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Oh, hi friends!
Well! What an off-kilter week this is! Anyone in the U.S. feeling the same? Three-day weekends are somehow more disorienting than proper vacations. Maybe because they’re both short and feel kind of…indulgent? You’ve supposed to be at work! I was practically skipping through the streets in Brooklyn on Monday afternoon.
But another reason for the off-kilterness — my play reading was on Friday! And it went really well! Off-kilter only because now my brain says…what’s next? Meanwhile, as I digest it all, I wanted to share with you a few lessons that I learned:
Sometimes, accidents are a good thing.
I’ll confess something: the only reason I did the reading was because I was chosen in a lottery via the Dramatists Guild to get free space on a Friday night. You could pick the nights you wanted, and I chose a few in late June or July, well after my 10-minute musical (which I’m presenting this Monday!!) is finished. And yet…I won the night that was the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, the most inconvenient night possible. LOL. And yet, it gave me a target.
Do you need a target?
Give power to other people.
But the REAL reason the reading happened was because I asked for help. Not my strengths: choosing actors for casting, booking and running rehearsals, coordinating…stuff. I kind of just want these things to…happen. And so I finally asked my friend Jenn Haltman if maybe, possibly, would she want to, I don’t know, possibly, direct my reading? And since being a casting director and director is her actual job, turns out she is amazing at all these things — and so much more.
Who can you ask for help today?
You simply find the time.
I had been sitting on this draft of “Old Hollywood” since my Pulitzer entry in December, unable — more like, unwilling — to find time to work on it. Turns out, when you rope in other people with you, you magically find the time. You don’t want to let anyone down. So I was editing page-by-page on my lunch hour, in 15-minute bursts before work, on the subway. Those little snippets all added up to a new draft I had ready for rehearsal.
Can you find 15 minutes?
Remind yourself of the spaces where you belong.
We had one rehearsal — four and a half hours of going through the play with very talented actors. But I could have stayed in that room for 24 hours, and gone back the next day and the next. Talking about characters and themes and words — there is nothing better.
So now I pose to you: Which rooms do you love?
The reading itself was wonderful — 25 supportive friends and friends-of-friends showed up on a Friday night, in the middle of Times Square, to watch something I wrote, and which ascended to new and thrilling heights in the mouth of these actors.
To try, and learn, and fail, and try again. Isn’t that an extraordinary gift?
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“The No. 1 predictor of happiness,” he said, is the “quality time we spend with people we care about and who care about us. In other words, relationships.”
This was the antidote to “arrival fallacy” discussed in this great NYT article about what happens when you accomplish something — and the comedown that happens afterward.
(When it comes to running, I called this the “post-marathon blues.” You’ve run the race! Now what?)
I particularly admired the writer talking about crying in his car after wrapping up a big and important project. It is real!
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My iPhone Weather app seems to…lie? So I was very happy when Jenn showed me the way to Dark Sky, a hyper-accurate weather website and app. (I don’t have the app because my phone is so full I have to delete stuff every day but…it looks good??)
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Do you like these daily emails? Please share with a friend!
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara
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