Flying with(out) an infant

I just spent the weekend in Boston with my brother. And for the first time since August of 2007, I flew by myself.  No stroller. No liquid Tylenol. No origami frogs. No kid. I fully expected to read on the plane,  but there were a few things that took me by surprise.

1) Waiting in line is boring. 

2) Cinnabon is just…Cinnabon. It’s not a potential time bomb requiring that you whip out the graphing calculator and plot blood sugar level over time in relationship to boarding, taxi and take off.

3) I didn’t miss my baby. At all. 

Not only did I read on the plane, I wrote on the plane. I had ideas on the plane. I daydreamed on the plane.

Here’s my question for all of you, parents or no. Is solitude a crucial part of your creative process? When you haven’t had time to yourself for, oh, say…about 19 months…does that affect your ability to generate ideas?

Jen? Amy? Put This in a Play!

There are fairly strict unwritten rules among my siblings regarding the usage of family history in our sundry creative endeavors. That’s why I can’t use this, but you can.

As I mentioned, I just visited the gentleman I refer to as my “Harvard brother.”  I’d like to pretend that the purpose of that nickname is efficiency, but it’s easy to see through that, since Harvard Brother is actually two more syllables than his given name, Jacob. More likely it’s indicative of my personal hang ups about the Ivy League and how my own education doesn’t rate. But anyway…labels help to organize a big family, and it’s accurate.  He even lives on Harvard Street.

Here’s the scrumptious character detail that should be in someone’s play. Jacob confesses that not only is he once again playing Dungeons and Dragons, he is playing with the same people that he played with in junior high school, via Skype! As he puts it, “there are more people in my peer group playing D&D than there are people who admit they are playing D&D.” Apparently the magician who Skypes in from New Jersey administers cool effects on his computer image whenever he casts a spell.  

Mmm hmm. In case you were wondering who teaches at Harvard University.

About that MOXIE – JBG

Here’s the beauty queen herself claiming the senior photo below:

OK, it’s me.  In 1987. (Good call JT! I graduated in ‘88, but senior pics are taken in the fall.)  In a very small town (Noelle) in Northern California (Jo and D) called Morgan Hill.  The furry blue wrap was the photographer’s (Chelsea) indeed, but I do now own a cropped blue furry jacket that is the same color.  Maybe I’ll wear it to the next staff meeting.

I gave up on that failed come-hither glance long ago, but here’s what I find really funny about this photo: everyone is always asking Missy and me if we’re sisters.  Judging from her photo and mine, I doubt anyone would have asked the same back in the late ’80’s…

At Labyrinth rehearsal the other day someone asked me if I knew the whereabouts of “gee-bee.” And I realized that when I introduced our designer, JBG, I should have enunciated a little more clearly.  JBG stands for Jennifer Brawn Gittings. (She’s also okay with being called Jen, or Jennifer, and her husband calls her Jenny. Sometimes I use all three in one conversation just in case.)

Her MOXIE title is Design Ambassador, which we often MOXIE up into Design Badassador. A company with less insouciance might call her a resident designer. She does the costumes for more than half of our shows, and lends her eye as advisor to the rest.  

Here’s what she looks like now, with husband Chris at this year’s San Diego Theatre Critics Circle Awards, where she picked up the prize for her design of Scrooge in Rouge at Diversionary Theatre. 

Great outfit, Jen. All it needs is a fuzzy blue wrap!

On Gratitude and Compensation

When I posted last week about parenting and theatre, Lisel, Elaine and JBG all chimed in, and their comments reminded me of one very good reason why the theatre mommies of the world aren’t marching in the streets for on-site childcare and better hours. 

We have very little to bargain with.   

As a freelance artist, if you don’t want to work for a company because you’re holding out for a better or different reward, that may very well be your loss. Someone else will. 

The American theatre exists in its current form because of people who are willing to work for free or for a pittance. Some folks are happy to donate their time to something they love. We hear a lot that “we aren’t doing this to get rich.” (And isn’t that the truth!)  Other folks think of themselves as resume building, or putting in their time, looking forward to the point at which they break through to another level of theatre and start making a living wage. 

And some folks do. It’s a complicated ecosystem. There are a number of companies that can pay people enough to live on. And there are many companies that can’t. In the gray area between, there are companies that pay some folks a real salary and other folks gas money. And there are freelance paychecks that are enough if a freelance artist can just get enough of them.  

