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Nov
25
If you’re up for some light holiday reading, my article from this month’s The Advocate is available online here.
Be good to each other this Thanksgiving. And in general.
Nov
16
Hi there. Yes, I know…in my last post I promised to write more. That was in July. But look, I’ve been busy since then. Busy enough to rack up about 300 unread comments on 5 posts, mostly consisting of – you guessed it – Russian porn ads, Nigerian scams, and nondescript gibberish. Let me give you a rundown of what me and mine have been up to the last few months:
1. Acting: A lot of acting. I never really did it before this year, but I am kinda hooked. After Elevator Plays 3, I was cast as a cross-dressing Nazi-captain in Bent, and then as Riff-Raff in Pandora’s Rocky Horror Show. Wow. Fun. Had I known how much fun I had been missing out on all these years…well, I’d probably be dead now. I’m in a four-person show called Dinner With Friends in Oldham County through next weekend, and in January I’ll be playing bass for Pandora’s Oh My Godmother. If you get a chance, come say hi.
2. Music: Not as much as any other time in my adult life, probably, but still a decent amount. Shine-Ola is still playing semi-regular Thursday nights at Ray’s Monkey House. The guitar teaching biz has amped up a bit (get it?), but I’m still only doing one day a week. I started playing with an original rock band called Blood Turns Brown. We don’t have any recordings yet, but if you want to check out the page, some of the singer/songwriter’s (Jon Harrod’s) material is there. I’ve known Jon for a long time, and his songs keep getting better and better. I’ve also resolved to write a little more frequently, but I resolve to do a lot of things. If and when I get some new material together, I’ll post it here.
3. Lawyering: A lot of lawyering. While the website (and for the most part, this blog) may be frozen in time, business is vibrant. Still practicing in the same place with the same folks, at least until the end of the year. We’ve gotten some press on a couple of cases. Here’s one we won. Here’s one we lost (for now). Here’s one we’re still waiting on. We also went to trial on a really bizarre dogbite case. I’ll tell you all about it someday. Suffice it to say, it is almost never dull.
After about a year of having more irons in the fire than I can count, it is perhaps natural that I have been thinking a lot about multiplicity. You know, serving more than one master, that kind of thing. Is it possible to do so competently? I tend to think so. People have a lot of flexibility, a lot of adaptive strategies that are rarely employed, and a capacity for learning that probably doesn’t get used nearly as much as it should. I think it’s a real shame when people get boxed into a particular routine and refuse to deviate from it. I’m terrified of that kind of existence, or anything even remotely resembling it. I realize that not everyone has a choice in the matter, and I’m grateful for what I’ve got.
What I’m describing is part of what scared me away from doing the music thing full time. It’s strange that lawyering should be considered more mundane than music-teaching, or even being a professional musician. I always loved and will love teaching and playing, but I got to the point where I felt like 1) what I was doing didn’t make much difference in the grand scheme of things, and 2) I was basically doing the same thing over and over again, every day. Lawyering is not like that for me, at least not yet. You’re always doing different things all the time. And unlike the arts, which are almost necessarily self-serving and ego-inflating, being an attorney is necessarily focused on the needs of other people. What I have found to be interesting, though, is that on average, theater people and musicians are almost universally more accepting, more open, more empathetic, and more giving of themselves than the average attorney. I don’t get that. Not saying either way is wrong or right, I just don’t get it. It probably has something to do with wealth, privilege, the adversarial system, or something else that I’ll never fully understand.
But even if I don’t get it, it’s great to have a both a bird’s- and a snake’s-eye view of more than one piece of American culture. And not just culture, but subculture, and sub-subculture. It’s so easy to get comfortable in one little niche that you can easily forget what else is out there. And, especially in my 30’s, I’ve realized that there’s a lot out there. By being exceedingly capricious, I’ve had the good fortune to have a lot of experiences that I would never trade for anything.
On the other hand, it could be argued that the nigh-obsessive behaviors associated with multiplicity – for instance, never allowing yourself to do nothing – do more harm than good. There is little doubt that 80/90/100-hour weeks are not particularly healthy. And at a certain point, you have to question whether you will ever be satisfied with anything. For instance, I am a little bothered by the fact that I will likely never have firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to be a professional athlete, or an auto mechanic, or a chef (though one never knows).
I would like to hear from those of you that hang out in multiple spheres of existence. What are your coping strategies? I think most people have a primary “thing,” a character that they identify themselves as. For me it was a musician, now it’s an attorney. But the musician still nips at the attorney’s heels quite a bit. How do you reconcile your multiple selves? If you made a transition from one character to another, was it difficult for you to allow yourself to do that? And most importantly…
How in the hell did any of you have time to read this?
