Because humans.

We crave the absurd. We long for the silly. We find happiness in the inanity of the mundane. We like to make each other, and ourselves, laugh — sometimes a little too hard at something that isn’t really that funny, but it’s funny enough in that way of “you had to be there.”

We are weird, absurd, silly little creatures, humans. We build monuments to our own greatness, violently attack each other for genuinely no good reason, hold some of our own members down so that others can get just slightly higher (or rich beyond the dreams of avarice). But we also care deeply: sometimes for each other, sometimes for a family unit, or a beloved pet, or animals in general, or the world at large. We created the Internet to freely share more information than has ever been collected and collated in one location, nearly immediately began putting up paywalls and finding sneaky ways around said paywalls, and use it for the worst and best of our instincts — but it’s mostly for cats: cat videos, sharing pictures of cats, making artwork of cats, etc.

Maybe the Internet, and cats’ place on it, has turned us into ancient Egyptians?

I digress.

This morning we kept going back and forth, and ended up creating this silly little masterpiece. I’m including what we call the “candy jar,” the term for lines that are suggested or that we like but aren’t quite sure yet what to do with, so you can see just all of the ridiculousness that was suggested and experienced this morning.

And if you want to watch the whole silly episode, it’s up on my YouTube.

Why do I mention them here? Because they are part of what’s next. I like to think that I am, too, but I’ve been around for over 20 years now and the next generation of performers is coming and they’re hungry! These kids — well, not really. These young performers are attacking the stage with joy and energy. They’re coming at performing in interactive environments, like renaissance festivals, with an audience-first mindset that is familiar to me, but delightfully refreshing to see in others (not that to do anything else is wrong — it’s just different).

Here’s how they’re like my show: the set-up is the same set to set, they have their basic framework, bits that they know will work (and possibly kill) every time, and then they let where the audience wants to go (and likely their own inherent levels of ADHD — no judgement, but game recognizes game) dictate how their stage time will play out. What they do with improvised rap and musical comedy, I do with Shakespearean plays and occasional stuffed animal. There’s a similar energy, a kindred spirit vibe, that I recognize in myself and see in them.

Here’s how they’re different: they’re not afraid of going for the jugular. There’s something to be said for being young or new enough to be willing to try anything, if only because you don’t always know what works or what you can get away with, so you may as well beg for forgiveness instead of permission. And that is working out so very well for them. They have four minds on stage, where I have just the one, so they’re able to draw on four separate levels of personal experience, subject matter expertise, and personal diversity that I — and very few other shows — cannot. They are showcasing representation across the board in their cast, and that representation truly matters: audiences, especially younger ones, can more easily see themselves reflected onstage, thus increasing the popularity of this art form (renaissance faires) and potentially even swelling and replenishing our ranks by choosing to themselves run away and join our particular little circus.

Every so often (thankfully not very) some folks will complain to me that the ren faire isn’t “what it used to be.” What did it used to be, back in the “good old days (goode olde days?)”? It used to be overtly misogynistic, relegating women to secondary characters at best and more often than not as purely eye candy for men. It used to be just white people playing dress up, but now we are seeing more and more minorities and people of color join in the fun as patrons and as participants: vendors, artisans, performers, actors, and faire owners. It used to be a place where we’d hide our gays, or have the queer characters or performers be the butt of the joke. In the 2020s I don’t know of a single festival that doesn’t have a large plurality, if not the majority, of their cast and independent acts made up of people from the LGBTQ+ community.

So the ren faire isn’t “what it used to be?” To that I say, “GOOD!” It shouldn’t! It needs to forever grow, to change with the times we live in, to more accurately represent our demographics, along with the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of the people who perform there and attend them week to week. The renaissance faire may not be historically accurate, but it can be what we wish history was: more open, more accepting, more like the world we wish to see nowadays and in the future. And having young, fresh, new acts like Off the Cuff (and superstars like Jacques Ze Whipper, and folks like me who just might possibly be turning into a 20+ year overnight success story) will keep the festivals vibrant for years to come.

Today, though? Not upbeat.

Today was filled with righteous indignation and even a little bit of rage.

This wasn’t the first time that the writing process during the show has taken a darker turn, or even one where I personally or the Writers Room in general is lamenting the direction that the world, and the U.S. in particular, has taken. But this was the true first glimpse that I’ve seen amongst my own fans, my own patrons, the regulars who fill in the comment sections and chats of the the venues where I stream the show to (YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook, for the record), this was the first time that I’ve truly seen my artistic regulars express anger, rage, and sadness. Not everybody shared those same emotions, nor all in the same amount — but they were there. Everybody is reading the same book, are in the same chapter if not all on the same page just yet. And that is a scary thing.

