Well the Lord Made Me a Lion, But the Lord Forget to Make Me Brave

Oh man, I guess sometimes I forget that I have a blog. No, I remember always that I have a blog, but I figure you probably aren't interested in hearing most of the thoughts in my little head.

I had nothing to do and now I have to do much to do and this is a problem like what my friend Caitlin quoted from my first fictional husband Chandler Bing (actually it's Ms. Chanandler Bong) when she wrote on my facebook wall: 'Oh no. Two women love me. They're both gorgeous and sexy. My wallet's too small for my fifties and my diamond shoes are too tight!'

aka NOT A REAL PROBLEM.

But what's the one thing I like more than Muppets? More than Brownies? More than when children fall down and their parents dont' want them to cry so they make absolutely no reaction and yell, 'you're fine, get up!'? Yes, inventing problems.

I'm doing an application and I'm just overcome with the dread that someone's eventually going to read it. And if they read it, they'll judge me and think I'm terrible, and I'll live the rest of my life NOT KNOWING that whenever they see me they'll go, 'Oh, there goes that crappy theatre person'. This fear expands to not being able to show the work to people before I do it, not being able to tell people that I'm applying or ask people to work on things with me (BECAUSE THEY WILL REJECT ME).

It's really hard to do work and then it's really hard to show it to people.

I have some auditions too, and it's the same thing. The terror that they will think, 'God, is that what you think is good? Is that your best?'

Putting yourself out there artistically is just really terrifying. And while I've been doing it for a while now and survived it, even when it went poorly I am still, technically, alive, and I am still, to some extent, creating, and I am still, to a smaller extent, getting to perform on occasion, it still feels really scary. How can it not? If you care about something, it hurts to see it hurt. Or thrown away. Or just not recognized.  I don't think this is a debilitating fear, because I do keep going. i feel that I'm really vulnerable and live on the precipice of quitting, but I do keep going. Somehow. But it is a fear that's preventing me from sharing the work as much as I could.

Because getting other people on board would be great. Being able to get feedback from more people would be great. Not being worried that when someone says, 'I don't want to direct your show', or 'this doesn't work for me', it really means, 'you are the least talented'. And if it means the work gets better, I really want to do it. But that means I have to overcome something and OH GOD I'LL DO IT THIS AFTERNOOOOOOOON!

Brave is hard, eh? Brave has fear in it. It's hard to move past fear.

Also, 30 Rock is ending tomorrow and Liz Lemon is my spirit animal and what am I going to do?

One, Two, Three And

Here's the plays what I saw in 2012. Most of them, at least:

1) Living With Henry, The Washing Machine, The Tiki Bikini Beach Paradise Party A Go Go, Hypnogogic Logic, LoveSexMoney, Loving the Stranger at Next Stage.

2) The Blue Dragon (Mirvish)

3)The Book of Mormon on Broadway!

4) Follies (Broadway)

5) The Golden Dragon (Tarragon)

6) Penny Plain (Factory)

7) Kim's Convenience (Soulpepper)

8) The Who's Tommy (UC Follies)

9) One night at the Rhubarb Festival, second week (Buddies)

10) The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs (Tarragon)

11) Frances and Marybeth (at Factory)

12) Clybourne Park (Studio 180)

13) Gruesome Playground Injuries (at Theatre Centre)

14) The Real World? (Tarragon)

15) Venus in Fur (Broadway)

16) One Man, Two Guv'nors ( Broadway)

17) Lost in Yonkers (HG Jewish Theatre)

18) Bring it On! (Mirvish)

19) Rent (Lower Ossington)

20) Some stuff at Fringe: Fishbowl, The Dinner, Transit Diaries, Help Yourself....quite a few things there, but I don't remember it all very clearly. I think I saw about 12 this year.

