Swiped from several people, this is great:

The Best Pie Chart Ever

Okay, in a few hours I will be seeing Patrick Stewart in The Tempest. Good ol’ Captain Picard and his Royal Shakespeare Company folks have brought their shenanigans to Ann Arbor, at the University of Michigan. I’m really looking forward to it.

I’ll publish a full account later!

In other news: Prince is opening up a new club…in Las Vegas?! What is happening to the world?

Now I have to get tickets to Vegas…

Well, this was fun! The Fonz gave me a Spork, and I got to hang out with Mal Reynolds from Firefly!

You went trick or treating as MichaelVaughn.
TheFonz gave you ASpork.
Sundance gave you TheOneRing.
MarySue gave you FancyImportedBeer.
EnderWiggin gave you AGlassSlipper.
You had a lousy time until MalReynolds introduced you to the Dementors.

Well, the Tigers lost the World Series.

Congrats to both teams, especially the Cardinals who simply outplayed the Tigers during this 5 game stretch.

And, as sad as it was to see them lose, I also feel very good about this season. This was the most entertaining season of Detroit Baseball in about 15 years. The first time they got to the World Series in 22 years. Thanks for that, Tigers. And, although they didn’t win it all, they did quite well – I mean, they made it to the World Series, the place that all teams want to go!

And there are those who will complain. I’ve already read it in the papers, and on LiveJournals and MySpace blogs: They made it as a Wild Card, not by winning the division. They got lucky and beat teams better than them. Their inexperience killed them. The Twins should’ve won. The Yankees should’ve won. They got lucky this year, will they be as good next year?! Blah blah blah…

That’s baseball. The “Best Team” in baseball is determined by who wins the World Series. Like it or not. The “Best Teams” from each league are the ones left standing after the playoffs, and those two top teams play each other to see who’s the best in the “World” (which is, of course, not exactly true – there are a lot of other countries…but I digress.)

And the Tigers didn’t make it all the way.

But they came close.

Damned close.

And it was fun.

I’m so excited about this project!

In the meantime, I’ve got a ridiculously silly Christmas show to direct first. We start rehearsals in just over a week for Every Christmas Story Ever Told, and I’m really looking forward to it. The cast and crew are both made up of awesome people to work with, and the script and production are going to be a ton of fun. I hope, with the short run, that we can sell it out at Williamston. Then it moves to Meadow Brook Theatre, Michigan’s biggest not-for-profit Regional Theatre for a couple more weeks! And THEN it actually plays for one weekend at a theatre in Tecumseh, Michigan, also! Fun!

The Good News:
I have a ticket to the World Series!

The Bad News:
Well, the Tigers are now down 3 games to 1 in the World Series.
*sigh*
That’s not an easy deficit to overcome.
*bigger sigh*
And the ticket is for Game 7, which means the Tigers have to win 2 in a row just to GET to Game 7.
And then they have to win Game 7 to win the World Series.

It’s not looking good, but there’s still hope!
So, John and I are hoping that these tickets (which we got from the awesome Steve Zynda, patron saint of Williamston Theatre) will still be necessary on Sunday, so we can watch the Tigers win in 7!

In Other Tiger News:
MEMO TO TIGERS BULLPEN: Under NO circumstances is it good for the relief pitcher to throw the ball into the outfield. I know I’m not a Major Leaguer, or anything, but I’ve been a baseball fan for a while now and I just can’t come up with an instance in the game when that play is ever called for. Ever. Please cut it out.

Early yesterday evening I took the kid to the bookstore, Borders in Ann Arbor. We picked out some books – Max got a great Lilo and Stitch “early reader” book and Maggie got a Fairy Realm chapter book – and looked around for a while. Fun! I love looking around bookstores, and I love it that my kids love doing it too!

After we were done there, they wanted a snack, so since I’d recently gotten a Starbucks gift card as a thank-you gift for speaking at a class, we went across the street to Starbucks.

The kids got little hot chocolates, and I had a wonderful Decaf Skim Mocha the size of my head. Maggie had a big ol’ slice of iced lemon loaf and Max had a big pumpkin muffin. (I sort of snurched from both of their snacks!)

