The Gamble
On rejection, prednisone, and the complicated math of being alive and ambitious at the same time. If you've ever bet on yourself when your body was actively voting against it, this one's for you.
The high: performing for a sold-out crowd.
The low: learning my show, the one I’ve been writing and composing for five years, the one that has had three readings and two workshops and is genuinely ready for production, was not being offered a slot in the upcoming season.
The reason I was given: budgets cut 8%, my show was the fifth of the season, first to go.
The truth: who knows. I don’t know if it was ever truly being considered.
The more uncomfortable truth: I’m not sure that matters.
The embarrassing part: I cried at the meeting.
I didn’t have time to dwell on any of it. I had a weekend of performances ahead of me and an ear infection that had other plans. So I made a decision. I took a small dose of prednisone, just enough to keep up with myself and belt out those high D’s.
I can already feel the imaginary judgy people in my brain shaking their heads.
My internal response to them: Fuck off. You have no idea what it’s like to live in this body.
Too much? Maybe. Maybe not. You decide.
I chose myself. Again. As I keep having to do.
What I’m Actually Waiting For
Here’s the honest version: I’ve been waiting for some authoritative entity to sweep me up into the clutches of their budgets, their huge email list, their guaranteed built-in audience, their weekly health and pension, and a venue full of designers and creatives who can help my work explode.
I’m starting to accept that’s not coming. Not yet. Maybe not ever in the way I imagined it.
I once pictured this show opening off-Broadway just as I turned fifty. A perfect number for my storybook life. Creating buzz the way Alex Edelman or Jacquelyn Novak did with their solo work. Hip theater, great press, the whole thing.
But those people are on their own path. They’re younger, not ill, they live where the action is, and they’re stand up comedians. I’m a musical theater performer singing all my jokes, raising kids in Northern California, negotiating with a body that wants to stay small.
Do I sound bitter? Maybe a little. I’m working on it. It’s not their fault. I made different decisions based on what life had to offer me.
The Actual Question
Do I keep waiting for some authoritative agency to produce my play, which could take another two years? Or do I produce it myself, get it on tape, let it become part of my creative portfolio, do a proper ta-da, and move on to write the next thing?
It’s not so simple. In the back of my brain has always been the notion that this show could take me somewhere real. And weirder things have happened.
But here’s where I actually am this morning: the right side of my face is swollen. The ear infection is back. I may have built up a tolerance to the antibiotics, which is its own special problem. I pushed my body beyond its capabilities for one night of solid entertainment and my body has shoved me back into submission, as it reliably does.
This is my creative cycle. It has always been my creative cycle.
I’ve made a kind of gamble with my life. To live bigger on the front end, still performing, still creating, still pushing and asking and learning, with the full understanding that I may get permanently sick on the back end and reach an earlier finish line than most.
Sounds dramatic?
Well. I’m literally dramatic for a living.
I’ll go see another doctor who doesn’t know me. Explain my thirty year illness from the beginning, again. Take a drug. Get better for the time being.
And then I’ll try to soothe my soul with art.
It’s the only thing that really works. The only thing that calms the anxiety of a restless soul trapped in a body that keeps changing the terms of our agreement.
So that’s what I’ll do.
Again.
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