chicago, F&F

this train only goes in one direction

On a train from Jackson to Damen, in search of tacos, with two of my friends, young women of indeterminate age, they discover that I am older than both of them. They are surprised.

“Yes,” I say, “the late twenties.”

“What’s it like?” says one of them, and I realize she’s serious.

Luckily, I had just thought of the answer to this question a few days ago, while pondering a recent screw-up and its aftermath.

“Well, the thing is, you will keep on making the same mistakes,” I say, “but you make them much faster. It takes six weeks, as opposed to several years, to recognize what you’re doing and stop.”

“Yeah?” says the other.

“But you can’t consume as much alcohol or stay up as late as you used to,” I say, “so get your drinking in now.”

(This is the first time I have written a dialogue excerpt in fiction as opposed to play format.)

Standard
chicago, theater

write me the money

I began a new grantwriting project today, the first one for a Chicago theater. I’m very happy to be doing more of this kind of work. Grantwriting can be so cookie-cutter, but I really love the challenge of it – placing the maximum amount of style and creativity into a very restrictive form, a kind of praise-song. Superlatives upon superlatives. An abundance of excellence.

In the course of hanging around the theater I’ve met some other young people who are engaged in some kind of volunteering or assisting of the staff, and talked about employment prospects in the field. There’s no doubt that it doesn’t look too good right now.

I’m lucky to have some work. I think part of the reason I’ve managed to remain employed is that the extra-artistic skill set I’ve cultivated – grantwriting and fundraising – is more essential now than ever. No matter how bad it gets in the arts, until we all throw in the towel entirely, we will all, all of us, always need folks to go find us some more funding.

Standard
quotes

next question!

“PLAYBOY: Would you classify sex among your wants, wherever you go?

DYLAN: Sex is a temporary thing; sex isn’t love. You can get sex anywhere. If you’re looking for someone to love you, now that’s different. I guess you have to stay in college for that.

PLAYBOY: Since you didn’t stay in college, does that mean you haven’t found someone to love you?

DYLAN: Let’s go on to the next question.”

– the famous Dylan Playboy interview, which I reread every now and then, for the wisdom. Upon looking at it again – it’s been a few years – what I really like are the character names, PLAYBOY and DYLAN. It seems like they should have their own play, just the two of them, and that it should be far more detailed than this interview. It should be like Zoo Story, a new Zoo Story. Or like someone should name two parakeets PLAYBOY and DYLAN, in all caps, and record them squeaking, and call it The Playboy-Dylan Interview: II. Yes, yes, I can be clever. You can be clever. But there’s no getting away from the two of them.

Standard
quotes

here, in the world

“And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.”

– Zadie Smith, ON BEAUTY

She has said a lot of things, but this is my favorite.

Standard
chicago, F&F

football americain

I watched Super Bowl 43 with the same assortment of folks from the Indy Convergence with whom I watched Super Bowl 42. It’s hard to believe I’ve now known Robert and Caitlin for two years.

Last year, in Indianapolis, our crew was surrounded by an group of twenty rabid fans, who screamed every time the TV reception went out (often). I had driven in driving rain with a frustrated friend and actor in my front seat, and gotten lost several times in dark, streetlightless streets. I remember thinking that the Super Bowl was out there somewhere, but I was never, ever going to find it. We arrived late, and I had to turn round & take him home about 20 minutes later. We could barely focus on the football for the many theatrical crises growing around us. I was mid-production for the first reading of 13 WAYS and was so distracted I couldn’t sit down. Honestly, I don’t even know who won that game.

This was a much less dramatic and smaller party, with only six people. We ate Costco pizza and watched James Harrison run 100 yards. I was the only one in the room rooting for the Steelers, but we all respected each other’s loyalties. Lots of jokes about holding penalties and Madden’s unfortunate, repeated “double penetration” phrase. For the first time in my life, I watched every single minute of the football being played.

Rode the Western bus home from Lawrence to Division, and made myself obnoxious to the drunk people on the bus by asking if they were Steelers fans. They weren’t, but they were nice about it.

Robert and Caitlin depart today for the second annual Indy Convergence, and the Steelers have their sixth Super Bowl title. If you keep living, stuff keeps happening.

Standard
chicago, theater

you put your left foot in

Yesterday, I attended a play reading at a local theater, and was once again pleasantly surprised by the large Chicago audiences who turn out for new work. The play was good and the vocal audience discussion afterwards was even better.

I’m going to be taking a playwriting class and also doing some grantwriting this winter. Back in the game? Theater for Dara hasn’t always been the healthiest thing – or most conducive to sleep, rest, exercise, relationships, friends, three meals a day, a bank account bigger than a stick of gum, etc.

I am reminded, since it IS Super Bowl Sunday, of other people who take part in pasttimes (football? ice skating?) that can create long-term damage to the body or the soul. I read an article recently, which I can’t find this moment, that interviewed many former football players who were now dealing with lifelong injuries from their pursuit of the sport. Of course, they overwhelmingly said they had no regrets.

I do have some regrets about all the theater I’ve done, and the greatest one is financial. I wish that when I was younger and had enough energy to burn so many candles at so many ends that I looked like a human fireworks display that I had used some of that energy towards making money, to support myself in my late twenties, while I redistribute my energies more towards writing.

I have some sense of a few years mismanaged, of time not spent well, of decisions that could have been better made. I took care of the art but I didn’t take care of my self – and the result is some resentment, however slight, towards the art.

But being in that theater yesterday, hearing an audience experience a play in process-progress, I felt things I haven’t felt since I left. I felt my soul lifted like a tarp on an unused car. I felt the engines turn on.

If there is a way to keep doing this kind of work, but with less damage to body, soul, and checking account, then I’m going to try. Playwriting can’t kill you, right? Yet?

Standard
wordage, writing

untitled folder

Ah, January – when the desktop is studded with identical bright-blue icon-droids all bearing the name of “untitled folder,” full of important documents that you haven’t named, mostly titled “Document1” and “Copy of Document1,” and when the words of Polonius’s Guide to Portfolios become, with repetition, increasingly meaningless. This above all:

“A poem may be more than one page, however, please do not put more than one poem on each page.”

I used to be good at titles – these days I want to call everything “Baby Girl Poem (DOB 1-12-09), 3 stanzas, 11 lines.”

Standard