell someone how much all this sucks, please feel free to share all the suckitude here in the comments.
But what about gratitude? Shouldn’t we practice feeling grateful and lucky? I actually don’t think the two things are mutually exclusive. I feel extraordinarily fortunate to have survived. Honestly, I suspect anyone who stayed here in NYC in April feels a profound sense of gratitude for how lucky we are not to be among the dead or hospitalized. I am awash in my good fortune of remaining healthy and in my privilege at being able to protect myself and others by staying home. And it sucks. I’m lucky to be alive! And every day feels almost exactly the same and that sucks.
I suspect that my current willingness (and need) to express the suckage is partly because the worst part of this storm was almost a year ago for me. The storm is surging elsewhere these days so I do have the space and the air to feel something besides relief at my survival. Others in this country are not so lucky right now. That sucks. That sucks for everyone.
Things suck, in varying degrees, and we have to be able to say so. No matter how much more things suck for someone else, they can still suck for you. I’m not a psychologist but I’ve read enough about mental health to know that saying what’s actually happening tends to be a good idea. Pretending that something that sucks doesn’t suck is a surefire way to twist yourself up.
Partly, I think we’re not talking about how much this sucks because it’s so obvious. What is there to talk about? It sucks in the same relentless way, every day the same sort of suckage. People are connecting with one another less because they have so little to report. “What are you up to?” “Oh, you know, exactly what I was up to for the previous eleven months.” And we don’t want to complain, when so many people are sick or dying or managing their job Zooms and children’s Zooms simultaneously. The specifics of our complaints feel so pointless to share. But I think we at least need to acknowledge that it sucks. Or, as we do in our apartment, joke about how great everything is. We swing between saying, “Hey – you know what? This whole thing sucks!” and “Just in case you hadn’t noticed, everything is absolutely great and everyone is having a marvelous time.”
Things suck right now and while there are reasons to believe they will get better, they still suck for the moment and I think it’s important to say so. At least for me. For my buddy at the shop, he may need to insist on a world of no complaints and if it helps him get through this moment, then that is good. I am not here to take away anyone’s crutch if it’s helping them move forward. But for me, though, this all sucks and I gotta say so.
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Filed under: American, theatre | Tags: American, American theatre, Beef and Boards, coronavirus, Covid 19, Epidaurus, Greece, New Zealand, the death of theatre, The Persians, theater, theatre, United States of Covid, zombification
For the last few months, I have been trying to grapple with the loss of my primary art form. When theatres shut down back in March, it was painful but we all hoped it was temporary – just a little disruption in our theatre lives. As time has worn on, and the virus has gotten worse here in the US than it was when they shut the theatres down (Florida reported 12,000 cases this week, which is twice what New York had back in April at the height of things.) it has become increasingly clear that theatre won’t be back any time soon. The art and business that we knew and loved is dead. There’s a small chance of zombification but theatre as we knew it is probably over.
The actually real theatre folks over at Beef and Boards may be giving their dystopic socially distanced dinner theatre a shot there in Indiana, but not many are clamoring to follow their very disturbing example. Institutions are crumbling (maybe this is good?) smaller venues are closing and many a former New York theatre maker has moved back to the place they came from. As unemployment benefits expire, the small inner tube that was keeping many a theatre person afloat is floating away with their future, hopes and dreams. Without some support, the American Theatre, which was already struggling, will start to lose its limbs and then fall apart entirely.
Maybe it will reassemble into something more equitable and beautiful but it is falling apart, no question. And despite much more substantive support, I wondered, too, if the UK theatre was also in decline. I wondered if theatre was dying all over the world.
And then, I tuned in to the live-streamed production of The Persians at the Epidaurus Theatre in Greece. I assumed we’d be watching performers in an empty theatre, doing their work for the cameras – but when I opened the link, half an hour before the show, the camera revealed an audience settling in, making their way to their seats, the way an audience does. I found myself weeping at the sight. An audience! There’s an audience! I had convinced myself we’d never see their like again and there was a giant crowd assembling to watch a play. There went the President of Greece and her entourage to go and sit in the front rows! They’ve brought the country together for this!
And here was the world, on the internet, gathering to watch an ancient play in an ancient theatre – and there, in the seats, were the people who lived there. (I’m assuming the majority of the people in the audience were Greek, since no one’s really traveling these days.) It was all very moving, even before the play began.
