Check out the newest sponsor for The Dead Guy!!

I really do believe that if you don’t challenge yourself and risk failing, that it’s not interesting.
-Julie Taymor

You get money out of acting. You get gray hair out of directing. Actually, I get more of a rush from directing.
-Tim Robbins

Directing, I get all kinds of inspiration. It’s working with people. It’s a lot more fun.
-Ang Lee

Directing is: you’re overwhelmed the whole time. Your mind never stops. If you care about it. You wake up in the morning and you begin thinking about it and then you go to sleep at night and you’re still thinking about it.
-Campbell Scott

My interpretation of a strong director is someone who knows their story. That’s what directors are, they’re storytellers because they’re directing where your focus is going to be as an audience.
-Dennis Quaid

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
—

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
—

Almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
—
Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011)

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.”
-Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

We start previews on Thursday – this show is something special!

You know what I love? (And, in this instance, by “love” I mean “am both mildly amused by and greatly annoyed by.”)

Since we don’t really have time to play the guessing game, I’ll just tell you:

Emails, or Facebook posts or Tweets that end in some version of “And only 3% of you will have the courage to pass this message on.”

Lately there seem to be a proliferation of these popping up, and I absolutely hate them. (See, in this instance I’ve eliminated all sarcasm, but “hate” is a pretty strong word, and here means “strongly dislike”.) Is it just me? Am I the only one to find this to be a ridiculous, offensive, off-putting remark?

I mean – okay, first off, what kind of statistical analysis is being used? Did the original poster of this thing actually do a study to determine that only 3 out of 10 people re-posted their message? And was the study thorough enough to determine that the reason it WASN’T passed on was a lack of courage? Doubtful, so don’t come at me with some big philosophy on life that I’m supposed to take seriously, and then pollute it with your fictional numbers and group-mind scare tactics.

Secondly, does this really work? How many people actually read that and think “Holy Crap! This says that if I don’t re-post it, I might not be cool! I can’t be part of THAT group! I’d better share this QUICK!” I hope the number is small, for the sake of the world.

Thirdly, and this is the big one: Bite me. You’ve offended me, with your sad little “If you’re not one of us, you’ve clearly got no balls, and you suck” threat. You know what, even if I LOVED your message, the minute that you have to resort to peer-pressure taunting to get me to re-post something, you lose. I don’t care if your message is “Theatre is the best artform ever” or “Down with cancer” or “Don’t eat babies with a grapefruit spoon”, if you follow it with “I bet 95% of you are too chicken-shit to re-post this”, you can bite me, I’m not re-posting it. (And here, to be clear, I’m not actually interested in being bitten. But I’m also not interested in passive-aggressive, judgmental little comments designed to eliminate thinking like an individual and promote bullying.)

There, that’s my mini-rant. Now I have to get back to work.

And, listen, if you want to re-post this – go ahead.
But if not, that’s cool too.