Here, now, is the poem we wrote together.

“Seven-Twenty-Five”

Keeping up with the bills can be very tough,
Frustrations piling higher with each digit,
Sometimes my pay cheque is just not enough,
I cannot pay, I only stress and fidget.

Pay off my debts with the sweat of my brow,
“I couldn’t hold it down this week,” I say,
I max out my cards as much as allowed,
You tell me, “Pay it back another day.”

I tighten up my budget where I can —
Overdraw my account, get charged a fee,
Work for the company, work for The Man,
These days you need an extra job … or three.

So much time as a rat in a cage.
Seven-Twenty-Five the minimum wage?!

— May 26th, 2026

I’m trying something new this weekend, my final for the season at the Oklahoma Renaissance Festival, both something that I’ve not tried before and also serving double-duty as a proof-of-concept/live dress rehearsal for a bigger show that I’m pulling together. I’m introducing my Midsummer: A Gaye Olde Tyme (Almost a Musical)

to the world as a three-part story (why three parts and not two or four, or even five since there are five acts in a Shakespearean play? Simple: I have three time slots per day!), to be performed as, effectively, episodes in a miniseries. Each of the three pieces shall have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and each piece serving as one of those parts for the larger narrative (there is a bit of method-acting to my madness!); if you only see one part of it, my hope and intention are that you shall be neither disappointed nor confused, but walking away with an understanding of at least PART of what’s going on. But if you see all three parts (episodes) you’ll have the full picture and be delighted!

Why am I doing this? Why not stick with the same tried and true formulae that has gotten me this far? That’s a great question, and one I ask myself constantly. When I started Shakespeare Approves! way back in the old days when cell phones were either bricks or of a flip variety (I never got a Motorola Razr, and I’m still a little salty about it), I had one story that I would tell: Romeo & Juliet: The Flying Implement of Doom Edition! Eventually, though, audiences being what they are, people wanted to see other shows, hear other stories, and so I added what became 12th Night & the 3 Bears! into the rotation. So with my first year as an independent performer at renaissance faires under my belt I had two different sets I could perform, and often had 3-4 time slots per day in which to perform them.

Several years went by and I started getting hired by a few more smaller festivals, and in order to keep audiences’ attention — to not just have new audiences every time slot and every day but to build up a loyal fanbase and following — I needed more material. Here’s a secret of performing at renaissance festivals that I learned many years ago: some patrons look at you as their favorite band and they want to hear the hits. It won’t be performed exactly the same every time, and they savor those small changes and beats, but the broader scope of the album they know by heart and can sing along with. Other patrons look at you as their favorite stand-up comic: they love your style, your material, but once they’ve heard it once or twice (or even thrice) they want something new from you. So in an attempt to satisfy both types of fans I started to create new sets based on other works of The Bard: Macbeth, The Tempest, Henry V, Richard II, Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, and also Midsummer. This gives me plenty of shows to have in rotation, allows me to focus on the most popular (the hits) when need be and also grants me the creative freedom to forever be working on and perfecting something new.

A few years ago my amazing spouse started agitating for a Midsummer show (a lot, probably most, of my fun ideas start as conversations with her, be they shows, podcasts, stand-alone scripts, or parody songs. She truly is my muse). I had no idea where to begin, as most of my stories either have a joke attached to it (Julius Caesar: Beware the Ides of March of the Penguins!, and man alive do I love that punny portmanteau!), or a silly take (Macbeth: Death by Fluffy Kittens!), but I had nothing for Midsummer. What could I do with it? But I needed some new material, she kept coming back to the tale of love and fairies, so I figured, “Why not? Let’s try something!”

It began with fits and starts, as most things of value do. Sometimes I would simply do a 20-30 minute basic retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, just focussing on the inherent silliness of it all. Sometimes Bottom and Titania’s relationship became the foreground of it. Then I accidentally hit gold. It’s about true love, right? I mean, love that is wacky, and messy, and confused, but true. “Lord, what fools these mortals be,” and all of that. I was performing it at the Midsummer Fantasy Renaissance Faire in Connecticut (which, for the record, is one of the gayest shows on the circuit!) and I thought to myself (amazingly enough not aloud in front of the crowd, but the idea came in the moment of performance), “Go for it.”

