I caught a snippet of Marketplace on NPR yesterday. They were interviewing a professional ballet dancer about her current earnings, and she said when she tells people she’s a dancer they ask, ‘What else do you do?’” She explained to the interviewer she’s in rehearsals from 9-6 every day, and performing and dancing is her...
A few weekends ago, we went to the famous Wildflower Festival in Crested Butte, Colorado. The scenery and flowers were stunning. I took some pretty good pictures, I thought. Then a couple of days later, a friend posted on Facebook some flower pictures she took in her backyard garden, and they blew my shots away....
Today I’m grateful for the artists. The writers, poets, singers, musicians, dancers, actors, filmmakers, photographers, painters, sculptors, potters, weavers, architects, and craftsmen whose art is the axis on which this world turns. Without artists, we would have no understanding of cultures long gone. It is their pottery, cave paintings, and temples which we study to...
You know how sometimes a Hollywood actor speaks out about a cause, and the critics shout him down? “She gets paid to act,” people say, “not spout off about her opinions.” There’s a double standard when it comes to artists and politics. The message we receive is that we are “lucky” the public allows us...
Yes, this is a picture of actor/activist George Takei holding my children’s book, The No-No Boys! I heard him speak recently at the National Speakers Association convention. When he came out on stage, everyone expected him to talk about his role as Mr. Sulu on Star Trek or his pop culture persona or his enormous...
Think of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald hanging out in Parisian cafes in the 1920s. Think of all those writers and critics and actors exchanging barbs at the Algonquin Round Table in New York City. Think of the many movie stars, singers, and musicians who waited on servicemen during World War II at the Hollywood...
I do a one-woman show based on my book Dancing in Combat Boots, but few people know that the show actually started out as a fundraising effort for a local theater, and I performed it with several actresses. As we were back stage prepping before the show, one of the actresses was running some of her...
When I was twelve, my mother took my brother and me to see a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar. She’d escorted us to children’s theater productions before, but this was my first time seeing a truly “grown-up” play, and I was utterly transformed. I was a church-going kid, but until that night, I had never...
The other day, I was listening to an interview with an established speaker who started out, as we all do, as an unknown. One day, through a bizarre twist of fate, a major company asked to partner with him, launching his career. We’ve all heard dozens of stories like his about artists or entrepreneurs who...
I often find myself reassuring friends whose children want to go into the arts that their kids will not starve, nor will they ask for support for the rest of their lives. I know dozens of artists – writers, singers, filmmakers, visual artists, actors – and none of them are starving. Few of them ask...