Songs For The Struggling Artist

You might think I’d be the target audience for Six. I am, after all, obsessed with reframing old stories so as to give women some power they otherwise might not have in their narratives. But while Six seems to think it’s doing that, it almost feels like the opposite. The premise is paper thin. The six wives of Henry VIII gather together to put on a show and have a contest to see who had it worse. (Spoiler alert?) That’s really all there is to the show.  Each wife sings a song about her troubles and then they spend the last five minutes trying to imagine an alternate history. That is literally all there is to the show. It’s a variety show disguised as a musical. Which, you know, fine, what do I care? Variety shows can be fun. I resent it, though, and I suppose it’s because they’re framing it as if they are doing these historical women a favor by dressing them up in pop star girl boss outfits and giving them some bland songs with vocal calisthenics to sing. Somehow I doubt any of Henry VIII’s wives would apprec

This is a taste of my new audio drama. You can help us out by subscribing to The Defense, giving it five stars and writing a review! If you've listened to The Dragoning, you'll hear some familiar names and some new ones! A live recording of an audio drama podcast about a group of women grappling with their defense, a seemingly magical power that protects them from harm.  Get a glimpse behind the curtain of live podcast drama. Come see the serio-comic podcast sauce get made, four episodes at a time. TW: Women laughing. Men dying.   We’ll be performing at Jalopy in Brooklyn at 7pm on January 21, February 11, March 10th and April 14. Tickets available for ⁠March 10th⁠ and ⁠April 14⁠. Don’t worry if you haven’t been to previous shows. We’ll catch you up at the top! The first episode of the podcast is available now on ⁠Spotify⁠, ⁠Apple⁠, ⁠Amazon⁠, ⁠Pocket Casts⁠, ⁠Radio Public⁠, ⁠Pandora⁠, ⁠Podchaser⁠, ⁠iHeart⁠, ⁠Deezer⁠, ⁠JioSaavn⁠ and ⁠YouTube⁠ or here on our ⁠website⁠. Performed by: Marcella Adams,

It’s December. I’m back to putting on a show. I’m doing all the things you have to do to make a show happen. I’m getting a team together. I’m casting actors. I’m writing a press release. I’m crafting a marketing strategy. And at a every inflection point, I think, “Golly this is hard.” I think, “Why did I get myself into this?” And at every turn in the road, I think, “Wouldn’t it be easier to just not?” At every mile marker I feel sure I’ve made an irreversible mistake and failure is inevitable. The fact is, it WOULD be easier to just not. It’s always easier to not do than to do. Always! (Well, almost always.) It would be nice if the arc of the universe bent toward justice but it seems more accurately to bend toward inertia. It is really quite remarkable anyone makes anything at all! I have renewed admiration for anyone who ever had an idea and then DID it. It is so much easier to have an idea and then just sit around hoping something will happen with it. That is what most people do. And the reason that is wha

I'm recovering from recording some episodes of my new Audio Drama series, The Defense - so I'm rebroadcasting the inspiration for the previous Audio Drama series (The Dragoning). You'll probably also hear some carryover into The Defense. And I forgot to say during the intro that this post was provoked by the Kavanaugh hearings. * An excerpt: I am nice. I am so nice. My whole life I have been told I am nice. When I received criticism, it was that I was too nice. And not just once either. Over and over and over again. “You’re too nice!” they’d say. But that’s over. It’s over. I am a dragon now. Tell me I’m too nice again. *It didn’t have to be this way. The arc of the universe could have bent toward justice a little sooner and I would have remained as I was. I could have stayed that person who wrote sweet plays that mostly worked out in the end – you know the kind, the ones where smart women hook up with slightly dorky temporarily clueless men and everyone’s happy. You could have had more of thos

I am without much voice today so I'm rebroadcasting an early episode. Believe me, none of us want to hear my "Easy like Sunday morning" today. And because it was the Grammys yesterday and a lot of people are talking about them, I thought I'd reshare this one. * In the old times, the fairies roamed the green hills. They were powerful and mischievous. There were many varieties of fairy – with different specialties but the power they principally possessed was something called glamour. It was an enchantment that placed a sparkling illusion over a human’s eyes. The glamour made the ugly beautiful. It made the empty full. It turned a pile of old shoes and tin cans into a pile of gold shoes and diamond glasses. It turned a heap of ashes into a scrumptious looking cake and murky dirty water into rich red wine. Fairy gold is not real gold. It is something that has been glamoured. Most humans are powerless to resist the glamour and some are trapped in Fairyland forever, having eaten a mouthful of as

