Songs For The Struggling Artist

In an interview about my work in Shakespeare education, I was asked what we did to make Shakespeare accessible to the students. I couldn’t help but laugh. To me, it’s like asking, “How do we make hip hop accessible to the students? How do we make Marvel movies accessible?” You don’t have to make Shakespeare accessible. It just is. Does everyone love it? Nope. That’s ok. Not everyone loves Marvel movies either, believe it or not. But put a really fantastic Shakespeare play in front of students and they’re just as likely, if not more likely, to enjoy it, as a fancy grown-up crowd would. To read more of Making Shakespeare Accessible visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog.  This is Episode 330 Song: Potter's Wheel Image via the British Library Me on Mastodon - @erainbowd@podvibes.co Me on Hive - @erainbowd To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review! Rate it wherever you listen or via: https://ratethispodcast.com/strugglingartist Join my mailing list: www.emilyrain

The video made me cry. It was clearly meant to – and it succeeded. It’s the one where the young man asks the stranger – an old man with his walker – if he’ll go to Disneyland with him and they go to Disneyland and have a fantastic time and at the end, the old man (100 years old, a veteran, we’re told) tries to express what the day has meant to him and cries. He says he thought his life was over. It is moving and very sweet. And very popular. I saw the TikTok video on Twitter where it had millions of view and then looked for it on TikTok where it also had millions of views and it’s also on Instagram, where I assume it also has millions of views. If I were Disney, I’d be setting up a Bring an Elder to Disney Program right now, because I predict this is going to be a trend. And it would be a lovely trend. Young folks searching out older folks to take them out for a fun day? Awesome. To read more of A Visit from the TikTok Fairy Godfather visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog.  This is Episode 329 S

This book I’m reading is not the first book to do this, but it is the latest and it is enough of a trend that, when it happened in this book, I may have said, out loud, “Oh no, not this again.” It’s this thing where novelists and screenwriters put a playwright in their piece. In these works, the playwright always becomes super successful and gets famous and rich and, I have to assume, receives all the accolades the writer dreams of, but in theatre form. My sense is that they do this because they don’t want to write about a writer too close to themselves. If they’re a novelist, the protagonist can’t be a novelist, that’s too close – and a playwright, they imagine, is like a novelist but more social and glamourous. A screenwriter imagines that a playwright is like a screenwriter but artier and nobler. To keep reading Playwright in a Novel, Playwright in a Film, visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog.  This is Episode 328 Song: Glamour Boys Image via Pixabay by Myriams-Fotos  To support this po

My storage unit was filled with show shit. That is, it was full of props, set pieces, costumes, puppets, mask molds, rehearsal materials, marketing stuff and lots of random creative remains. I hadn’t seen these things in a long while so when it began to emerge, I said, “Well, a lot of this is going in the garbage!” Meanwhile, it’s complicated. I saved a lot of this stuff out of a sincere hope that I’d find a way to produce the shows again. I have those giant gold frames, the hat boxes and the portable racks for a show that we toured for a little while and hoped we’d tour again. I kept the materials from our creative process on The Door Was Open in case we got the opportunity to explore further. We haven’t. And those six hula hoops probably aren’t entirely necessary to keep around. Nor is the big bag of wallpaper scraps. But I kept them because I hope they WOULD be called into service again. That wallpaper was a miracle in our Research and Development process! Could I really just get rid of it? I haven’t made

This is part two of my journey of reading When Women Were Dragons. If you want to know why I’m reading this, catch up with my questions around plagiarism here. If you want to read Part One, start here. And I’m just a fountain of spoilers so skip this one if you’re wanting to be surprised by anything that happens in this book. Now PART 2 September 4 I can really feel how Barnhill is a children’s book writer. I’m actually surprised this book is being sold as one for adults. The narrator is a child, looking at this event from a child’s eyes. Sure, there’s some violence and a lot of child abandonment but have you read work for children lately? Some of it is quite dark. I mean – listen – maybe she really means to be writing for adults and just can’t help making work that feels like it’s for children. That happens to me all the time so I’m sympathetic. I make some piece that I feel very clear is not for children and then someone comes to see it and says, “This would be great for kids!” But I do wonder why an award-

