It’s amazing how much more I get done when I don’t have to go to work. Unemployment does wonders for my productivity. In the past week, I made a website, business cards, posted several blogs entries, finished a sewing project, made great progress on my novel and more or less started a business. It’s strange what a little bit of free time can do.

It seems like they do. Almost every time. I was a feminist from an early age. I wouldn’t fight about much; I was more inclined to defer than to debate but one thing would make me shout “Nuh-uh!” or “That’s not true!” and that was when some boy in my class would claim that boys were better than girls at something. I knew the culture had his back if he claimed a woman couldn’t be president or be an astronaut or play baseball or whatever it was but I was ferocious in defending the possibility. Sally Ride meant the world to me.

Now I can recognized that little boys said the things they said mostly to get a rise out of girls like me. I can see that they enjoyed making me angry and might not have really believed what they were saying. But what they didn’t realize, as they teased us about their gender’s superiority was that they were reinforcing centuries old beliefs and even as we fought fiercely for our right to be just as good as boys, we also couldn’t help internalizing the structure. We might have firmly believed a woman COULD be president but the fight for that belief was such that very few of us could actually imagine it as a reality. I mean, here it is 2013 and no woman has even come close. Our numbers in congress are better than they’ve ever been and are still appalling. This radio interview with Geena Davis on NPR mentioned a statistic where when a group has 17% women in it it is seen as a 50/50 gender split.

Until perceptions like that change, until real equality exists, the boys will continue to carry it away.

To re-capture magic
To succeed where all else have failed
To slip free from poverty’s claws
To love the work one does for money
To go out all night and be ready to tackle a day in the morning
To have it all
To understand what it all is
To change the dominant paradigm
To realize the artistic revolution you imagined as a student
To shake loose the outdated, unhelpful ideas of self that send you down the same roads again and again
To proceed as you’ve never been hurt, never failed, never lost.

If only our field thought this far ahead. Theatre folk tend to be so intensely present oriented, they almost never think of the broader picture, of the future for anyone but themselves.

I loved Michael Chekhov’s essay about The Theatre of the Future, for this unusual big picture thinking – for its attention on what we make and its impact on what comes next.

The way I’ve seen most theatre folks operate, these children in this story would not say their writers did them wrong, they would more likely rail against the next crop of children and never think through how the system set them up to drop them down again. We theatre folk tend to think all our bad luck is personal, that each failure is ours alone – and almost never look at the systems in place that ensure that personal failure.

There’s a frankness to this line. One which indicates that the life of an actor was not at all glamorous – just a choice for someone whose means are not better. It’s not too glamorous now either. The actual day to day of the theatrical person is relentlessly mundane but it has a shine on it when you start and it clings to you a bit when communicating with the outside world.

The man playing Orsino had a deep rich baritone. It was lucky he was into Shakespeare because he had a Shakespearean voice – one that could boom out and bounce around even outdoors. One night, next to a fire in the grill on our company porch, he told me he had, as a child, been a part of a choir. He sang – this babyfaced, sweet-voiced kid – and was much lauded for his singing. When his voice changed, so did everything. A life ordered around a sweet voiced boy got turned upside down by the fluctuations of man-making hormones.

He quit singing. He couldn’t anymore, couldn’t depend on his voice and somehow or other, he found his way to theatre, where his voice became important once again, but in a new way.

And then we asked him to sing.

Is escoting the same as escorting? How is anyone escoted? The words must be related – they must share some sense of accompaniment mustn’t they, coming as it does, after “Who maintains ‘em?” Is the sense, perhaps, how do they get where they’re going? Perhaps a combination of escorted and transported.

But – once we look at the definition and the sense is Support. Hmmm. How are they supported? Pretty close to the previous question.

Dear Human Giant guys, Please create a Renaissance version of your sketch, Shutterbugs. Your agents would be in charge of an eyrie of children performing on the common stages – and given the way companies seemed to work back then, you would also act as their Fagin or Miss Hannigan. You’d probably all live together and you’d have to feed the little monsters but then you’d send them out to put on their shows and they would, with money, scurry back to you on their fat little legs, it would be like Real World Renaissance Theatre.

This line feels like a delayed response somehow. Rosencrantz has mentioned the children a long sentence before this one. Is there something about goosequills that somehow makes Hamlet understand what Rosencrantz said before? In which case, what do goosequills have to do with children? Or really, what do they have to do with anything? Is the idea that the warriors, with their swords slung at their sides tremble with fear when children come around?

The goosequills, it would seem are for the writers – , their mightier-than-sword pens – but the writers aren’t the children are they?

Or ARE they? Is it like Written By a Kid? I’d go see an Elizabethan Written By a Kid.

It’s hard to get rusty when you’re working, doing show after show, playing the game everyday.

Rust comes from disuse, from waiting, from sitting, untested, unstretched – just parked in the rain waiting for the sun to emerge. It’s the not doing, the fallow periods that can cripple a technique. It’s those months of no action that can make you think you don’t know how to do it anymore.

Doing it day after day might make you rigid and boring or robotic and disconnected but the danger there is less rustiness and more smoothness. They could grow too slick, too safe, like watching someone open a garage door with a button. Like closing the window in a car over and over with a little lever instead of watching someone turn it with his arm. Without a little bit of effort, without a little bit of danger, that slickness is dull. I’d rather watch someone rusty.

When I asked my college directing professor for his thoughts about teaching directing, he mentioned a tendency in all of his students to believe in happy endings. He notes that they all thought if you worked hard enough and were a good person that everything would work out in the end. When I was one of his students, I believed the same thing.

I thought my good will and enthusiasm and my talent would save me and I would float, like a balloon to the loftiest heights. I thought the good and the smart and the nice people would be elevated and I would be among them, a handful of beautiful colorful brilliant balloons bouncing around on the palace’s gold-trimmed ceiling.

But I’ve seen the stupid thrive. That one girl at our college who seemed to not have three brain cells to rub together was the first to find success. I’ve seen the mean, the cruel, the hard, rise to the top of the pile. I’ve seen the authors of some of the most insipid, confused, messy, nonsensical, artless works find themselves with awards and great reviews.

And I’ve seen the kindest, the most brilliant, the most innovative, the most spirited artists consigned to artistic ghettos.

I’d like to be that naïve student I once was, believing that the good and smart will have happy endings but experience does not bear this out.