For years I’d been seeing discussions of “SEO” all over my websites. Every company seemed to want to help me improve this SEO business so I eventually looked it up to try and understand it. In case you don’t have six websites the way I do, (I am a maniac. They’re here, here, here, here, here and right here) or maybe you’ve never encountered SEO before or maybe SEO stands for “Sexy Elephant Opera” for you – allow me to explain. In this case SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It is what you’re supposed to do to make yourself easy to find on the web. People who are concerned about discoverability and visibility on the internet tend to care a lot about SEO. I am, as someone who makes many things in this digital space, very interested in making myself discoverable so I looked into it. Most of the companies that make CMS (Content Management System) templates give their users tools to optimize their searchability. To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review! Rat

The scene is a flashback. It’s looking like the 60s because the teen is in a silky turtleneck mini dress and the mom’s hair is up, cocktail hour style. But the song is Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name” which came out in 1973, so probably it’s supposed to be 1973 and this group is just rocking their clothes from eight years ago. I mean, that’s how humans are, sometimes. They wear their clothes from the previous decade. Not everyone is in style all the time. And hey, maybe this song isn’t telling us it’s 1973. Maybe it’s later in the 70s and they’ve just chosen this song for this party for its metaphorical value. But judging by the fashion and the music, it’s around 1973. But who are these people? They’re normally not on this show that is set in the now times. We’ve never seen them before. It’s a flashback, so we have to work out who they are from their names. It turns out, the teen is Jean – who in the now times is played by Gillian Anderson and her younger sister, Joanna, played in the now times by Lisa McGrillis. T

On my way to go see a dance piece, I stopped off at the Drama Bookshop and noticed that they had a collection of plays written by my old friend. I figured I should buy it, since I have a goal to dedicate a shelf, nay, a bookcase, to the work of my friends. Also, I wanted to read the plays. Over the years, we’ve been less in touch so I haven’t managed to see everything or read everything. In our twenties, we were very close. We talked on the phone many nights a week and we’d go out and wander the streets of New York, finding delicious tidbits to eat. We talked about our ambitions and our hopes. He dreamed of seeing his plays on Broadway and I wanted that dream for him too. It was a time of much angst and sometimes we’d both of us slip into hopelessness. You really have no idea what’s coming. I guess we never do. To keep reading Some Good News for Some Friends, From the Future, visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 384 Song: Wednesday Image a page from the book I was quoted in - Feld

When I heard (in an Audio Drama group), about the AI descriptions taking over podcasts on Goodpods (a podcast platform), I headed straight over to see if my audio drama (The Dragoning) had been subjected to this treatment. It was not, so I moved on with my week, not thinking much of it. Then another audio drama group began to talk about how outrageous and wrong these descriptions were and how they were pulling their shows from the platform. So I went back to check and, still, The Dragoning was unaffected. But this time, I thought to check my other podcast, the audio version of this blog, and lo and behold, there was a whole bunch of text I’d never seen before. There was a description of my podcast, a paragraph about who should listen to it and a summary of three episodes. And unlike the descriptions of my colleagues’ podcasts, it was pretty accurate. Actually, it sounded like a PR person got ahold of my work and went to town. It sounds like a pretty nice review. If a person had written it, I would be flattere

There are about thirty artists in the classroom that is not designed for a lecture but is being used for one anyway. We are required to attend this information session in order to be eligible for our local arts funding. It is a two hour Power Point presentation about how to fill out the grant form. About an hour into it, the facilitator asked “Are we having fun?” and the silence was deafening. The facilitator is very personable and he’s working so hard to make this content less deadly than it is. But telling thirty artists how to fill in forms for grants, mostly between $1000 and $5000, is not scintillating presentation material. I’ve been sitting in presentations like this for over twenty years now and every single one of them is like this. Or worse. They are a colossal waste of artists’ time, no matter which borough or organization is sponsoring them. Whether it’s the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council or the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, Queens Council on the Arts or the Brooklyn Arts Council, they all r

