On Being a Stagewhore

Back when I was still taking acting classes, one of my teachers (David Switzer) passed along his explanation of why people were willing to tolerate huge salaries for sports players and Hollywood superstars. In effect, people are paying to watch them play, because as adults, they don’t feel entitled to play. (Sears and Switzer give really good courses, by the way. Unsolicited testimonial.)

Also, by extension, people are allowed to play along with them in a “trickle down” method of playing. Sports fans paint their faces and bellies blue and dress in Viking hats and wave plastic scimitars around, Hollywood fans shriek and cry when they see their favourite star live. [Disclaimer: Obviously I know nothing about the exact way sports fans dress up, but the general theory still holds.]

The strongest players, the ones who we wind up loving, are the low ego players. Their generosity makes us remember what generosity is. We can admire and praise the cold technical skills of the lone superstar, but honestly, we are never going to love that performer with the same level of trust as someone who loves the game above all.

I guess I wrote this to remind myself to seek out opportunities where the game is the important thing. And maybe convince you of the same thing.

Last night I had the pleasure and privilege of performing with my classmates from the Kate Ashby Academy at the Lower Ossington Theatre.

Our group was EVERYONESMIRANDAPROV because, well, there is a woman named Miranda in our class, and…

What a charge it was. The audience was fantastic, my classmates were fantastic, the musical genius of the keyboardist was fantastic…so magical!

And the HIMANDHERPROV after was equally magical. (Well…maybe I’m biased a bit towards my class. He he.)

It was the most fun I’ve had doing improv since my days of being El Santo Gordo.

Does this make me want to start acting/improvising again? Honestly, from what I can tell, the average age of an improviser in this town is 20. Not so good for me. Acting is a possibility, but I want to start getting paid for it.

Some interesting decisions to make. Meanwhile, I still have a script in draft 11 that needs finishing.

I started out in theatre as a stage manager for a company founded on strict Renaissance principles. This meant two lighting cues every show (lights up at the start, lights down at the end), and actors speaking at so many words per minute to make a five act play fit into two hours.

When I say strict, I mean according to the theories of the artistic director. They might have been accepted as doctrine in academic circles, or not. I didn’t care. When you’re in the role of stage manager, you learn to ignore such trivia so you can serve the larger task of not having actors kill each other.

However, the odd thing (even for me in my then great naivete about all things theatrical) was that the artistic director hated Shakespeare. Not enough to not program him into his seasons, but get him in private? Johnson, yes, Marlowe, yes, Middleton, yes, Rowley, yes, but Shakespeare?

Untalented hack. Overrated. And so on.

However, being exposed to a rep season of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, I could tell, even with my limited knowledge, that Shakespeare was the better writer. Not that I didn’t enjoy The Spanish Tragedy, but it was melodramatic, and characters in it were about as deep as they needed to be for a melodrama. The Shakespeare characters, on the other hand, came across as real people.

So yes, for some people, Shakespeare sucks. Not me, though! Happy Birthday Shakespeare! 

The coffee shop has paired up with an ice cream place.

When you walk in, you no longer smell coffee. Instead, sugar molecules move from floating in the air and rappel up your nose hairs so they can punch you in your olfactory nerves.

Walls of sugar everywhere. Donuts to the left, ice cream and “mix-ins” to the right.

Mix-ins. Do you like chocolate chips? Then add some to your ice cream. Gummy worms? Toasted almonds? Pretzels? Coconut? Alsatians fur? Spoo? Grommets? Mix it on in, mix it on in.

A row of young women, wanting to grow much older, wait in line for their turn, giggling and talking with each other in a language I do not care to learn.

I get my black coffee and a sundried tomato pesto mozzarella garlic chili bagel and sit here, feeling superior.

This post was sort of prompted by this event. (It is also a change from the normal theatre activity posted here, so skip it if you’re so inclined.)

webOS is basically dead. So the developer announced no further support and development for his two main apps. Which is fine. But he also removed both of the apps from the app catalog. So if someone’s phone crashed and a full reset was required, then no chance of getting those apps back.

I don’t think I would care as much if the apps were crap. They have a few bugs in them (losing your account authorization with Twitter occasionally, killing the sound when one loads), but nothing that I can’t work around. I really like the apps and their design.

For whatever I paid for them (maybe eight bucks total), I certainly don’t expect lifetime support. But I would like to be able to have access to what I paid for, somehow.

Pulling an app from a public catalog is the easiest way to handle the fact that you are dropping all support for that app. It is also the way guaranteed to please the fewest of your current customers.

So what are the other choices?

Open sourcing the app might cause problems, because the dev is planning to develop for other platforms like Android and iOS/Apple, and he might want to reuse code. Which is fine. No open sourcing.

UPDATE: As @webosinternals pointed out to me, making something open source does not prevent you from using the code in commercial projects.

Hosting the app yourself might be costly. I don’t know. The source file itself is pretty small. If he isn’t getting enough money from downloads, then I can’t see it being a huge issue, but I haven’t crunched any numbers, so who knows?

He seems like a really decent guy, and is giving refunds to people who bought his two apps during the last two weeks. It’s a messy situation, and there are no perfect solutions.

I just wish I could keep access to a repository for these two unsupported, abandoned apps.

This time I was only indirectly chewing my nails and waiting for a reply. My friend and colleague was the one who sent in our combined application. Not that I did much, some light editing and suggestions, and sending over a bio/resume.

He actually got an e-mail. The last two times I applied, I did not get an e-mail. Instead, I wandered over to the SummerWorks site and scrolled down through the list of winners. For two years in a row.

Does the fact that he got an e-mail mean that this was a better application than the ones I sent in? Does it point to a general increase in respect for the way SummerWorks treats all applicants? Was it just random chance?

I don’t know. I have to wait until my collaborator gets back in town to get all the details. But until then, I’m going with the better application theory.

What who is this shadow reaching from this past I never entered

How does it know me so well when I’ve never seen it before now

It whispers things it should not know

Flesh of my flesh

Blood of my blood

Who cries out in the night?

Is it my voice, or the voices of me stretched back to

Who was I before I was born?

Flesh of my flesh

Blood of my blood

The terrible stinky drunk men marry the

The quiet repressed men marry the

The simple honest men marry the

The scattered sisters go marry the

The times between them the children between them

The marriage becomes the sad that creeps between them

The memories that surround them to

Protect the enrich the fantasies

Every day is the last with a few more flubbed lines

Flesh of my flesh

Blood of my blood

Happiness is that thing out there

We’ve never heard