When the four lovers — Hermia, Lysander, Helena, and Demetrius — awake near the end of the show, each pair is supposed to be back fully in love with who they are meant to be. And so I kept that … mostly. I already had lines in the show insinuating that people could be more, so … why not make it slightly more explicit, and thus more welcoming for all people? Hermia ends the show not with Lysander, but Helena, and Demetrius with Lysander. Oberon asks Puck what happened, and Puck says that true love rules the day. Oberon and Titania still end the show happily together, with Oberon having learned a valuable lesson (and that is my concession for some heteronormativity: have the fairy people be together), and they all live happily ever after.

Once I made that realization, and it went over SO WELL, I leaned into it. I started adding in snatches of songs (popular songs from the last 50-60 years plus also parodies of them), and one of my newer popular shows had found its legs.

And that brings us to THIS year. I’ve been stretching my boundaries of my style of performing and writing, finding new genres and venues to play with, and the opportunity presented itself to do a longer, full-length play — still in my audience-interactive ren faire style, but much longer than a standard 20-30-minute piece. Should I look to write something new? Yes … and.

For those of you who don’t know, “yes … and” is the most basic element and building block of improvisation. You are accepting the reality presented to you (“yes”) and then you build upon it (“and”). My show, because of my background and training, is largely influenced by this concept — some sets are more improvisational than others, but all of them have it as a part of their basic DNA. So I went with both approaches: something old and new.

I expanded my Midsummer. I have basically the whole plot of Shakespeare’s original with all of the elements, elements that largely have had to be dropped in the interests of time and keeping things simple and straightforward enough for an abbreviated renaissance festival presentation. I have all of my elements: silly songs, modern dialogue mixed with the original, and ending gay AF. PLUS I get to do “Pyramus and Thisbe,” the play-within-the-play, as part of it.

So this weekend the experiment begins. I get to perform it not three times, but in three parts — possibly with three sets of completely different audience actors. I don’t know! Anything can genuinely happen.

Am I nervous? Of course! It COULD suck — but I think it’s going to be alright. There will be things that I see live and in the moment that don’t work, even though they may have looked great on paper (or, you know, my computer screen) and adjustments will have to be made either in the moment or for next time. And that is what makes it great: the unknown, the living, breathing nature of it all.

This is an experiment. And I am uncomfortable. My stomach is in knots and my adrenaline is starting to go through the roof. And I think that is precisely right.

As I write this I’m going into the third weekend of the Scarborough Renaissance Festival at the Castle of Muskogee (I’m here performing at this ren fest through next weekend and they go on for another two, but I’ll be in New Jersey — ahh! Logistics!) and, as I am wont to give over to a certain amount of navel gazing and continually wonder and review what I’m doing, how I’ve gotten here, if it’s the right path for me, and so on, and so on (short answer: yes, I’m pretty sure I’m going in the right direction). But the question is, in the end: why do I do this?

I’m on the road performing, away from home, to one extent or another for 34-38 weeks this year (33 weekends of renaissance festivals and/or school shows, 1-5 weeks/weekends of other characters, like Poe, or doing guided tours in Salem, Massachusetts). When I’m not doing that, generically I’m at home in Pennsylvania with my spouse and our four cats. Or we’re off having adventures! One never knows.

I don’t have a trailer towed behind my truck or an RV that is my home-away-from-home; instead I stay in hotels, AirBnBs, a loft space provided by a venue or even a guest room at a friend’s house. I often live, effectively, out of a suitcase. Sometimes I joke that my job is “driving” and “acting” is my reward (not always that much of a joke — it’s also not particularly funny, but that’s another story). So 34-38 weeks this year out of 52. To put it another way, I’m only home this year for 18 weeks at the most, and most likely just 13-14. I’m away for 9 months of the year (the actual number of days that I’m home is a little better, but these are rough, round numbers).

So, again: why do I do this?

Short answer? It’s the only thing I’m skilled for anymore. I’ve spent most of my adult life (now being 45-years old) with “actor” as one of my primary job titles, starting with my very first job out of high school. I went to school for a bit (I did not graduate from college or university) studying theatre. I’ve taken writing classes. I’ve worked for other people, who have paid me real, spendable money, as a writer and sometimes even as a director. But I don’t understand technology any more than a standard person of my cohort (baby Gen X/Elder Millennial, or Xennial, or Oregon Trail Generation — whatevs) does: we programmed the VCRs and later the DVD players for our parents, taught them how to use the internet, and now find ourselves doing the same thing with Gen Alpha (yes, kids: the “save” icon is based upon a floppy disk, not the other way ‘round. The 3.5 floppy my 9-year old niece found in her grandfather’s attic boxes was not a 3-D printed version of the icon. No. Just … no).

