Grouchy this morning…

Posted June 13th, 2003 by Sean Williams

A childish foul mood has taken me over. For some reason, the continuing raging debate between what one wants to do and what one has to do is inescapable, we are constantly being cornered into the stuff we hate doing even if we avoid things like a day job or kids.

Gideon has a wonderful play that all three of us adore, we just aren’t sure if it might only be us who find it funny and awesome or if everyone would. We are desperately trying to work our way through it and decide if we should keep it in the festival we might be in this summer. That’s right, there is a festival we might be in, but we aren’t even sure if we want to keep this play in it. Because the play might be completely different by then and the festival opens on Ian’s wedding day.

Michelle also has a show she wants me to do with her at the end of August, and I have three weeks of recordings to do in July for a musician I loathe, and I have to fly there. I am also trying to finish the re-write on the gay one act I wrote (the one act is fine, the characters are gay, and I don’t have a title, so…) and I have an idea for another one act that a different theater company will do a reading of if I go ahead and write it.

And then there is Torch, still hanging over me. When I actually get into the music I love it, but there is a huge stumbling block in front of me. I am waiting for ‘The Song’, that one that hits about ten minutes in to the show, the first really up tempo piece, heavily verbal, big rock-out showy dance-y kind of thing. I have about eleventy hundred bad ideas for it.

(I told Mac about my idea for this one act I am writing now and he said it sounded cool, that I should write it, etc. and that I seem to be going through a phase of “refined insincerity” in my work, which I was excited by because it had never occurred to me that I had any kind of unifying themes in my work. But when I go back through my theatrical writing over the last few years, I do seem to be fascinated by the insincere specifically. Of course, in theater everything is artificial, but I am fascinated by lying and reversals and embraced betrayals.

Which I guess makes sense.)

All this to say, people think that the life of the lazy person is easier than the life of the diligent person, but I think the former ends up doing more work then the latter, and is less pleased with the work he has done. In the same way, a freelance artist does sometimes find him or her self in a position where the forseeable future is tied up in shit he or she doesn’t want to do. A person who gets up every day and goes to a job simply for money and does stuff that doesn’t interest them sees the same ocean of crap. The difference is that the end product is for the artist is more personally expressive and therefor more worth it.

I think the best possible world for me would be in producing or event planning. I love doing it, I’m really good at it, and, faced with the knowledge that I have to do stuff I don’t want to regardless, it would be great to have a steady job where the end could actually satisfy me as much as producing does now. I just don’t know how much I get out of performing, much less acting, anymore. As someone once told me, ‘Just because you’re good at it doesn’t mean it has to be your job. I’m great in bed, but I’m not going to be a hooker…’