Back To It

I know. I know. I have been neglecting my blog lately. Well, that is not without some design. You see, updating my blog was beginning to feel like something of a chore, and I decided that I shouldn’t write anything else until it stopped feeling like a chore. I also needed to examine why it wasn’t much fun anymore.
Well, call it a confidence issue if you want, but I just wasn’t feeling like I was doing much with the blog. Posting videos of my favorite movies or of songs by music artists on their birthdays was starting to feel a little trite. As far as wildlife conservation and charities go, it’s as effective to just link to the cause in question with a few words of introduction – say, 140 characters or less. And on Twitter it’s a lot more likely to be seen and shared. I don’t know how many people read my blog – I mean honestly read my blog. I can see how many people visit it, but I don’t know if they were led there by a particular keyword or one of the many photos of Kristin Chenoweth and then went surfing on their merry way without pausing for my prose.

Without having any real sense of who’s reading, writing on my blog was beginning to make me feel like I was one of those guys who tweets about what he’s having for dinner (picture attachment and all) or one of those women who posts twenty new pictures of herself to Facebook every week (all in the same pose).
Well, I don’t want that, so I decided to take a break. Now I’m back, and here’s how things are going to go forward. For now, the daily format is gone. Instead of hunting for topics to fill each day, I’ll write about whatever interests me that day – with the hope that it will be interesting to you, too. I’m still interested in theatre and movies and music and wildlife conservation and saving the world, so you’ll still see all of those topics, but just when I feel like it. I originally thought that the daily format would get me film buffs dropping in on Fridays, wildlife proponents dropping in on Wednesdays, etc., but I don’t have any evidence to suggest this happened, so I really see no need restrict myself to that format anymore.
Which brings us to Thursdays. Ah, yes, theatre – the whole reason this blog began in the first place. Well, that’s a bit of a sticky wicket. I’m still a big proponent of theatre, I still know an awful lot about it, and I still like to talk about it, but I have become a bit disenchanted with the Denver theatre scene. And, in all fairness, it with me as well.

Oh, I’m still involved in theatre here, in fact, I’ve got a staged reading of Coriolanus coming up in August, but I just don’t really feel as though I belong here anymore – if I ever did – and I haven’t felt that way in quite a while, which makes it a little difficult to write about theatre in this town.
Sometimes a project comes along that I get very excited about, like BREACH, and it was actually a lot of fun putting that podcast together for you. If something else like that comes along while I’m still in Denver, then I’ll see if I can’t do something like that again.
Oh, right. Yes, I have decided that I will be leaving Denver. I moved here in November of 2001, and, by coincidence, my apartment lease ends in November of this year. So that’ll be ten years, and I think it’s been a pretty good run. In a decade I’ve held two Artistic Directorships, directed and performed in dozens of shows, and, most importantly, a large number of very attractive actresses are inclined to hug me on sight.
I can’t complain.
To stretch an analogy, there are lots of round pegs to fit the many round holes here, and I’m really content with being a square peg. The few square holes that exist here are already adequately filled. So, it’s time I went looking for someplace with more square holes. This is not intended as a slam against the “round pegs,” it’s just not my thing.
Do I disagree with what some companies are doing here? Yes, and I’ve gone into that before, so I don’t see the need to do so again  . . . at the moment. However, that’s more of a philosophical issue, and has more to do with the way some companies are using their nonprofit status. I don’t begrudge anyone wanting to get his or her art on, so to speak. (Though I still insist that we could do it a bit more cooperatively without disenfranchising the limited audience. But I’ll stop there.)

So, anyway, the blog is back again, with changes again. I do not expect that any future entries will be as long as this one, though. I did feel that I had some ‘splainin’ to do.

If you’ve made it this far, let me reward you with this video to celebrate the birthday of guitarist, songwriter, and astrophysicist Brian May of Queen.