Monday night brain dump, in bullet point form…

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•Great quote that I read today, "Leadership is stewardship". 

•We had a wonderful readthru tonight of next season’s world premiere musical, "The Usual".  Some great stuff, some stuff to be worked on, and all of it in a great place with a great cast.  Very much looking forward to the project, because it’s going to be a lot of fun, and a lot of challenge: A love story that includes songs about obsolete computers, sex toys and Florida.  Oh yes.

•It was a day of lining up schedules and calendars.  Tomorrow it will be more of the same.  I realized today that my goal of making next season a little less busy than this one has failed horribly, but I’m really excited about it. 

•The Tigers made a big trade today – surprising, at this point in the season, but a very welcome trade, to pick up Delmon Young.  This has the potential to really help them lock down the Central Division Title.  (Please, let that sentence not be the jinx that ruins it.)

•Got home tonight, and my son was awake.  Poor kid, I’m hoping he doesn’t inherit my occasional insomnia spells.  Still, it was nice to hang out and snuggle and chat about the day, the upcoming week, his thoughts on going back to school in a few weeks (to a brand new school, too, for 6th grade!).  He’s 11 and 1/2, and I have a feeling that, over the next year or so, his "Dad? Come snuggle me and let’s talk while I go to sleep?" requests are going to be less and less.  Just thinking about that makes my heart heavy.  I hope I get longer than a year!

"The one principle that surrounds everything else is that of stewardship; that we are the managers of everything that God has given us."
-Larry Burkett

From Wikipedia: Stewardship is an ethic that embodies responsible planning and management of resources.  The concept of stewardship has been applied in diverse realms, including with respect to environment, economics, health, property, information, and religion, and is linked to the concept of sustainability.

Historically, stewardship was the responsibility given to household servants to bring food and drinks to a castle dining hall. The term was then expanded to indicate a household employee’s responsibility for managing household or domestic affairs. Stewardship later became the responsibility for taking care of passengers’ domestic needs on a ship, train and airplane, or managing the service provided to diners in a restaurant. The term continues to be used in these specific ways, but it is also used in a more general way to refer to a responsibility to take care of something belonging to someone else. To be a steward, and or act in steward to something, is known as stewardship.

A fun pic… of a muddy little man…

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I just got this picture of me running the Warrior Dash!

This was the next-to-last obstacle so, yeah, that’s me in mid-air, leaping over giant flames of doom lapping at my heels!! (Or something like that….) I had just finished swimming the Swamp Pit, hence the goo all over me.) (Yeah, you heard me, Swamp Pit)

So, the good news is that after the Swamp and Flames of Doom the final obstacle was the Mud Pit, and I wound up looking like THIS:

It was nice to have the mud to, y’know, wash away all of the swamp. Well, I suppose it didn’t really wash it away, it just sort of… covered it up…

I can’t wait to do that again next year! 🙂

My tweets

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  • Wed, 12:32: Wow! Stephen Sondheim isn’t mincing words!: Stephen Sondheim Takes Issue With Plan for Revamped ‘Porgy and Bess’: http://t.co/2CWdzma #fb
  • Wed, 12:53: Someone asked me for an invite to Google+, I still have a bunch – anyone want one? I’m still on the fence about it, but…
  • Wed, 18:35: RT @jaimepaglia: Thrilled that our network and studio are giving us another episode to make a #Eureka series finale. The fans and show d …
  • Wed, 18:37: RT @bearmccreary: RT @bergopolis Rumors are true. Syfy and Universal are giving us one additional episode so we can end the series on ou …
  • Wed, 22:31: RT @mbennardo: Two-thirds into this book and only now do I finally notice that Dr Dolittle is apparently, unaccountably, horrifically NO …
  • Thu, 10:33: Nice! You sound great! (+, HANDLEBARS=great song!) “@LoloLoGro: Djing on The Impact right now. Check it out at 88.9 or impact89fm.org!!!”

Be Dissatisfied

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Doing some reading tonight, and I came across this piece, and I really like it. As I have been working quite a bit on preparing for next season at the Williamston Theatre, as well as prepping for a season of my own more individual work as a director, this simple idea really spoke to me. I thought I’d share it…

An inventor was asked why he spent sixteen hours every day tinkering with his work. He replied:

“Because I’m dissatisfied with everything as it currently exists in its present form.”

Dissatisfaction is beneficial to the creative process. Otherwise you lose the prod you need to spot potential problems and opportunities.

Success can make us complacent. We think, “Everything’s fine. Why change anything?”

And we stop trying new approaches.

Often it’s only when our success is threatened that we seek to make improvements.

An example is the “Sailing Ship Syndrome,” named after the burst of innovation in the mid-19th century sailing ship industry. Only after it became obvious that the steamship would dominate the commercial sailing ship did the sailing ship reach its peak of efficiency.

Faced with the challenge of steam, sailing ships reduced the duration of the average westward crossing of the Atlantic from five weeks in 1840 to three weeks in 1860. Many of the changes that made this increase in speed possible could have been made decades earlier, but it was only when faced with elimination that the motivation was present to do so.

Moral: to remain successful, sometimes we have to be dissatisfied with the things that enabled us to be successful in the first place.

— What are you dissatisfied about?
— What isn’t sitting right with you?
— How can you turn irritation into inspiration?
— What previously successful assumptions can you challenge?

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.

Vacation was great! Now… work is also great! Some updates…

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Coming up next – digging out my in-box, making schedules for 4 different projects, getting a haircut, a metric ton of paperwork for next season, and organizing the rest of my to-do list!  🙂

Hey – have I mentioned the Michigan Equity Theatre Alliance?  (Or "META", as we’re calling it?)  It’s an organization that Williamston Theatre and 6 other professional Equity theatres in the state are creating, designed to support, market and generally raise awareness of the Equity theatre industry in the state.  It’s pretty wonderful, I think, and before long it will also be a nice online hub for ticketing for all 7 of the theatres, as well!  Check it out at the brand new website, metatheatres.org!  The website was just launched, and will continue to be a work in progress as everyone announces their new seasons and gets the info on there, and soon online ticket sales will be happening there, as well!  

I can’t believe we’re only a few days from ending our 5th Season at the Williamston Theatre.  Still amazing that A) we’ve been here that long, and B) we’re about to launch into a whole new season of programming!  Our fundraising cabaret event, "Songs, Friends and Fun" was a huge success, and based on the number of phone calls and emails we’ve gotten, I think it may turn into an annual event!  Plus I’m excited about the fact that we may soon be announcing a series of events that will be happening at the theatre over the coming season… that I can’t talk about just yet!  (How’s that for a tease?)