It was the sight of Theatre, alive and well and vibrant in a place where it has thrived for over two thousand years. Theatre may be dead here in the United States (along with over 140,000 people who might still be with us if we’d handled this crisis with anything like the skill of the people of Greece – or New Zealand where they are currently resuming live performances again) but in other parts of the world, theatre is bringing people together and demonstrating its extraordinary power.
Theatre may be dead for us here but it lives elsewhere and I have to hope it will live for us again one day. It won’t be any time soon, except for at, the actually real and not a satire, Beef and Boards, but one day we might all sit in a room together and cheer at an expression of our national pride the way the Greeks did during The Persians. I don’t know what will make us feel proud in that far away future – but I have to hope we will be proud of something, If only our survival of this moment, this administration, this mess. We will have theatre in the future and we might feel pride again, too.
Not now. We’ve let our theatres die alongside so many humans – but theatre will rise, I hope. It lives and thrives elsewhere. We can look to those places for inspiration. Long live the Theatre.
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Filed under: American, art institutions, Leadership, Shakespeare, theatre | Tags: American, American Moor, American theatre, Denzel Washington, fury, Othello, rage, Shakespeare
The show nailed the standard white American male theatre director so well, I found I had fantasies of kicking his head down the road a few days later. Forgive me the violent imagery but I guess I’m a little bit furious.
American Moor is a show about an actor grappling with the weight of Othello. Caught in a tug of war between the demands of the racist American Theatre system and his African American peers, the character rails and resists. He wants to rage against the injustices that rain down but he keeps himself in check. He also attempts to audition for the role.
The last half of the piece is a glimpse of both that audition and the internal struggle of adapting to its demands.
While much of the show addresses the specificity of this actor’s experience – specifics that, as a white woman, I do not share – I found myself relating to it deeply.
One of the themes that kept arising was the way the actor’s black male body was a source of fear for white theatre makers. This character had to continually manage the racist fears of the people around him. His getting a job depended on his presenting a minimized self – a nice, safe, unchallenging version of himself, one that has never known anger and would never need express it.
I relate to this despite the fact that, much to my dismay, no one is ever frightened of me. No one assumes I am powerful and aggressive. Not ever. I don’t have to adjust my presence in a room to placate that fear – because no one ever fears it. I have, however, in my acting days, turned myself WAY down in order to appear ladylike, like I could be an ingénue. I have shrunk myself into a girlish form so as to be seen as a possible object. I know what it’s like to bring all my intelligence to a part and then be asked to ingratiate myself, to seduce, to giggle, to be more malleable. And anger? What is anger? Why would I be angry? I’m sweet! And nice!
I know what it feels like to have to hide myself and defer to the patronizing white guy with all the power and authority. It is, fundamentally, why I stopped acting. Because being asked to do only one thing when I am built to do 20 others things was more frustration than I was prepared to handle. And, for entirely different reasons than the character in American Moor, I, too, would never be allowed to express my rage in the theatre.
As I watched the show, the director in me wanted to push aside the character of the patriarchal dolt in charge and take over his show. “Oh, you can’t recognize the opportunity that is in front of you? Oh, you can’t set aside your own limited understanding to make space for the human being in the room with you? You don’t know how to do that? Well – I do. Get out of my damn way, dude.” And in part, this is why I quit directing. There are too many pricks in power. They kept wanting me to be like them.
So much of my experience in and out of classical theatre in America suddenly made sense. It made a kind of sense that made me want to run screaming through the streets – but still…sense!
Seeing the racism that this performer encountered in the worlds I have touched down was chilling. I have seen some of it with my own eyes and failed to recognize how awful it was. I have seen classical scholars or theatre makers look black men up and down and ask, “Have you played him?” I’ve seen that. It happens ALL the TIME. Just the other day, I saw a post about Denzel Washington’s upcoming performance as Macbeth and someone commented that he’d rather see him as Othello. Fact is, that commenting guy already sees Denzel Washington as Othello. It’s the only part that guy can imagine a black guy doing.
This is not something I have had to deal with. There are 1-4 women in each play and there is not one whose race is specified. No one will ever ask if I’ve played “her.” No one would know who they meant. I am lucky that way.
