Ve’s Top Ten Tips for Dealing with Burnout

I’m very pleased and fortunate to welcome my friend Ve’s contribution to this blog. She was a co-organizer of one of the festivals I’ve been at, and as such has been dealing with a great deal of stress. I asked her how she coped with the Life…

Hope vs. Practice

To follow up on the idea that hope is not the wonderful gift that it is portrayed as, let’s take a look at it as it applies to practice.

Do. Or Do Not.

Do you practice with the hope that you’ll get better at something? That is the idea…

Practice In Spite

Let’s go on a trip to in the Way-Back Machine to a date in 1988, to eavesdrop on a telephone call between a young man, not quite twenty, who is trying to Do the Right Thing by asking his pregnant girlfriend’s father for her hand in marriage:

“And how do you expect to be…

The Ballad of Alec & Amber

Note: the following story is completely true.
Only the names have been changed to infect the ambivalent.

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The Fifth Element

At the recent performance festival in London (well, I guess it’s not so recent, it was a month ago now) I was having lunch with a very talented couple of performers, and I was asking them how they managed to be so expressive in their movements and interactions. They are well known in certain…

Pensive

I’ve been wondering about my obsession with pens lately.

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A Touch of Home

The place where I’m staying here in Berlin is an apartment block that was originally part of East Berlin. It’s an interesting building, five stories (travel tip: the first floor doesn’t count, so if someone says they live on the third floor, you walk up four flights) with a neat art-deco trompe…

The Little Things

You know the story of the widow’s mite? Basically it’s a game of percentages; if Mitt Romney gives a million dollars and my daughter gives fifty to the same charity, who’s the more giving? It entirely depends on how much the gift itself meant to the giver. Sure, there can be the argument about…

The Quiet and the Dark, part 1

Yeah, authenticity, that’s what really gets the chicks. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
 — Anonymous Performer

First things: you can, in fact, fake authenticity. It’s called, depending on your degree of skill, something between “lying”…

Risk Awareness

(the following was a PSA delivered to present me by past me regarding future me)

You know what’s scary about love? It’s the idea that you might need someone else. That you might get so used to them being around, to their presence in your life, that you start to rely on them…

Hope, the Love Version

“Hope is fear wearing it’s pretty face.” — Jay Easton

You’re familiar with that story about Pandora, right? The one with the box? She was told (in a way eerily reminiscent of Eve and the Apple) not to open the box, or she’d be sorry. Of course that made her want…