A Short Interval

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A Short Interval

Last weekend I finally had the opportunity to see something other than the walls of my apartment and the faces of those I live with - and it’s been a fantastic and much-needed little break!

This pandemic has been a sizable drain on all of our emotions, energies, routines, bank accounts, and lives on the whole.

And of course it is far from over. Despite how well we’ve been doing here in New York, other states have set us back on a national front while the world begins its preparations for a second wave that will likely hit this winter. I do hope we catch up.

On a personal level, I have been running on fumes for quite some time, both generally and creatively. Which is why I’m going to be taking a short interval from my blog posts - just a few weeks - to recharge and gather some new thoughts for moving forward through summer and into the fall!

But before I go for my period of recharge, I’d like to leave you all with a couple thoughts:

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10 Lessons Learned In A Decade

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10 Lessons Learned In A Decade

Ten years ago today I graduated from SUNY Geneseo and - two hours later - hopped in a car with my mother to drive 20 hours to Granbury, TX for my first professional theatre gig at Texas Family Musicals.

And with that, I embarked upon the journey that has been my post-college adult life.

To say that a lot has happened in the past decade is an almost criminal understatement: I’ve lived in three states, made a home in NYC, made and lost friends (made far more though!), had people come in and out of my life, found my artistic home, grew as a teacher, writer, actor, singer, pianist, arranger, and overall human being, and oh so much more.

As much as people like to call our high school and college years our “formative” years, I think it’s in the decade after the college experience (or your twenties into the start of the thirties, for those who did not attend college) in which we truly discover who we are, what we want, and where we want to go.

So, in honor of this milestone, I would like to share just 10 of the lessons I’ve learned over this decade.

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Collective and Connective

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Collective and Connective

There has been an extraordinarily common theme across the informational platforms I’ve been devouring recently:

Nothing creative or inventive happens in a vacuum or alone.

And I want to be clear about this: all inventors are creators. In an early blog I talked about how essentially everyone is a creator - science and math-minded folks included - and I just want to reiterate this point.

Has the world seen a large number of “geniuses”?

Yes.

Are these people extraordinary?

Yes.

Have their innovations and creations altered the world in which we live?

Yes.

But not a single one of them did it all alone.

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Just The Perfect Blendship

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Just The Perfect Blendship

One of the absolute best parts of the theater that I feel people don’t talk about enough is the people - the community.

Sure, every June as we all get ready to sit down together in NYC and across the country to watch the Tony Awards, or are preparing for one of the major benefits like Broadway Bares, or even just during Pride Month in general, theatrical and non-theatrical publications will talk briefly about how Broadway is a community. And it is! It’s a fantastic community with the same pros and cons that any community might have.

But only “Broadway” is discussed as being the community itself.

And as soon as you call something the “Broadway” community, there is an innate elitism to that term - whether geographically or in terms of production budget - which gets thrown into everyone’s minds.

But what is this Broadway community? Is it just the thousands of people actively working in NYC’s largest theatrical houses? Just those who contribute to the city’s multi-billion dollar industry?

I don’t think so, no.

I think the Broadway community is far larger than that. Personally, I would consider the Broadway community to include anyone and everyone working in theatre across the entire country. I would even consider the Broadway community to include the multitude of theatre lovers - those who don’t necessarily work in the industry, but participate through other means by supporting those who do, or even just attending all productions they can and keeping tabs on what’s happening in the industry.

In my opinion, it is crucial to consider everyone involved in the theatre everywhere as part of the Broadway community.

“But why?”

Allow me to explain!

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