… What was I saying?

Ah, yes! I might be my mum’s, or even my niece’s, tech support, but I don’t have the training or know-how to be professional tech support. I am not a lawyer, but I have absorbed enough legal parlance through the 24-hour news cycle and repeats of Matlock, Boston Legal, and Ally McBeal, to sound dangerous at a dinner party (and possibly just as knowledgeable for two minutes as any pundit). I’m not a teacher: I didn’t go to school for pedagogy, nor do I have any desire to make tenure (if that’s even still a thing). This weird life is the only thing I’ve got the skills for.

TLDR: Because I love it.

And because I have a very particular set of skills.

It started in December of 2020 as me showing up for a virtual class for a group of 8th graders. Nearly everyone was in their own spaces at home, with a few of the students actually sitting in the physical classroom, but all of them in a screened-off bubble with headphones on. We talked about the sonnet form and how it works, did some examples, and then — and then — the most remarkable thing happened. Someone (I no longer remember who) asked, “Can you write one now?” I replied with something along the lines of, “Sure, but it would be more fun if we did it together.” Their teacher went to the white board and started writing down line ideas, kids started shouting them out more and more excitedly, and I served as basically just the editor.

I liked the whole process so much that the next day, December 3rd, I started the actual show, collaborating with the audience (they weren’t shouting out, but rather putting their suggestions into the comments), and now, as of this writing, we have written together 161 poems. Not all of them have, strictly speaking, been sonnets: 14 lines, broken into three stanzas (usually following an ABAB pattern), rounded off with a rhyming couplet, done in iambic pentameter (10 syllables per line), or 11 syllables (hendecasyllabic) if you’re feeling fancy.

This is the project that, more than anything else, made me a writer. I had written things, things I have been really proud of and still am, before this. But for more than 5 years, I show up (largely on Tuesdays) and write a poem with my writers room. I sit down in front of a blank sheet of (digital) paper, I sit in front of that scary, blank screen and I write. It’s for many writers, including me, the hardest part of doing it: getting started. So I value this project so very much, I hold it so very dearly to my heart, and I very much realize how very, very much I am using the words “very” and “much” in this paragraph, and I am not at all sorry. Alright, maybe I am a little. A very little bit.

Between Writing Sonnets with Shakespeare and this Substack, I am genuinely putting out more words, getting my brain to find the connections between ideas and pulling them together in new and interesting ways, and just sometimes possibly even creating some art.

So to close out today’s piece, here is the sonnet from last week when the brilliant author Jessica MacLean (check out her Substack and become a subscriber!) joined me in the Writers Room to talk about her new book and we ended up writing a poem — her, me, and the rest of the Writers Room — about a vampire café inspired by the world she created.

Let me know if you want me to share more of the sonnets with you. They bring me a lot of joy, and I’d love to give them more air to breathe, more eyes upon them, and eventually a publisher to put them into a book (pretty please?).

“Drip-Drop: A Night at the Vampire Café”

Midnight drips slow through the café’s glass panes,
Where velvet shadows curl in candlelight
And bitter brews run darker than the veins
Of those who linger pale beneath the night.

Within these walls, where silent centuries breathe,
They sip what time itself cannot reclaim —
Each crimson drop a tale concealed beneath
Each cup, a whisper speaking out your name.

Your mortal life will only last an hour,
While theirs are longer than a winter’s night.
But step inside, you precious living flower,
The dark welcomes the flavour of the light.

The corners of the shoppe are shadowed deep,
Your little life is rounded with a sleep.

— April 28th, 2026

I’m including the screenshot of the question and the response (which I’m still giggling about) that followed.

And o’er the last two hours or so, it lived in my head rent free, so that I HAD to write it down. Here, then, is my first draft.

I’ve heard of galactic civil war

A story that happened here before

A blockbuster tale that would thrill ya.

It goes like this: May the Fourth, the Fifth,

Then the Order of the 66th,

The baffled Jedi (fandom?) struck down before we knew ya …

Hallelujah, Hallelujah,

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Your spirit was strong, but you had subverters,

All you wanted was power converters

Then the Empire killed Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru-ya

You went to the den of scum and villainy

Met a nerf herder who was kind of scruffy

Your mentor saying, “Just trust the Force, now wouldja?”