This week I found out I had reached the #4 spot on the Singer Songwriter charts in Queens. This kind of success doesn’t come around very often in my life so I thought I’d share what I did to make it happen. You know what I did? Absolutely nothing. Not one single thing. Last week, I got a notice that, since I hadn’t logged on in so long, Reverb Nation was going to suspend my account. So I logged in. That’s all I did. I didn’t upload new songs. I didn’t change my profile pics. I didn’t upload a video. I didn’t enter a contest or message my “fans”. But a few days after I logged back in, I got the notice that I was in the top ten of singer songwriters in Queens. However this achievement happened, it had absolutely nothing to do with me or any action I took. To read more of How I Became the #4 Singer-Songwriter in Queens visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 381 Image of my Reverb Nation Account (including my rank at #4!) Song: Sleepover by Emily Rainbow Davis c 2007 To support this podc

As you might have surmised, I listen to a lot of podcasts. I used to do a podcast recommendation of every episode of my own podcast. While True Crime isn’t my top genre, sometimes it can satisfy the itch for an involving, multi-layered mystery. There’s not always a solution or resolution (which I do not find satisfying) but the journey there is usually very compelling. There are a lot of great shows beyond Serial – which may have kicked off the popularity of this genre. I’ve gotten into stories about corruption (Dead End, Trump Inc), drugs (The 13th Step, Document), theft (Last Seen, Believe in Magic), and, of course, murder (Bone Valley, In the Dark, Suspect). I believe there’s a sub-genre in the murder True Crime scene – Wrongful Conviction. And while I’m not sure I’m ready to swear off True Crime podcasts or even murder themed True Crime podcasts, I do think I’m done with the Wrongful Conviction podcasts. They just make me so angry! They are infuriatingly full of cops railroading young people into confessi

Over a decade ago, my friend wished I could be there to sing her baby some lullabies so I recorded some and wrote one specifically for him. Then I burned those songs onto a CD and put them in the mail. I did this for a fair number of my friends with babies for a fair number of years. Then some of the parents of those babies wished they could listen to them on Spotify and so I put them up there and they became available for anyone who wanted them. Now, hardly anyone has a CD player anymore, so I send new babies a link. It’s somehow not as special but companies like Spotify made it this way. My music has been on Spotify for something like seven years now. Of all the albums up there, the lullabies are the most popular and my friends who listen to them there like knowing that I get a little payment every time they listen. That’s not something that happens when you listen on a CD. The payment on Spotify isn’t much (between .002 and .005 cents per play). I made $43.24 last year (from all the streaming services, not

Sometimes you have an awareness of the historical quality of the moment you’re going through. I had a very clear sense that things would never be the same after the eleventh of September, 2001. I could feel the day being engraved in the land, in our memories, in our timelines. But a lot stuff doesn’t FEEL significant while it’s happening, especially childhood events, even if people TELL you a moment is momentous, sometimes it just all blends together in the fabric of a life. I’ve lived long enough now that folks are making historical period dramas about eras I remember. It is super weird to see production teams get this wrong. Or to watch styles be elevated from a niche corner to a dominant style. (“No, 7 Lives of Lea, we did not all wear mesh, tiny tank tops and chokers all the time in the 90s. Your research included too many promo shots from the WB.”) But sometimes, the events are so far in the past, I question my own memory of them. I know I am often wrong about what year a pop song came out, for example,

When I was in high school and dreaming of being an actor, I read a lot of the major acting texts. I read Stanislavksi. I read Stella Adler. I read Uta Hagen. I read Sanford Meisner. I was particularly enchanted with the Meisner book and tried to square it with the Meisner exercises we’d done at the Governor’s School for the Arts. They didn’t QUITE connect and I could never really apply what I learned to actual shows but I was captivated and all these texts seemed to strive for a more authentic, emotionally honest style of acting. A lot of acting training is concerned with this authenticity. A lot of acting training takes itself very seriously. I took it all pretty seriously. I took myself pretty seriously, truth be told. And then I started working as an actor. The concerns of working actors have very little in common with acting training. For the most part, the jobbing actor becomes less concerned with whether or not you can tell someone their shirt is brown with authenticity (Yes, this was an exercise I did