By the end of this show, tears were streaming down my face. I wasn’t entirely sure why. In part, I think, it’s because it ended with a possibility of transformation. The show had a hope, for a moment, that the white guy director could see a way to change and help bring forth that change. I think I was crying, though, because I didn’t believe for a minute that that guy was going to change. I knew he wouldn’t. (Spoiler Alert: He didn’t.) And I came all over mournful for the state of American Theatre and how little hope I have for its doing anything much different than it has always done. I mean, sure, the #MeToo Movement has made waves and we’ve ousted the most egregious examples in the theatre but mostly, if dudes managed to keep their hands more or less to themselves, it’s still their sandbox.
One of the themes of American Moor was how the character, pigeonholed into Othello, really wanted to play Titania and Feste and Juliet. And honestly, if I had my hands on a theatre with a budget, I would cast him that way without even hesitating. I think a lot of us on the outskirts of the American Theatre would make that choice. But the mainstream is stuck in a world where everyone has to look the part, where Desdemonas have to be tiny, beautiful and blonde and black men can only play Othello and it shall always be thus, now and forever.
And maybe it seems like it’s just classical theatre that is like this – but it isn’t. Many of the plays that continue to march through our stages enforce similar status quos. Every theatre wants to do their artistic director’s True West and almost every artistic director is the same variety of white man. White guys raging at each other is American Theatre’s brand.
There are changes coming, I know. I know there’s a wave of people of color stepping into authority at theatres across America – but while it’s still news, still an exceptional shift, it feels like that change is a very long way off.
Anyway, I’ll be over here kicking an imaginary white guy director’s head down the road for a while and hopefully someone stepping into new power and authority will cast the guy from American Moor as Titania soon. I hope his Titania rages.
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Filed under: resistance | Tags: 45, American, anywheres, congresspeople, David Goodhart, resist, resistance, Senators, somewheres, United States of America
Never do I feel more American than when I travel abroad. At home, my identity tends to be more specific – the city I was born in, the state I’m from, the city I live in or the borough in that city or even the neighborhood in that borough. I don’t feel American in America – partly because I have always felt so countercultural. Americans are like THIS and I am like THAT. I have tended to identify more with other cultures. I have even (unsuccessfully) tried to emigrate in order to be in places that align more closely with my interests and values. If European countries had looser immigration policies, I would have moved there long ago. But…I am American. And going abroad always helps me appreciate the good side of that, in times I’m mostly seeing the bad. I have enjoyed those moments when my Americanism becomes obvious – when my friends abroad tease me for my optimism or my accent.
During my recent trip abroad, I found myself in a new position with my European friends. American politics are in the news everywhere there. As one friend told me, the first story of every news broadcast is whatever crazy thing Trump did that day. Before any news of their own country, they get news of ours. My friend was understandably frustrated by that. Trump is happening to everyone in the world, not just to us Americans. My friends felt the need to vent about him, to imitate his speech or his mannerisms. They are laughing about the horrors they’re seeing and they want to laugh with me, their American friend.
The thing is, though, I’m not finding the current political situation funny. It is not amusing to hear imitation after imitation of the man who makes my skin crawl, to hear his faults listed and marveled at and analyzed – as if he were just a character in a play. To me, it feels as though 45 or Lil Donnie T or He Who Must Not Be Named (see why here…) is an arsonist who has set fire to my house and is blithely watching it burn. Every time someone imitates his speech or his gestures, it’s like looking at another face of the person who traumatized me. Objectively, I understand that he’s funny (or maybe more precisely – buffoonish and ridiculous) but emotionally, it’s horrifying.
I’m from here. I live here. My house, my America, however embarrassing it can sometimes be, is mine. Having this house, this America, was something that I could always rely on in the past. I had a certain amount of privilege in that house and others could not rely on it as much – but there were certain things we expected to remain. I grew up with a relatively stable government and a kind of classic American optimism that justice would prevail, even when all evidence pointed to the contrary. It wasn’t a perfect house but it was mine and now it is on fire. Every day I do something that I hope will help put out the fire but I fully expect the place to be a pile of ash before too long. I throw a thimble full of water on the fire, next to dozens of others, all of us, hoping to put it out…but knowing that it might take much more than our water to do it.