Hallelujah, Hallelujah,

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Buddy, I’ve flown this trench run before,

I own every John William score

I was outed as a nerd before I knew ya

Every part takes years of plannin’

And sometimes we have to change canon

But that’s the danger of a story that outgrew ya

Hallelujah, Hallelujah,

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Maybe there’s a Living Force

And I’ll see a Force Ghost, of course,

But you went and replaced Annakin, now, didja?

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good

It’s just a story from my childhood

And the online trolls will scream for Dave Filonia

Hallelujah, Hallelujah,

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

At the end of the day, what we have is great

Give not into anger, that way leads to hate,

He is flawed, but listen to your Master Yoda

No matter what, this tale we know

It started a long time ago

In a Galaxy far, far away … hallelujah!

Hallelujah, Hallelujah,

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

And may the Force be with you. Always.

Well, to answer the third question first, maybe. It’s hard to say if we exist, especially if you’re prone to experiencing existential crises. But assuming that we do, let’s answer the other two questions: what do we do with our downtime and what do we do during the week? Those answers are different for different people. Some folks, if they’re crafters, for instance, spend their week building back up their stock: creating the amazing and beautiful works of art that you buy and take home with you. Some folks, if they are performers, may be rehearsing their shows or practicing new skills, or improving their existing ones so that they don’t get rusty. We repair equipment and costumes, answer emails and texts, and quite a few of us go back to 9-5 day jobs that we work in order to make sure that we’re making ends meet. Most of it is pretty mundane.

But there are some aspects that we don’t really have out in the wider rest of the world, such as community movie nights. Tonight, for instance, I got to watch a 25-year old movie, A Knight’s Tale, in the open air in a recreation of an Italian piazza. Someone in the local ren faire community posted on one of our message boards that it’s Thursday Movie Night, come on out — and we did. There were only a few of us tonight (it was pretty chilly!), but I watched a movie that influenced more than a few people in my generation to run away and join the Renaissance Festival.

Could this film have a more fantastic cast? Mark Addy, Rufus Sewell, Paul Bettany, Laura Fraser, Shannyn Sossamon, and the late, great Heath Ledger created a story with style. It swaggers. It dances. It understands poetry and pageantry, the sublime and the vulgar in equal measure, blending a (mostly) Middle Ages style with music and sensibilities of the late 20th Century, it’s a thoroughly Millennial movie (possibly Xennial). Lines as glorious as “You may feel like a poet but you sound like an idiot”, “You look like the Bible,” and let us not forget all of Chaucer’s glorious introduction of “Sir Ulrich von Lichtenstein”: “the defender of Italian virginity,” “spending a year in silence to better understand the sound of a whisper” … it’s all so glorious!

But can I tell you what was truly glorious? Hearing peafowl cry out periodically as the jousters rode their steeds at full gallop. Being surrounded by a beautiful recreation of classical Europe while watching a tale nearly as old as time and from my own youth up on the screen, sitting amongst people of my community. This film partially represents what we love about the ren faire: the costumes, the pageantry, the style, and the silliness. It encourages you to be the best version of what you are and to change your stars.

I ran away to join the Renaissance Faire, and I found myself, and my love, there. Just like William (“Sir Ulrich”) I have been able to change my own stars. I hope that you are able to do the same.

More accurately, Shakespeares all adore each other.

Yes, of course The Bard hath some measure of self-loathing — what artist doth not? And if one is to loathe oneself, then, one may find oneself asking with a certain measure of validity and reasonableness, does it not follow that if there is an extra version of oneself, perhaps from somewhere else in the timeline, mayhap a clone or a multiversal variant, then that person would be the most logical external target of that internal self-loathing? You would think so! However, it’s virtually always the opposite. Yes, Shakespeare may indeed loathe himself, have a high level of self-hatred, but that is all just one side of the coin of narcissism, the other being love: unadulterated infatuation, in fact. And aren’t both love and loathing just the two sides of the coin called “obsession gentle reader, the Sweet Swan of Avon has some unhealthy obsessions with his own personage, be it love or hate, and to have someone who is, for all intents, exactly the same, that is someone to whom that can all be put upon — and it invariably turns more to love. When externalized, Shakespeare sees what his audiences can see: brilliance, cleverness, and human failings, while also able to see in his double everything that he both loves and hates about himself. He sees his intellectual twin, the only other person who truly gets him.

Then there is the sibling way to go. Whether they grew up in the same household or were indeed brothers (and sisters!) from another mother (John Shakespeare, our father, certainly got around), there is that similar level of understanding. You can play it as having known each other for your whole lives and grown up together, or having only discovered the other’s existence more recently due to only having just become aware of dear old Dad’s philandering, there’s the familial bond that brings the two (or more?) Shakespeares together: here — HERE — is someone who truly gets me, who understands how this fantastically clever and weird brain works, and even has my back as only a sibling can (or would).

