Synthesis

The Little Theatre Company where I manage the box office sent me an e-mail to say, basically, "Hi.  We like you.  Um, are you still going to work for us next season and do you want to be House Manager, too?"  

Oh, yes.  

I'm hoping it's a paid position or I might turn them down.  It's a greater time commitment, I'm sure they could find someone else to do it out of the goodness of their hearts, but paid?  Yes, you can definitely pay me to do that.  For starters, I think it would mean they'd finally give me a set of keys and I wouldn't have to wait around for someone to show up, which would be ideal.  

After spending a few months as a guy and a couple weeks as a teenage boy, my hair was growing out into "woman with terrible haircut," so I got it trimmed and cleaned up.  Today I went to the grocery store, picked up a handful of stuff and stood in line behind a guy with maybe twice as many items.  Saw him glance at his groceries, glance at me and make a decision not to let me go ahead of him.  I look like a dude again.  

I have failed in my attempts to discourage a tenacious biomechanic.  I say that in a way that suggests I don't like the guy.  Not true, I'm just not interested in him in any other capacity and, well, we don't have a lot in common.  Or rather, I can speak to his interests better than he can speak to mine, and I'm not really interested in anyone I can't have a theatrical conversation with.  

One of the things I do when I get really frustrated by butts-in-seats seasons that fail to generate revenue is create terrible theatre seasons, ones that are worse or less well considered than any I've ever lived through.  It makes me feel better.  I post them on Facebook, where I discovered that even my local community theatre friends know less theatrical literature than I do.  

So maybe I am a closeted academic.  But I don't want to be.  I want to figure out how to make all the things in my brain accessible to average people, and I don't know how to do that.  

I've attended several "talk back" sessions for local theatre and find myself disgusted with the level of analysis possessed by the average patron who is interested enough to attend a talk back.  Maybe it's because there isn't enough structure in the session.  Instead of asking very, very specific questions, the floor is left open to talk about shit irrelevant to the process and dependent upon dealing with someone's flawed perception of what they've seen.  People, I'm learning, do not listen, read, or synthesise information well.