The whole system is based on a numerical imbalance between the number of artistic jobs and the number of people who want them. Actors are a dime a dozen. You’ve heard that. It probably isn’t really true. But…people who want to be actors certainly are a dime a dozen. If you don’t want it, fine. Somebody else will.  

Sometimes the work itself becomes a commodity. Opportunities and titles can make a little bit of money go further.  At MOXIE the paycheck is padded with childcare, flexibility and the privilege to bring our kids to work. That’s why I’ve talked so much about the pleasure of sharing my work with my baby. 

However, my total adoration for my son and appreciation of time spent with him shouldn’t make it sound like I stay home because I want to. In actuality, I stay home because I can’t afford not to. I’ve had two jobs in the last year that paid me enough to cover my childcare expenses. One of them was as a stage manager, which income is negotiated by my union, Actor’s Equity Association.

As a director, I have often received the signal that I’m lucky to have the work at all, let alone any crazy perks like health insurance. How can I even start talking about child care?  It’s so expensive and difficult to execute the production, that if a producing organization commits to this Herculean effort, I’d have to be crazy to ask for any additional reward. Take it or leave it.  

But if it’s my privilege to do the work, then doesn’t that mean that theatre is a hobby?   This makes the whole professional vs community theatre distinction a little less clear.  And this is why, as JBG suggested, so many of us leave the theatre, or leave and come back and leave and come back.  

So, what should we be asking for?

This is all a case for bringing back the craftsman guilds from the Middle Ages. I’d really like to be able wear a belt that tells you how good I am at my job, based on the assessment of my peers. Because as long as the value of the artist remains subjective, putting in your time comes with no guarantees, and theatre artists will continue to take what we’re given.

Date This Photo

Here’s a MOXIE highlighting those baby blues in her senior year portrait. How jealous were you of that blue fuzzy thing? And who killed it?

Put the year you think this photo was taken in the comments. Extra points for the name of the MOXIE, and extra, extra points for where in America you think it was taken.

Good luck!

Thanks for the Love!

This is for anybody who missed our Choose Love! fundraiser on Monday, co-produced with ion theatre, and featuring a reading of Caridad Svich’s The Labyrinth of Desire. 

Here’s the set up…

Rehearsal with Jo Anne…

And the finished product… 

 

I’d like to give some Love to our incredible design team. In a single day, about one hour of which was actually tech, and with almost no attention from the directors, Ross Glanc gave us those gorgeous lights. 

The entire remainder of the production was designed by Jennifer Brawn Gittings, also known as the MOXIE Design Badassador, with technical direction by Adam Lindsay and essential support from Claudio of ion, Bret at Diversionary, Kristianne at NVA, and our pals Nick and Neil. 

Gwen Fish was our stage manager, Missy Bradstreet ran the sound, and Chelsea Whitmore took the photographs. 

Thanks for the Love!

The breastfeeding majority

The last week of conversations has me looking at just about everything through a lens of “normal” and “not normal.” This has to do with our next show, The Butcher of Baraboo, in which a Midwestern family practically becomes a circus act trying to contain their lively collection of skeletons. I’m fascinated by the way that the women of Baraboo, as well as women closer to home (at least the one sitting in this home) seem to sort the behavior of our sisters and friends into “okay,” “okay for her but not for me,” and “not okay at all.”  At least, that’s what we’d like to be doing. What I’m afraid of is that the last two categories have a very messy overlap.

A week or so ago I posted an article to my Facebook page called “The Case Against Breastfeeding.”

I should tell you that on the spectrum of American moms, I’m pretty far to the granola. I give birth at home, I didn’t circumcise, and my 19-month-old is still nursing. I’m looking forward to a tandem breastfeeding adventure when my second child is born sometime in May.

But I appreciated this article.

It was written by Hanna Rosin, whom I follow on the XX Factor blog at Slate Magazine. (She’s the one who did this stunt where she and her husband spent the whole day no more than fifteen feet apart, which I totally want to try.)  

In my opinion, and I think this is often true in this world of high impact page headers, the headline doesn’t accurately represent the article.  The actual text was about what I might call the breastfeeding mandate: the power of the collective to make you feel bad if you don’t “do the right thing for your baby,” or if, for some reason, you can’t.  Like, for example, maybe you’re a man.

