Someone's Got To Be Oppressed!

I meant to do a birthday post and then I had a really horrible birthday and I didn't want to.

And then I meant to do a post about Shakespeare's birthday and be a part of this massive blog project but then I wrote half of it and learned that talking about Shakespeare makes me sound like a really really big jerk of a nine year old. Like this kid who is incredibly pretentious and too smart for their own good, and should be rolled in a parking lot. So I didn't do that either.

I'm in a pit of nothing right now so it is hard to blog and not sound like a really blah or boring or whiny person.

Enough of that.

A lot of people have been telling me that they also feel they have nothing going on, so maybe it is just that time of year? The city looks like this:



Ugh. It is grey and rainy. Although in January we were saying it was 'just that time of year' when we had nothing going on. And we'll probably say it in August too. Really, the whole year is just very, very hard.

But quite a few of us are feeling very dejected and as if this Toronto theatre community doesn't want us, and we don't even really want to be in the community the way it is now, but it's something we've wanted for so long that we can't just give it up, and sometimes we want to be in it, plus we want the option, so we have to be accepted by the community and then we can turn it down, but we can't get accepted. And we can't get accepted because maybe we aren't talented, or maybe we are and we're just not friends with the right people, or we're not the right people, we're too weird, or too boring, or too not ethnically diverse, or too much or too little or we didn't go to the right school or we just don't have anything to offer. And who knows? It could be all of those things so we worry about them all without knowing what is the thing we have to change and whether we have to change at all.

It's tiring. And maddening. And I don't know a way out. For a job that I think I continue to get better at, I really don't know how to deal with it in the slightest. I tell myself that when I have work I will feel better. These periods without it make me feel like I'll never work again. And I can't get out of them without doing a play or getting cast, and I can't do those things because of the above paragraph.

My life is small and silly but it still causes me lots of anguish. I could have an anguish sale. Everything must go.

In our continuing series of horrifying pictures of me, we present THE DAY I DRESSED UP AS MEN YOU WOULDN'T DATE.


You wouldn't want to date this guy, shotgunning a PBR at 2 p.m. on Easter Monday in the rain, would you? Maybe you would.

This was, of course, for my fast approaching thing at Canadian Stage. I'm at the wonderful Canadian stage of artistic development where something is far enough away that I don't learn my lines, but close enough that I have anxiety attacks on the streetcar when thinking about it.


These are horrifying and I will have to marry a giant squid and live at the bottom of the sea with the other unspeakably hideous creatures. My gorgeous friend Eric Double took them. Kyle Purcell is in them, taking good quality pics that will be used in the show. Behind the scenes footage!!!


They're also kind of funny. I hope my show is. I don't know. It's a weird look inside my brain. It is, on one hand, very much my thing, but because we're using a multimedia element and I have two people directing me, it now is something that started with the way I do things and is changing. That's hard. The multimedia stuff is amazing, but when you don't initially think of theatre in that way (as I don't), it's hard to combine it with your own aesthetic and still feel like it's something that you would do. Kill your babies and let go, and we're stronger when we work together. I know it's the truth, but it's hard to do. Anyway. I am loving working on the show when I actually work on it. When I don't, the demons of insecurity creep in at an alarming pace. Partially because I wrote it, partially because it now is changing, partially because I don't know the lines...so many things to worry about! So many insecurity demons.

I just want it to be spring.