I spent today revising the Bylaws and Practices pages for UpstageProject, in preparation for another collaboration session with Amina tonight. I was surprised in doing it to find myself more interested in being editor of the Reviews & Interviews section than of the Articles. Part of this is probably from having had such a good experience doing the Crossover Interviews earlier this year, but I realized that I just have way too many opinions about what constitutes good or self-indulgent reviewing and interviewing in theater.

I remember a woman who I had some meetings with at Stanford who said that her standard response to people who suggested doing new things was:

“Are you volunteering to do that?”

She took a lot of pleasure in saying it in a really nasty tone of voice, to shoot them down, but I think it is a good principle – sometimes when you care about it that much, you should do it yourself.

Or else stay as far away from it as possible. I sometimes think I get in my own way. Excessive passion for something can be the enemy of getting it done. I spent too much time before this retreat with Amina agonizing about HOW to make the bylaws perfect, and not enough on actual revision.

Amina has suggested that it might be better to have me floating as an editor-at-large, to fill in gaps and/or be able to take over for people if needed. She’s probably right. I will remain open to any permutation on this.

We are using GoogleGroups, for the moment, to maintain our documents in progress. I still find PBWiki easier to use, and it loads faster, but in their respective free versions, GoogleGroups is a more powerful tool.