In a wave of curiosity, I put myself on the waiting list for my library’s digital copy of When Women Were Dragons, the novel that came out this year in which a dragoning is a featured event. (I wrote about this funny “coincidence” not so long ago.) The wait was going to be months long so I figured I didn’t have to read it – but it would be on my list should I want to. When it suddenly became available, I didn’t WANT to read it but I also couldn’t help myself. What is this book’s deal? I started it last night and I already have so many thoughts. It seemed like it would be better to wait until I’d finished the book to write about it – but it’s clear it’s going to be a real journey for me so I figured I’d take you with me on it. This post may take a while to write as I don’t think I’m going to be able to read this book quickly. In fact, I think it’s going to be multiple posts. There will be spoilers. This will be me reading the book, with you alongside me. To keep reading In Which I Read that Dragon Book visit t

There’s a song by a young woman, that has emerged via Tik Tok, that is extremely popular, called “Victoria’s Secret.” In it, she (she goes by Jax) reveals that the secret of Victoria is that she was made up by a dude. It’s a fun pop tune about body empowerment, with Victoria’s Secret at the center.  It’s a super catchy song and I recommend the video on her Tik Tok which is a flash mob video in front of a Victoria’s Secret. I’ve had the song in my head pretty much since I heard it. And every time it comes around again, I think, we should have stopped this a long time ago. What a terrible power this dumb store has had on the psyches of girls. To read more of I Also Know Victoria's Secret visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 324  Song: Jax's Victoria Secret Image of Victoria's Secret via wikicommons To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review! Rate it wherever you listen or via: https://ratethispodcast.com/strugglingartist Join my mailing l

Mostly I don’t worry about respectability. I’m aware that I work in fields that lack a certain respectability and that by operating at the margins, I do not rank high on a lot of people’s respectability scales. I notice it particularly in the comments on anything that proposes providing support for artists (for housing, basic income, anything – “Why should we help these people who don’t even do a regular job for a living?”). I have made a kind of peace with my lack of respectability and can sometimes even revel in it. Recently, though, I found myself thinking about it – after wrapping up jury service on a civil trial, spending hours watching lawyers. Lawyers, despite all the jokes to the contrary, experience a high level of respectability. Often, immigrants want their children to grow up to be lawyers (and doctors!) so that they know the children have achieved something like respectability. No one shakes their head regretfully when they hear someone is going to law school. It’s a sign they are entering a resp

You will likely not be surprised to learn I was crazy for the Indigo Girls in my youth. When I learned to play guitar, it was Indigo Girls’ songs that I particularly focused on. I didn’t learn the entire Nomads, Indians and Saints songbook but I got pretty close. In those days, we bought songbooks. There were no chords on the internet since there wasn’t much internet. Somehow in the last couple of decades, I’d lost track of what the Indigo Girls were making (along with almost every other band I used to be into – I don’t know what happened. I blame digital music and aging, I guess.) so I thought I should catch up. I added all of their albums from the last era to my “New Moment” playlist on Spotify, which is where I put all the music I want to make sure I listen to. Since there’s a live album in that mix, I’ve been hearing some old favorites in addition to new songs. Some of them I’m hearing differently now. “Prince of Darkness” popped up and I thought, “Damn if this song doesn’t sum up the Gen X experience!” T

In case it’s not completely obvious, I’m a fairly conflict averse person. I hate when people argue. I get anxious when tensions rise. I do not enjoy a debate. I would almost always prefer to exchange smiles then to exchange “words” with anyone. Sometimes, on-line, people will think I like heated “discussions” because I have strong opinions and I express them through this particular medium. Just for the record, I do not. I will do a LOT to avoid a heated “discussion.” As the time for jury deliberation got closer for those of us sitting through the trial, this one juror seemed positively excited about it. She’d put up her hands and pretend to duke it out with an imaginary person. I gave her the gesture back on occasion because I like to be playful – and I hate to leave an acting offer on the table. She wants to play fight? I’m here for her. But once the deliberations started, this woman had a lot to say and not a lot of it made sense and I was not there to indulge anyone’s whims. I did my best to get us on trac