After I finished writing my novel for kids, I realized I was not particularly well versed in what kids were reading these days and so set out to read all the contemporary middle grade fiction I could get my hands on. Top of my list: The Secret Keepers, The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, The Bromeliad Trilogy, The Girl Who Drank the Moon and Miss Ellicott’s School for the Magically Minded. There’s a lot of great stuff out there. And they tend to be real page turners compared to a lot of adult books. One of the books I encountered on my search was The Screaming Staircase, the first book of the Lockwood and Company series. It takes place in a world where children work as ghost hunters because adults can’t see spirits. It’s somehow both Victorian and contemporary and has the charming quality of being a workplace story for kids. I know the youth love a ghost and here kids can see them and hear them and fight them every night. I liked it. In theory. But I wasn’t compelled to read more than the first one for

After reading a bit about the history of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (because of questions that came up after watching The Empress), I learned of another Empress Elisabeth (AKA Sisi) project in the pipeline. The film, Corsage, was reported to look at the darker side of the empress, dealing with her fatphobia, her tightlacing and obsession with her extremely long hair. After the overly romantic fantasy version of this woman in The Empress, I was ready for a thornier Sisi. I thought this new film might be a more historically accurate version of events because of the inclusion of these less attractive aspects of her personality but as I watched it, I didn’t need to read more history to notice it was just as made-up as The Empress, if not more. The thing about The Empress was it was clear to me why they made up the fictions that they did. A love story between relative equals is a lot more attractive than the Emperor marrying a young teenage girl. It is a beautiful fantasy to imagine an empress wanting to help th

I’ve been thinking a lot about this thing someone said to me when I was in graduate school. I’d just performed a role I’d always dreamed of playing (Imogen in Cymbeline) and at the cast party was propped up on some chairs resting the ankle I’d twisted during the show. A faculty member came up and complimented my performance (those compliments are lost to my memory) and then said, “I don’t know why you’re wasting your time directing.” Let me give you some context for this very odd compliment. I was there in that graduate program as a directing student. I was less than one year away from an MFA in Directing. My class had only one director and it was me. This particular faculty member, while not someone I studied with, was married to my advisor – that is, my primary directing teacher. In praising my performance, she was also dismissing my entire purpose in being there. To keep reading "Why are you wasting your time directing?" please visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 374

By the time I signed up with Patreon, I’d had about thirteen years of fundraising experience. Having started a theatre company in 2001, I’d explored all kinds of ways to fund our work. In the beginning, it was just writing letters and asking for help. (Weirdly, still the most successful method.) Then, as the internet became more integrated into our lives, we watched Charity Donor Portals come and go out of business and then crowdfunding kicked in. We ran campaigns on CrowdRise and Indiegogo and probably a few others I’ve already forgotten about. These were all for my non-profit theatre, not for me personally. These were funds which only rarely benefited me in a financial way. But in those days, there was not yet a reliable way to get support for me, as an individual artist. I could raise funds for projects but not for my ongoing support, not for my writing, for example. Patreon came along as a way for folks who were making things on the internet to get paid for the things. To keep reading Can Businesses Do th

A writer of my acquaintance recently had an op-ed published in the Washington Post about theatre and what should be done about the death spiral it seems to be in. In the piece, she proposed some ways to fix some of the problems the field has found itself in. She named the difficulties, the history and offered a solution. In watching the response to the article roll in, I was struck by how those who were opposed to her ideas seemed to think the proposal was a plan that was about to be put into place. They seemed to think this was a thing that was about to happen. (One thing she suggested was to give funding for big arts institutions directly to artists instead.) There were cries for the loss of these institutions, for the loss of jobs, for the impossibility of artists taking responsibility for their own budgets. It seemed like they thought this writer was a wizard and was giving notice of what she was about to do with her magic wand. They seemed to attribute great powers to this writer, to imagine she could, w