This Can't Be Broccoli

When I was seventeen, I read The Normal Heart  for the first time, and it scared the hell out of me. The anger in it was palpable. Sometimes I found myself needing to put down the script because it felt like it was searing my fingertips. This was in 2001, and I had been out of the closet for all of five minutes.  I came out during my senior year of high school, and I was the direct beneficiary of the new wave of acceptance that was hitting certain liberal parts of the country.  That wave had conditions, of course, but I didn't know that at the time.  I just knew that my experience had been mostly positive, and I assumed that what I was reading in The Normal Heart  was ancient history. As a young man gay, I was eager to learn about queer culture, but I also wasn't ready for it, and I certainly wasn't ready for Larry Kramer.  It was made clear to me very early on that the way you survived in America as a gay person was to look, sound, and behave like a straig...

I did this interview awhile ago, but then the world went crazy and I tabled it so I could have more pressing conversations, but I don't want to wait too long to post it, so here it is. THEM is a former employee of a company that publishes plays and licenses the rights to productions. I won't say which of the companies it is, but there aren't that many, so I'm sure you can narrow it down. Here's the interview: ME:  Can I just tell you that when you contacted me I actually screamed? THEM:  You screamed? ME:  I...screamed. THEM:  Why did you scream? ME:  Because this is, like, the lid I've been wanting to blow off.  Just the-- THEM:  (Laughs.)  Because the place is such a mystery. ME:  All of these--we're mainly going to talk about licensing. THEM:  I thought so, yeah. ME:  And licensing is just so secretive.  How people get the rights to what they get the rights to-- THEM:  That's on purpose. ME:  Oh, I'm sure it is. TH...

I wrote a much more nuanced version of what I'm about to say last year when I was on the job hunt, but now that all the jobs are gone and my patience has gone with them, I'm going to be a little more blunt. Why is resisting remote work the hill employers are determined to #$%-ing die on? Because I had gotten into the habit of checking job listings every day, I've continued to do that during the pandemic, and while there aren't many people looking to hire, I've noticed a trend that is driving me up the #$%-ing wall. Jobs that explain that the position they're hiring you for will be done from home until the crisis is over.   Most of these listings go into detail about how the job can be done entirely from home, but then makes it a point to say that they will not let you continue to do the job from home any longer than they have to. What. The. @#$% Why...if a job can be done from home...would it... not be done from home? There are not many good things about the @#$...

Last week's conversation got such a huge response, that I thought I'd go back and speak with my friend again about their reaction to some of what's being said online and what's transpired since then. You can read the first part here:   https://thiscantbebroccoli.blogspot.com/2020/05/on-theater-and-season-announcement.html Here's the interview: ME:  We're back. THEM:  What am I thinking? ME:  I think you're crazy for doing this, but-- THEM:  You ASKED me to do it again. ME:  Well, you saw the click numbers. THEM:  Those were great numbers. ME:  Those were approaching some of my best numbers. THEM:  You do have the best numbers. ME:  Damn straight--or gay, however you want to-- THEM:  Okay, let's get a move on. ME:  What's happened since we last spoke? THEM:  We have cancelled any plans for a Fall season. ME:  And that's my fault? THEM:  (Laughing.)  Fault is a good word for it. ME:  I would like to ...

In a quest to find silver linings in the middle of a pandemic, I was thinking the other day about how glad I am that I'm finally getting around to listening to new music. The problem is, I had this thought while listening to an album and that led to other thoughts about other things and before I knew it, the album was over and I couldn't remember anything about it. Instantly, I started to think about how much I'm actually absorbing  during this time. I tried to think about whole podcast seasons I started and finished. Movies I'd watched. Three seasons worth of boring German television. In my Google Drive marked "Delete This If I Die," there's an entire list of all the culture I take in within a given year, and as you can imagine, 2020 is already twice as long as 2019, but how much of all that has stayed with me and how much breezed by because my attention span is as short as its ever been? Part of me started to think I should go back and re-watch or re-lis...

A few days ago, I was contacted by a friend and fellow Artistic Director (granted, of a much  bigger theater) because they wanted to speak with me about what they perceived was a slight regarding a decision they'd made. Here's the interview: ME:  We should start this by saying that we, in fact, very good friends. THEM:  Let's see how this goes first. ME:  (Laughs.)  You're coming for me, aren't you? THEM:  I just think you were being a little insensitive. ME:  Because I cracked a joke? THEM:  You cracked a joke at a very sensitive time. ME:  The pandemic is going to go on for at least two years, and you think I'm going to be able to be sensitive the entire  time? THEM:  I think you need to watch what you say as someone who has a platform. ME:  I don't have a platform. THEM:  Kevin. ME:  I do not think I have a platform to the extent where I share a tweet that somebody else tweeted and all of a sudden, I'm attacking yo...

To the Class of 2020, When I graduated high school, it was still possible to believe it was possible to get lost in the world. Not to date myself, but this was pre-every social media platform except for AIM (Worth Googling), which meant you could theoretically keep in touch, but the window you had into someone else's life was small to say the least. Any major life announcement had to be put up as an away message, and even those were kept pretty cryptic.  LiveJournals were a little more permissibly invasive, but if you think people spin their fortunes now, you have no idea what kind of back-bending we used to do to make our lives look interesting when all we had at our disposal was a purple background and clip-art. We didn't really know people the way we know them now.  For better or worse, we were only ever given pertinent information about twenty percent of our acquaintances, and so it was a lot easier to distinguish our friends from everyone else we interacted with on a reg...