On election night last November – I fully expected us to be in the middle of the new Third Reich by now. I was emotionally preparing for concentration camps and firing squads. I am not convinced we are free of that threat. Our issues may seem funny from a distance but here inside, we are watching a man with the ability to push a button and start a global nuclear war pick fights with everyone from kids on Twitter to world leaders who have similar access to weapons and who might be very glad to see Imperial America get its comeuppance. And if you believe that our famous checks and balances would prevent a nuclear holocaust, I would point you to this terrifying episode of Radio Lab.
We are watching what we thought was an increasingly tolerant and progressive nation become entrenched in increasing white supremacy. My seemingly peaceful hometown has become a site that white supremacist groups are targeting for their parades and rallies and celebrations. (And I would like to point out that I wrote the previous sentence back in July, before the Nazis showed up.) Even NYC, which, we who live here think of as a bastion of tolerance and diversity, has seen a disturbing trend of hate crimes. SPLC reports that hate groups have risen dramatically.
From where I’m standing, America is on fire and it will be ashes before too long if we can’t stop it. “Is there any hope?” my European friends ask. Sure. Yes. I guess. Every day a new batch of amazing people throw water on the fire. The resistance is persistent and powerful and fighting like hell. If you want to watch some extraordinary fire fighters in the middle of the government, follow Representative Maxine Waters, Representative Ted Liu, Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Elizabeth Warren. There is perhaps some hope that our Checks and Balances will find a way to check this fire. The on-going Russian investigation, the increasing calls for Impeachment, the way one Republican Congressman described how he could not go anywhere without women getting up in his grill…there are drops of hope and maybe all the drops will eventually put on the fire.
But meanwhile, please remember that our house is on fire and most of us are just barely keeping it together.
We need your help. Especially those of you who have lived through repressive regimes, through corrupt governments. You could be forgiven for just wanting to laugh at us, for just wanting to enjoy the schadenfreude of watching a nation that has been acting a bit too big for its britches finally get a comeuppance. America was probably due a reckoning given the way our governments have tended to go about the world like we owned the place – but remember that you have friends who were as dismayed by that, then, as you were. Perhaps more. It may be pleasurable to watch some madman set fire to the gaudy mansion on the hill – but remember that there are people inside, burning. People are dying now. Literally. We need the wisdom of the past so we do not end up repeating it. As Americans we have enjoyed an incredible amount of freedom and privilege before now and some of us were not prepared for the revocations of any of those things.
I learned, not long ago, about David Goodhart’s idea that culture is dividing into two worldviews – people from anywhere and people from somewhere. He defines Anywheres as mobile, educated, autonomous, open and fluid. Somewheres are more rooted, less well educated and value group attachments, familiarity and security. It is his explanation for Brexit in the UK. It also makes sense for our American situation. And I am very much an Anywhere. One thing that this burning-house-feeling has done for me, as an American Anywhere, is to make me feel my American-ness as acutely as I do when I’m abroad. I feel simultaneously more American than I have ever felt before and also deeply alienated from it. In the chaos, my sense of my Anywhere-ness has led me to become more of a Somewhere. When my hometown was attacked, I felt more from there. As my country struggles, I feel more from here. This year has made me feel as American as I feel when I’m away. It is a curious shift from being so firmly in the Anywhere camp to suddenly identifying with my Somewheres.
I am American, for good and ill. But I am from somewhere. And it’s here. While there is still a here to be from, I am from here.
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Filed under: art, theatre | Tags: American, Broadway, Canopy, ecosystem, Emergent, Forest Floor, Fringe, Non-Profit, Off-Off Broadway, Rainforest, Regional, UK, Understory
I saw a big fancy Broadway show that lots of my friends and colleagues had been raving about. It’s a show that utilizes the skills, ideas, movement vocabularies and motifs of devised and physical theatre. I saw elements of Viewpoints, of Chorus Work, of Dance Theatre. For many Broadway audiences, this piece felt extremely innovative and experimental. I’d wager that 97% of the audience had never seen anything like it before.
I, on the other hand, have seen a LOT of things like it before, though not with that kind of budget and all those bells and whistles. For me, it felt like old news dressed up in fancy trimmings. I could draw a direct line from the motifs I saw in this show to the innovative independent theatres I’ve seen in the UK. This show was a UK production and, in it, I could see echoes of Kneehigh, Improbable, Complicite, Frantic Assembly, Shared Experience – to name a few.
This has made me think about how complex the ecosystem of theatre is. I think of it as a Rainforest. A Rainforest’s ecosystem features the Emergent Layer at the top, the Canopy is below it. The Understory (or Shrub Layer) is next and the Forest Floor is at the bottom.