21) When It Rains (Summerworks)

22) Macbeth (Humber River)

23) Tear the Curtain! (Canadian Stage)

24) Mister Baxter (at TPM)

25) Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Broadway)

26) Grace (Broadway)

27) Miss Caledonia (Tarragon)

28) Delicacy (at Factory)

29) Speaking in Tongues (Canadian Stage)

30) Eigengrau (Red One)

31) Bloodless (Theatre 20)

32) A Theatre Hetarae Event (at TPM)

33) Ignorance (Canadian Stage)

34) This is What Happens Next (Necessary Angel)

35) Terminus (Mirvish)

36) War Horse (Mirvish)

37) It's a Wonderful Toronto (TPM)

38) Sleep No More six times.

This seems incredibly low because I feel that I see quite quite quite a lot of stuff. There is this awful trend of not giving you a ticket which means I can't put the ticket in my book, which means I don't remember it, and the same with a program. There were definitely a handful more, and even more that I missed and wanted to see. Oh so much theatre. Oh good lord.

It Needs Work

That 2 a.m. moment of clarity where you realize your play makes no sense.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Any Moment Big or Small Is a Moment After All

I had an audition this week that was for something pretty big, in the grand scheme of things (and completely insignificant in the GRAND scheme of things, but if we're going to think that way, we might as well just give up on blogs altogether. Also maybe on our lives.). One of those rare auditions that you're like, 'Oh, wow, I'm auditioning here! Someone that I know is going to see me! This could really change my career and this could really change my life and this could really change my self'.

And that's pretty terrifying and enough to make you shit pure liquid out your pants, but as I was waiting in the hallway to go in I had this weird kind of peaceful thought:

'Welp. At least I can say I did this'.

And the audition itself kind of became the story and I pictured myself telling it to someone at some point, that I had auditioned there, in the same way that maybe I'd tell someone I once stood at Four Corners, and like how excited I get when people tell me that one time they met Madonna or ate octopus or saw the Northern Lights, someone would hear me say that I had once been there and go, 'Wow!'

If a career in theatre can be enough in those moments, if the mere fact that I would try and fail, and show up was enough, it would be incredible and I would be so satisfied and happy. I think. If as far as I got could still be amazing, even if I never got paid to do it and never made it to Stratford or Broadway or even onto another stage again, that would be something, and maybe I would be more grateful and peaceful and probably eat fewer carbs.

I don't think there's a lot of hope for me moving forward in this, so I'm trying to hold on to that feeling. I feel lucky to be seen and I'm glad I got to go in and I did something, and I think I did it ok, and maybe what I did was too weird and immature and maybe I'm too weird and immature, so maybe it just isn't a good fit anyway, and let's just be happy for the moments that we did have together. But there's this ominous feeling of 'what's next' and the worry about that and the fear of that feeling of rejection, knowing how I will feel even though I'll try so hard not to, and ick.

In the meantime I'm overhauling a play and I'm finding the slaughter of my babies to be depressing and thrilling all at once.

Dramas Annoy Us and Ruin Our Nights

All I'm gonna say is I saw a play the other night that everyone else is saying is really amazing and is getting great reviews and has incredible actors and I fell asleep.

Like not 'asleep' asleep, my eyes were still open, but I would leave and venture so far off in my mind that every time I returned to the play I was surprised by what the characters would say, because there had been simply no precedent for what they were saying. Although, there probably was, I just was sleeping through it.

'Whoa! Where did that come from? She sure is angry. Oh well. Off I go again...'

I wrote monologues and thought about my own plays, and my own life, and watched more entertaining scenes involving myself and the life I wish I lived in my mind. Practically from the beginning. I'm sure it's a really great play, I just was totally not there for it.

I feel like I probably have no right to say this. All these critics who know so much more than me are loving it and other people in the theatre seemed to be having an all right time. But the facts are, officer, I was bored.

I Got a Rock and Roll Girlfriend

I've been reading Patti Smith's Just Kids lately. I have developed this habit of rereading books immediately after finishing them. I'm finding it hard to feel 'done' with things, I finish something and feel there's more to be mined. There were a few plays I couldn't put back on my shelf because I felt I had to have them around all the time. So I'm in the middle of my second read of this one.

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe have this amazing relationship that fills me with envy and romantic longing.

And because they're artists, and he became a photographer, there are all these amazing pictures of them that I just love.

