Credit

Posted May 19th, 2005 by Sean Williams

So, I’ve been asked a couple of times to update my blog, and it’s worth wondering why I haven’t. The last few entries were cheap-ass, I know that, and so I have to ask myself, why haven’t I been able to work up a lather?

And so it comes to this, this admission that I don’t know how to deal with good fortune. I don’t think it’s that I am always waiting for the other shoe to fall, it really isn’t anything that supernatural. My wife comes from a long line of Jewish women who never speak their fears out loud for fear that they might be giving them power, I call it her “evil-eye-syndrome” and it isn’t that with me.

I think I need to actually admit that I can’t get the same kind of juices flowing for the good days as I can for the bad. Our show was turned down by the NYMTF, and I had a long rhapsody on the nature of my failure, we got accepted to the Fringe and I was like, “Yeah, that’s great… No, really. Awesome.”

I am perpetually surprised by the failures in my life, organically surprised. I am surprised right down to my heart. When my first marriage ended, I felt like I had let everyone down because I was sure everyone thought we were perfect together and that my ex-wife was a gift to us all, I was *STUNNED* to learn that my friends were tolerating her to hang around with me. Every time I don’t get cast in something after auditioning, I get an existential pang, as if there was a special curse that hung on me despite my clear dominance over everyone else who auditioned. It never occurs to me that, maybe, someone else was just a little bit better suited to the role.

Maybe that’s the thing. Maybe I assume that success should happen with every attempt and that’s why I don’t get juiced up about it enough.

I have to say that I am continually amazed by my good fortune in fiscal and marital matters. I have always been a terrible boyfriend, and all of the same skills I employed in making the loves in my life miserable applied to creditors as well. Credit card companies don’t like it when you cheat, lie and bounce checks any more than your girlfriends do. The fact that I have found a woman who inspires a certain level of decency in me says more about her than it does about me, and, not surprisingly, as I’ve learned to take care of another person and be a fucking *guy* when asked, my credit rating and fiscal life have improved a hundred fold. I still don’t always get the cell phone bill paid on time, but I do have about fifteen tenants and about fifteen monthly bills to care for, plus taxes and hand-holding, and I’m getting by okay. All of which is just pure luck.

But artistically, I’m always like, “Um, I’m here! Write me a check and make me famous, please.” And I’m always stunned when the response is, “Dude, you haven’t really done anything yet.”

So, we wrote a show, and we worked really fucking hard on it. After years of finding meaningful success hard to come by, and years of feeling like the fat girl at the prom, I guess I am sort of surprised, suddenly, that our work is being taken seriously. We’ve always *felt* it should be taken seriously, but to have this buzz swirling is a surprise that I don’t dare dwell on too much. I have come full circle, now I expect to be treated with respect by my creditors and friends, and I am sorta stunned when my artistic work generates excitement.

So, I’m gonna need to learn to rhapsodize the good things if I am ever going to enjoy them.

One thing I can say, working with Mac and Jordana has never been a greater joy. Re-writes are always painful, generating new material might be the worst part of that, and we are all three having to metaphorically take off the comfortable wet socks and get on new dry panty hose, artistically. And we know, wet socks are no good for us and look bad, panty hose will give us that nice hour glass figure we’ve been dying for.

But the trust we have is implicit. We throw out ideas and we know when we’ve hit on the right path because we can see it in the others’ faces. I was thinking that I should write some lyrics for one of the new pieces because I knew exactly what joke to make, and Jordana wrote lyrics for it that were eleven times funnier than anything I would have come up with. But more than that, for me, is I will get ideas I think are great and then play them for Mac and Jordana, and I can see on their faces, from the first note, that I’m wrong. I can see it because when I’m right, the energy in the room changes color.

All right. There. I’ve got two paragraphs about how great this all is. I will try to focus on that for a little while, see how it works for me.