Okay…no, the article didn’t shout out to male caregivers, that was extrapolation, but it did address the difficulty moms in some circles might feel in actually hearing their own voices over the sound of the collective breast pump.

I think conversations like that are important. I think that debunking absolutism can only help those of us who do want to breastfeed, especially those of us who want to breastfeed our two-year-olds in public, since some find that behavior teetering out of “okay for her but not for me,” and maybe headed for “not okay at all.”  I think that the more we recognize that babies thrive when they are cared for, and that parents are qualified to make informed decisions about how to care for babies, the more of a chance we have of spotting the things that really hurt kids, like poverty, violence and abandonment.

But now I’ve gotten a couple of emails regarding this “attack” on mother’s milk. I’m hearing a call to rise up and defend breastfeeding (as if we aren’t the majority), and it’s making me feel guilty about supporting the other side. 

Is it too much to hope that we can have a dialogue about empowered choices AND also be supportive of breastfeeding?  Or is this desire to empower female and male agency in early parenting just feeding the culture wars?  

Society and the Single Girl

Since I’m thinking about families again today, I’m moving up this comment by Jo Anne from a post about love. This is MOXIE Theatre’s Managing Director:

I have been experiencing the “do you have a boyfriend?” question when I go home to Texas since I was 19. Now it’s morphed into “are you married?” or “do you have a family?”

To which I used to give a meek, head down, “no, not right now,” which then became a defiant, confident “Nope” – loaded with all of the “and I’m perfectly happy that way, thank you very much, so please get off my back” that I could fit into that little word.

But, the best part was always the look of thinly veiled suspicion and pity that followed. Always leaving with that “wow, I’m a freak” feeling.

And, I think your point about that push/pull that happens between trying to assure ourselves that we are ok, and reconciling that with the fact that we really would LIKE to have a partner, is such a valid one.

I’ve often wondered what the solution is to feeling not quite right about being single. How do we let it be TRULY ok to be single – giving AS MUCH value to that life experience – as we do to families? Even in MOXIE – our emphasis is on supporting families – with very little outright validation to the single person. Not that I would necessariy change that – I think this is part of our purpose on this earth. I just have often wondered how, as a society, we could make change that gives value to the individual, even unpartnered. I’m not sure what that is, but I just wonder if we’d feel more comfortable and easy in our search for a partner, if we didn’t feel like there really would be something WRONG with going through life single. 

At yesterday’s design meeting for The Butcher of Baraboo, we discussed the violence that can be done to an individual by a group. A community (which is, of course, made up of individuals, and that’s where the theatre comes in) sometimes invalidates characteristics of an individual that threaten the values of the group.   This happens in conservative communities. And it happens in liberal ones.  See Noelle’s comment on the “normal” post for a personal example of liberal outsider-shaming. 

Is offering “support” to our singles another way to shame people into conforming, potentially at their expense?   And if so, how do we let it be “TRULY okay to be single?”

Do This Now

1. Take out a piece of paper and a pen.

2. Make a list of ten things you enjoy doing.

3. Do one of them.

****

I had an obvious pass on “hike in Zion National Park” and also (7+ months pregnant), a pretty good pass on “wear cute clothes.” But I didn’t have any excuse not to read poetry.  

Opening Anne Sexton’s Love Poems, I read “In Celebration of My Uterus.”  I have one of those. Here’s an excerpt:

Many women are singing together of this:
one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine,
one is at the aquarium tending a seal,
one is dull at the wheel of her Ford,
one is at the toll gate collecting,
one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona,
one is straddling a cello in Russia,
one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt,
one is painting her bedroom walls moon color,
one is dying but remembering a breakfast,
one is stretching on her mat in Thailand,
one is wiping the ass of her child,
one is staring out the window of a train
in the middle of Wyoming and one is
anywhere and some are everywhere and all
seem to be singing, although some can not
sing a note.

Deep sigh.

Total time expenditure (make list, do enjoyable activity, AND blog about it): less than 30 minutes.

***

I wonder…among this nation of the overworked, especially considering anyone with a job, a kid or a Facebook page, and God bless the folks with all three…how often do we take the time to feed ourselves?

Thursday Inspiration

About Thursday Inspiration: The standard rehearsal week is Tuesday through Sunday. That means Thursday is the theatre-world hump day. On Thursdays I try to post something that encourages us all to get our luscious rear ends back to work. 

Here’s The Fund for Women Artists.