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to play it either, and both, ways at renaissance festivals and faires around the country, from New York to Philadelphia, from Texas to Oklahoma. Only once was there ever any level of animosity (“what’s THIS guy doing here?!”), and that was very quickly quashed. Far more often, there’s a level of curiosity and excitement between the two actors who have usually VERY different ways of playing one of the most famous poets that has ever been, but they always find themselves drawn back to each other: who can come up with the more clever rhyme in the moment, or the better title for a play, or the most dramatic death scene? And then they work to build each other up, each one making the other one better simply by virtue of their existence there, in that time, in that place. They are two actors who have a singular role that very few other people understand in the ren faire world (I’d argue that only actresses who have played Queen Elizabeth I or actors who’ve stepped into the jousting spurs of King Henry VIII can understand this small, intimate, and deeply strange fraternity).

Personally, I prefer siblings to variants (but both are fun). It allows me to, without much confusion with the audience, to refer to the other Shakespeare without them being the other Shakespeare, to introduce my Shakespearean compadre to the world without having to rely on a sci-if or fantasy gimmick, but rather just a regular “families are weird that way” shortcut. After all, for the next three weekends I am Will and my brother is William (Dad wasn’t that creative), and it can easily explain why everything in the Shakespeare canon is the way that it is.

To my other selves and siblings — Clayton, Rhianna, and David, and all of the rest of you who may be out there in the future of the past — I love you. You love me. There is mutual, glorious affection.

After all, we’re Shakespeares.

I say, most of the time now, that I’m a “creative professional.” What does that mean and what does it entail? Anything and everything that I want it to! I write (outlines and scripts for my own stage shows, plays, teleplays, essays, poetry, storybooks), I act, I perform on stages and in the lanes, I give guided tours, I teach classes, I live stream on YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook, I direct, I design new merchandise and provide consultations to some of my creative colleagues, I sign up for classes (and take them, too), I create the occasional podcast. All of it comes together under the banner of “creative professional” because sometimes it’s just too hard and confusing to be a multi-hyphenate!

So, in the here and now, today and this week, what does it mean for me, yours truly, to be a creative professional? For one thing, it’s writing this piece that may or may not get any views, have no readers, to go up on a sub stack that my ADHD brain has decided is potentially a good idea to start (and also cross-post it on my Patreon, because lord knows that I need to generate content for that!). It’s working out the beats of what will become a longer, 90-minute-ish piece that I’ll be debuting in a month and change at the New Jersey Renaissance Faire for an after-hours show (and rehearse them tomorrow and get ready to test drive them here at the Oklahoma Renaissance Festival, where I am presently). It means coordinating with collaborative partners on podcast projects and book projects, and ensuring that I’m writing myself reminders so that I actually do those things. It means generating content, the genuine bane of so many of my fellow travelers in the arts communities. We signed on to create art, not content, not viral TikToks or Instagram reels. But it’s part of the job now. Some producers only want to hire you if you have a genuine presence online in one or more of those spaces and a decent number of followers to go with them. Do not get me wrong: the folks who generate content, let alone entertaining content, and are able to do it again and again and keep up with the demand and adjust to the ever-changing mysterious algorithms have vast, incredible talent and skills that I admire (and am sometimes forced by the situation and the world/economy we live in to attempt to emulate). They are brilliant, and I am not here to demean them in any way. What I am saying is that in attempting to do my regular job(s) AND theirs: that’s a recipe for burnout — and we have seen quite a few folks in this industry suffer, and even leave it, over the last few years because of it. This business isn’t easy or for the faint of heart, and being a content generator on top of the rest of it can make it harder still.

If it sounds like I’m complaining, I’m really not, at least that is not my intention. I may be kvetching, but truly, at the end of the day there is nothing else I would rather be doing than taking part in this weird, often dysfunctional, wacky, wild, and so-very-gratifying business that we call “Show.” To have folks in my audiences, week after week, wanting to watch and take part in my odd little interactive take on Shakespearean theatre, to have people join me online in “The Writers Room” to write an original sonnet each week, to get even five “likes” on a post or video: that’s when the dopamine kicks in. Their smiles, their happiness, knowing that you are a part, however small, of their story, of their adventure — that’s what it’s all about.

So who am I? I’m a creative professional. What do I do? I make magic.