When I started my first podcast six years ago, I quickly discovered that it was a low engagement form. Podcasts aren’t easy to share and the platforms that they’re on, and the medium they’re made of, don’t make it easy for people to respond. If you’ve ever been listening to a podcast and felt the impulse to share it, you know how challenging that can be. My listeners manage it with tweets and retweets and Facebook comments – but there’s no direct way to tell me they liked it or to share it with others. (Apparently we can blame Steve Jobs for this – but maybe that’s just a rumor.) As a theatre maker who is used to instant gratification and applause, I find this one of the most challenging parts of podcasting. And I somehow find it even more challenging with my audio drama than I do for my blogcast. To read more of An Applause Button for Podcasts visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 320 Song: Tom Waits' Clap Hands Image via Pixabay To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple Pod

I was thinking about how important the study of fiction has been to me and to my peers and what a shame it is that these muscles have been un-exercised in many American schools. I was thinking about it because I was on a jury and the process of deliberation felt familiar somehow and it wasn’t just because I’ve had to teach 12 Angry Men a few times. One of the things that surprised me about my fellow jurors was how much they were inclined to just make things up. Several of them came up with “theories” about the case, adding events and possibilities that had nothing to do with the question at hand. Over and over again I found myself saying, “Let me read the actual question.” If these folks had been my students, I’d have done exactly the same. I would have asked where they saw that idea or concept and what was the evidence. In literary circles, we call this practice Close Reading. When you write a paper, you need to point to the place in the text where you got this idea or information. You can’t just make stuff

If you’re not a theatre nerd, you may not be aware of the stature that Peter Brook, theatre luminary who recently died at age 97, had with us theatre folk.  His book, The Empty Space, is the sort of text your theatre friends are likely to wax rhapsodic about. It has changed a lot people’s lives and inspired many a theatre maker to make more artful, high minded art. The Empty Space encourages us to both be simpler and more exacting in our work. He talked about how theatre is as simple as an empty space in which something happens and also, you better really think about what happens in there, especially for your audience. If you'd like to read more of That Thing Playbill Said About Peter Brook, visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 318 Song: Farolito Image of the Tweet from Playbill This is the article about Brook by Helen Shaw I mention: https://www.vulture.com/2022/07/remembrance-of-peter-brook-theater-director-19252022.html To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple

I'm out of town so I'm re-posting an episode from 2019 that I felt could use another go. I've been thinking a lot about this again this week. Here's This Hour's for You from September 2019: I read Brigid Schulte’s article, A Woman’s Greatest Enemy? A Lack of Time to Herself, and something snapped. I am not just taking time for myself, for my art, though it can feel that way. I am also taking time for all the women who can’t spare an hour. By taking time for myself the way Popeye takes spinach, I can, perhaps, begin to counteract the way the Patriarchy has stolen so much time from women over the years. I don’t just take an extra hour for myself, I can take one for Henry David Thoreau’s mother and sister who did his laundry and made him meals while he wrote out by the pond. I don’t just retreat to solitude for me and my play, I do it for Alma Mahler who might have taken some time for herself instead of tiptoeing around her husband. I take abundant time for all my friends, caught up in the mesh of childcare, wh

In one of the videos they play for jurors, the narrator explains the Court as being a lot like Theatre. He explained the roles and the conflict, the set and the setting. I was intrigued by this explanation because, as a theatre maker, I would not assume people understood theatre any more than they do a court. If court is a show, though, it is not necessarily a good one. To read more of The Theatre of the Court visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog.  This is Episode 317 Song: Jackson Brown's Lawyers in Love Image by W. S. Gilbert via the British Library To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review! Rate it wherever you listen or via: https://ratethispodcast.com/strugglingartist Join my mailing list: www.emilyrainbowdavis.com/ Like the blog/show on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SongsfortheStrugglingArtist/ Support me on Patreon: www.patreon.com/emilyrdavis Or buy me a coffee on Kofi: http://ko-fi.com/emilyrainbowdavis or PayPal me: https://www.paypal.me/stru