They are so the cool kids. I wish I had pictures like this. I find them really inspiring in a melancholy way. 

Apparently Robert Mapplethorpe would look at all his pictures and say, 'That's the one with the magic'. I think these all have the magic, but I mostly just love the idea of looking at things that way. And having the confidence to know which one did have the magic. He was right though. His stuff is amazing. And magic.

There's something about all these pictures that is so lovely, so artful and yet so unposed. Easy edgy. I think this is what 'cool' is, although having never been cool a day in my life I don't know if I'm qualified to judge. 

Don't you wish you had a friend like this?

Don't you wish there was someone who understood that doing things like taking amazing pictures of yourself is equal parts cool and goofy, and loves that?

Patti Smith talks about how they could work together, on separate projects, so happily. And how PROUD they were of each other, how giving, artistically. 

I'm trying to learn to be less jealous and intimidated, to be more loving of other artists, because obviously I know how hard it is, and we all have to be held with so much grace. I wish I had nothing but joy for everyone else who I was competing with, for everyone who is trying, like I am, to do something incredible. But it's hard. It's hard to be fully behind someone else when you want what they're going after too. It's hard to not feel jealous. For me anyway. 

It's frustrating that the community feels more like competition than community. I don't want it to, but I'm perpetuating it with the way that I feel. 

I said to someone a while ago that I think I want a creative partner the way most people want a romantic partner. The idea of finding someone who loves your work and pushes your work and creates things with you and makes you better and understands and is your little armour to the world, the thing that wraps you and protects you and lets you go into battle. I'm very in love with this idea. It's never happened for me. 

There's also something, to me at least, about the friendship being the work of art in itself. I'm writing something about that right now, but there's something about the creation of yourself as you're working on something, the falling in love with who you are because of the amazing people you've managed to get around you, that are working on this thing too. You work on a project and you fall in love with the people who are also working on it, and it makes you feel cool for a second too. The reflection of your love makes you beautiful. And that in itself is an artistic creation.

You create yourself in the work you do and the relationships you cultivate, and the self you create is the artist you want to be. 

I don't know. 

But there's something here that's beautiful and rare and intended and mysterious and of a moment that stays with you, and I think those are all things that great art should be. 

'Where does it all lead? What will become of us? Those were our young questions, and young answers were revealed.

It leads to each other. We become ourselves.'

This is my favourite picture:

Pick Your Left Foot Up When Your Right Foot's Down

This is an interesting read.

I'm doggedly applying for some grants right now, even though I don't know what projects are really valuable and I should keep working on and am generally feeling a little eek. I love Angels in America, and the scope of it is so incredible (I've said the same thing about my ongoing lover, Sleep No More), and I wish my work didn't feel so small and insignificant. But then if I write something for more than three people, it might never see the light of day.

This balance between how to make art and then how to get ahead and be business like so that you CAN make the art you want is very tricky and I don't know how to balance it. And of course, just thinking like that makes me frustrated because shouldn't I just create, create all the time, huge things and do it for the sake of themselves, and if no one sees it it doesn't matter?

I can't think that way. Because it does matter. Like Roy Cohn says in Angels in America, 'clout'. You need to be noticed. You can't push into a vacuum. It will suck you right up.

Anyway, that was one of a few inspiring things I've been surrounding myself with. Reread Angels last night. I will finally see a version of it next summer because a theatre company here is putting it on and I'm so excited. It really is a thrilling piece of work. So exciting to see something so big, all those ideas be chewed on like that. Ugh, start small, get big? Go big or go home?

My friend Jenna and I saw a play the other night that wasn't the most inspiring, but we were both kind of wracked with desire to be up on stage. And then we talked about whether it's better to just throw caution to the wind and throw something up and if it fails oh well, or if something has to be good, has to have a certain value or it wasn't worth it anyway. This kind of relates to this big/small debate. Do you do what you can just because you can, or do you wait until you can do something huge, but risk that that time will never come?

Of course, my feeling is to do something impossible immediately, but I get in to trouble an awful lot.....