So we’re sitting there, in the middle of Starbucks in downtown Ann Arbor, with a bunch of college kids from UofM hanging around studying. Maggie and I were chatting but Max was looking around silently for a while, munching his snack and scoping out the place.

Then he leans in to me and says, very quietly, Daddy? I think there are a lot of people here who are trying to look cool.

And I looked around. And he was right.
I thought that was pretty perceptive for a 6 year old.

So then, the three of us had a quiet conversation about a bunch of the people there, and the difference between just trying to make yourself look ‘nice’ versus trying to look ‘cool’, and why we sometimes want to look cool.

A nice night.

So much going on lately, it’s crazy. This is one of those times that you just wonder “Why? Why haven’t I won the lottery and made some bills disappear? Why did I decide to go into an industry that doesn’t pay anything, so that I can’t make any money and make some bills disappear? Why am I allowing my calendar to get so full of things?! Why does it seem as if there’s no respite in sight?”

It’s funny, I think it’s one of those things that changes as you grow older.

When you’re a kid, you think “Man, when I’m grown up I’m gonna do all sorts of things!”
Then you get grown up, and you start marking events, categorizing them as some of the “Things” that, since other people refer to them this way, you might as well call them The Things That Mark My Success. Vacations. Trips. Those types of things. You mix them in with other real life things, like birthdays and anniversaries and holidays.

And you find yourself marking time. Or, at least, I feel like I’ve found myself marking time, more and more. Time between one of these events. Time on the calendar – “Soon it’ll be Thanksgiving. Then the show opens. Then it’s Christmas. Then we’ll start work on the new show. Then our birthdays all come in that clump between January and March.”

It’s changed from when you were a kid. No longer is it “When I get older” as though that’s a stopping point. That’s not an end goal, and so often the calendar events aren’t either. But it’s easy to get caught up just marking time between them.

It feels lately as though that’s what I’ve been doing. Less multi-tasking. Less “Meta-goals”, if you will. Yes, I want to get a show up and running. But the “meta-goal” is what? To make this place as great as we can make it, and to push what we do to the limits. Or to make my family as happy and fulfilled and loved as they can be. Lately those overriding things seem to have slipped from my vision.

Why? Not sure. Lots of things being juggled at once, maybe. Not getting enough rest. Forgetting to look past this week’s To-Do List. Getting sucked into too many distractions (Hello new season of tv, Tigers in the World Series!)

I think, also, one of my biggest issues is this: I’ve forgotten to recharge my tanks. As Julia Cameron says in her marvelous books on writing, you need to “Refill the Well”:

Any extended period or piece of work draws heavily on our artistic well. Overtapping the well, like overfishing the pond, leaves us with diminished resources. We fish in vain for the images we require. Our work dries up and we wonder why, “just when it was going so well.” The truth is that work can dry up because it is going so well.

In filling the well, think magic. Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty. Do not do what you should do – spiritual sit-ups like reading a dull but recommended critical text. Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery, not mastery.

So I’m working on that the next couple of weeks. Seeing plays, doing fun things, creating not just family time but Quality Family Time. Replenishing the “Why” in the answer to “Why do I do what I do?”

Without that “Why”, I find myself not caring about what I do, or what I do next. And by just marking time and slogging through, none of it means as much.

THE QUESTION
So, as I set about to refill the well, I’m thinking about things I want to do. Play outside in the changing leaves, visit a museum, do something science-fiction-y, just for fun.

And the question for anyone out there is this: Any thoughts on this? What do YOU do to refill YOUR well? What ‘get away and recharge’ activities do you enjoy? Recommend?

For those who don’t know, there’s a statue in downtown Detroit called The Spirit of Detroit.
For the next 10 days or so, it’ll be the Spirit of the Detroit Tigers!

City workers and employees of Troy-based Meteor Photo put the finishing touches on a giant Tigers jersey adorning the Spirit of Detroit statue outside the Coleman A. Young Municipal Building. Friday’s ceremony included a GM-sponsored party at the Renaissance Center.