As many of my readers will be aware, back in 2018, provoked by the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, I wrote a piece called “I Am a Dragon Now. The Fear of Men Is My Food.” A few months after that piece went around, elements of it poured themselves into a piece that became The Dragoning, an audio drama podcast. The podcast came out in the spring of 2020 and Season Two just launched. I’m taking you through this timeline because here, in 2022, an award winning author has published a novel called When Women Were Dragons, in which there is an event known as The Dragoning. A friend sent me a review of this novel because it sounds an awful lot like my piece. Not identical, of course, but close enough to be uncomfortable. To keep reading Is This a Dragon Zeitgeist? visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog.  This is Episode 316 Song: There's Room for Everyone in this World from Pete's Dragon Image Paolo Uccello's Saint George and the Dragon To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice r

People like to tell you that being a part of a jury for a trial gave them a new sense of appreciation for the court system. The videos preparing you for jury service like to report that people say this as well. I might have thought this would happen to me, too, but in fact, it was something like the opposite. The whole experience made me incredibly sad. Now that it’s over, I can tell you why. Warning: there’s a lot about bowels in this case. I was selected to serve in a civil suit brought by a patient who’d had to have bowel surgery on the heels of his colonoscopy. His lawyer claimed that the doctor had poked a hole in the man’s colon while performing the test. The man had had to use a colostomy bag for six months and had a miserable time. This man had been living with HIV since 1989 and at times lived in shelters. He is an incredibly vulnerable man, who also, it became clear through his testimony, just didn’t really understand what had happened to him.  If you'd like to keep reading What I Was Supposed

When I saw Ray Liotta had died, I was shocked and saddened. I was a fan of his work and he seemed like a good human. In his honor, I listened to an interview he did with Marc Maron on the WTF podcast a few years ago and enjoyed learning more about him and his journey. It did make me think, though. And it did make me wish for change in the way we do show biz. Apparently, Liotta had no real interest in acting when the opportunity to do it presented itself to him. He got talked into auditioning for a show because of a cute girl and stuck around because a teacher encouraged him. Nothing too crazy there. I’ve definitely heard this sort of story before. But it’s the reason that Liotta theorized that his teacher encouraged him that got me thinking. Liotta had always been a jock and, it sounds like, a fairly macho guy. His teacher responded to him because they didn’t get a lot of guy’s guys there in the college theatre department. He saw a kindred male spirit and a kind of rare bird that they needed on the stage. Lio

For jury duty, we had to fill out information about ourselves that the lawyers then used as conversation points during jury selection. The first lawyer looked at my occupation (writer, podcaster, theatre maker, performer, Feldenkrais practitioner) and said something that I couldn’t understand at first. He said, as a statement, not a question, “You work in (unintelligible).” As I tried to work out what he’d said, he asked, “You’re a podcaster?” This I knew what to do with. Yes. I am a podcaster. And in the meantime, my brain had managed to process the word he’d said earlier, which was “media.” I have never, in my life, thought of myself as working in media, which explains why it threw me for a loop. I suppose it might technically be true in that “media” is a kind of broad category but conceptually, it is so far from how I think of my work that he might as well have asked me if I work on Planet Earth. I mean, I do. But that’s not how I usually think about it. I was struck by the discrepancy of the confidence he

Whenever I see a story about gun violence and it makes me feel sad and angry and helpless, I tweet a link to the XTC song, “Melt the Guns.” I don’t say what it’s for. I just tweet the song. It’s not a project. I don’t feel like I need to stay up to date with shootings so I can catch them all or anything. There are too many for that. If you tracked all the tweets, you could probably connect them to the news story fairly easily. Not that there’d be much point in doing that. It’s just, you’d be able to see what a lot of gun violence I have responded to since I started doing this. I tweet this particular song because a) it’s a really great song and b) it’s a pretty clear directive. What should we do about all these tragic shootings? Melt the guns and never more to fire them. Clear enough. I know it would never work in this world where guns have more rights than women or children. I fear we’ll never find a way to tear the guns from the hands of killers – but as an aspiration, I feel pretty good about the idea of m