Skip to main content

NaBloPoMo Day 30: 10 Things I'm Thankful For

"Perspective" by Flickr user Justus Thane, licensed
under Creative Commons
It is the end.

Wait, that's not one of the things.

But it is the end of this blogging month. I remarked to a friend, "I was surprised to find out how much energy it took to write, being unaccustomed to it any more." Said friend, a writer by trade, chuckled and agreed.

I didn't hit my daily goal, but I did blog more than I have, well, ever. So I'm calling that a success.

So, without further ado and in no particular order, 10 Things I'm Thankful For:

1. Live theater 
2. A job in live theater 
3. My family who make possible my job in live theater 
4. My friends who encourage my job in live theater 
5. The interwebs, which make working in live theater something immeasurably different than it once was 
6. The best graduate program ever for those of us working in live theater who also have families 
7. Coming to terms with how I can best support live theater 
8. Learning how to advocate for live theater 
9. The donors and patrons with whom I've built relationships around supporting live theater 
10. All of the experiences and decisions I made (or didn't make) that led me on this particular path into live theater

I love what I do. I hope to be able to do it for more theaters, more patrons, and more artists.

Thanks for sticking with me for the month. I've still got six or seven (or more) writing prompts. So who knows where we'll go next?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

High Art vs Low Art

“The masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator.” - -The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin, 1936 Is there any more contentious question in the art world than the concept of “high” versus “low” I like venn diagrams. And shouldn't art really be in the middle?  art? Who gets to judge? What are the parameters in which to judge? There is no standard definition for either concept and personal explanations range from simple to incredibly complex. One common theory about how to explain the difference is high art is “popular” and low art is “unpopular”, that is, appealing (or not) to many people. This also links to another version of the difference: that high art fosters the widest connection between people while a smaller subsection enjoys low art. This is in direct contradiction, though, to the idea of low art being part of mass culture (raising yet another question of “is art culture” or merely a com

Death & The Theater

I was listening to a recent episode of the Tim Ferris podcast and the guest, happiness scholar Arthur C. Brooks, was discussing death meditations. And the little lightbulb in my brain turned on with the thought, "We need to talk more about death in theaters." I know, I know, that seems like an illogical statement because it feels like we're always talking about the death of theater. This whole summer has been filled with articles and op-eds from across the country about how large regional theaters are dying in major cities. But that's not the kind of death Brooks was talking about, and in reality, it isn't death these articles are complaining about, either: they are trying to stay alive in a “E’s just resting” fashion, to find some kind of life-support for the theaters, to keep them going, receive new money from new audiences or donors, new shows, new gimmicks to draw more or different people in the door. Anything to keep from dying. We don't talk about death

Pass the Collection Plate, Please.

Various sizes of buildings, with some sort of seating arranged in rows, facing a slightly raised platform. may have curtains around the platform. people --primarily men-- take the platform to orate to the audience seated before them. A plea for donations is made at some point, either before or after the show, which may have music and will definitely have directives masked as stories on how to be a human in this day-and-age. children will be seen, maybe, but definitely not heard. the men in charge will believe they have been given a special gift for leading this particular group of people. and the people, for whatever reason, will also believe this. and this group of people will believe that their building and person and each other are completely different and somehow better than all the other exact same groups around their town/city/county/state/nation. If theater wants to be treated as church and church as theater, then both are getting exactly what they have been setting up for the p