There are similar layers in the Ecosystem of Theatre Making. Here in the States, Broadway is the Emergent Layer – the trees that grow high above everything else. They are the ones that get the most light. They are the most visible. But the Emergent Layer can’t grow without the support of the layers below. The life cycle of plants on the forest floor directly feed those emergent trees. The ideas, skills and innovations at the bottom, feed the trees at the top.
Unfortunately American funding structures don’t support the layers of the forest below the Canopy. Money flows primarily to the Emergent Layer (Broadway) with some diversion to the Canopy (Regional, Off-Broadway theatres.) But the Understory and the Forest Floor are starved of funds. This is not good for the ecosystem as a whole.
In a way, the American Emergent Layer has been feeding on the Forest Floor of the British ecosystem for the last decade or so. This may change once the Arts Cuts in England start to starve the Understory and Forest Floor there, as well.
The Broadway audience owes its new encounter with “experimental” work to the investment the English Arts Council made in non-establishment research and development in the previous 25 to 30 years.
Now that the Arts Council England has had its funding drastically diminished, Broadway may not be able to depend on getting its innovations from the ecosystem across the pond. Perhaps, I might suggest, it would be worth investing locally – in providing support for the Shrub Layer and the Forest Floor in the very soil that Broadway Emergent Layer is planted. That’s the way to a healthy ecosystem. Save our Theatrical Rainforests!
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Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. This is the part where I pass the hat. If you liked the blog and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
Filed under: art, Creative Process | Tags: American, Artist, creativity, glitter, ideas, Inspiration, R & D, space
Over the years I’ve been a part of various schemes that are meant to help artists. Most of the schemes in NYC are schemes to improve our business skills, to make us bigger and more solid institutions. These make me nuts for reasons I have discussed many times before but recently, I’ve been involved in schemes that are meant to help give me ideas and inspirations. These make me nuts in a very different way.
I have so many ideas, folks. I have ideas for breakfast, ideas for lunch, ideas for afternoon tea, dinner and midnight snack. I am rolling in ideas. And I am grateful for that abundance of ideas. I feel I can never have too many – so I am always happy to be a part of something meant to increase my inspiration. But ideas are never my problem.
It’s like ideas are glitter. Glitter is wonderful. It makes everything it touches sparkle. Every time someone gives me more glitter, I’m going to be happy to receive it.
The thing I haven’t had is a place to PUT all this glitter. It’s pouring out of drawers, stuffed into socks, pooling in corners. When there’s no space to put my glitter or a container to store it, it can start to feel like a burden to keep receiving it. Someone gives me a handful of glitter and I’m like, “Oooooh! Glitter! Thank you!” And then I look around…Where is this going to go?
I suspect my fellow American Artists are also not short on ideas and inspiration. We’ve all seen shows and been lit up and gone home thinking, “I can’t wait to try something like that,” and then we realize that we have neither the time, the space nor the context to try that idea out. We don’t have R & D grants as some of our European colleagues do – everything we do is meant to be a product with a target audience and numbers to match. There’s not much space for glitter in the models we have. But glitter is often what we love, what we respond to. I will never refuse an idea – would never refuse a handful of glitter – but like glitter, ideas can find their way into inconvenient places and start to clog up the works if you never get an opportunity to use them or express them.
I don’t want to seem ungrateful for any program or scheme designed to give me glitter but these programs should know that giving me more glitter is not the way to increase the quality of American Theatre. I imagine that if you are not an artist, that ideas seem to be the currency for us – that increasing them would be the way to build up the bank of art. But we’ve got this covered. I’ve got so much glitter, so many ideas. I understand the possibilities. I have an aesthetic education gathered from glittery artists from around the world. I don’t need more glitter. I just need a place to play with it.
Luckily, I was recently given a space with no real strings and so I chose to use it to create my own R &D experience and am therefore incredibly grateful to be able to pull out boxes and boxes of glitter I’ve had sitting around for years. And I get more glitter every day, just because I have a place to play.
You can give me space for glitter by becoming my patron on Patreon.
Click HERE to Check out my Patreon Page
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This blog is also a Podcast. If you’d like to listen to me read it to you and here additional commentary, click here.
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Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. This is the part where I pass the hat. If you liked the blog and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
Songs for the Struggling Artist 