Sentimentality, Arts Education and Bad Haircuts
Dear Tulsa Ballet,
Over 25 years ago you gave me an incredible gift. Your touring company came to my small Kansas town and I got to be in your Nutcracker production. I was actually in the production twice – once in 1983 and again in 1985.
In 1983, I was 8 years old and I played an angel. I loved the beautiful costume. I remember a woman on the costume crew pricked her finger on a pin while she was helping me and I remember the bright blood on the beautiful white gown. She saw my horrified look, laughed, told me that “spit always gets out blood,” and sure enough, it came right out.
But it’s really the second time, when I was 10, that I remember most vividly. I played a little boy at Clara’s party (an upside of a really unfortunate haircut.) I remember the audition, how nervous I was. I remember the day my mom called to find out if I had gotten a part. And how she told me that the roles of the children were the “best” parts – because I had to learn a real dance, not just “look cute in a mouse costume.” In retrospect, she was probably, wisely, trying to head off any second thoughts I had about playing a boy in a show full of beautiful dresses.
But she didn't n
eed to worry, I loved my part and I took it very seriously. I remember the rehearsals in the big dance studio at the university, how professional it felt. I remember my brown corduroy suit and my black ballet shoes. I remember how tough the teachers were, how we had to sit with one leg crossed underneath and one knee up – at attention – while we were waiting for our turn to dance. I remember mastering the hand-over-hand grapevine. I remember the day of the first show and that my Gramps sent me a "break a leg" telegram (yes, a telegram!) I remember waiting backstage and being in awe of the professional dancers – real ballerinas. I remember how hard they worked. I remember the hush of the audience, the music, the smell and the aliveness of being on stage.
I learned so much from those experiences – about art, about hard work and discipline, about confidence and pride, and about theater magic. Those things have informed my whole life and certainly my chosen profession.
I’m not sure I realized how important those experiences were to me, until this year, watching a beautiful production of the Nutcracker in Minneapolis, with my 4-year old daughter sitting on my lap. Afterwards I told her, “you know, Mama was in the Nutcracker when she was a little girl” “Oh,” she breathed, “I want to do that.”
Thank you for all of that.
Laura
Quick Tips for Archiving Clips: Automate. Save. Organize.
Behold, the coveted press clip, feature article, mention, quotation, whatever you might call it, it's all press and if it's about you, you want to know about it and collect it. Your collection of press is a body of proof points and ammunition for your marketing, PR and branding. So, how do you keep up on all your press and organize it? Below are three simple tips on keeping tabs. It's not the only way but it is one way to help you get in the practice of archiving your press.
1. Automate: Set up Google Alerts. Chances are you probably don't have time to be Googling yourself everyday and clicking through 15 pages of results looking for anything related to you or your art. Google Alerts will do this for you and, better than a ringing in your ears, they'll send an email straight to your inbox with a link.
2. Save: In a perfect digital world, all webpages and their content would live forever. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Organizations, websites, publications, articles, posts, all of it can come and go. In order to preserve your precious links we recommend three options.
First, bookmark the content. In terms of workflow it might be fastest to bookmark them through your browser but later upload your folder to the cloud using Delicious or Diigo. Social bookmarking allows the advantage of tagging, sharing and organizing web content. Most importantly, in the event that your personal computer decides to go the way of Chernobyl, all your press clip links are safely waiting for you to access from anywhere.
Second, save the page as a Web Archive (usually thru the Save As... menu item in your browser). This will duplicate the site content to your hard drive, then you can back-up the information in another location. Web Archives allow you to load the page as it looked in the browser, even if you're working off-line.
Third, you might want to print the pages to .pdf. The downside here is that URL's get truncated, and links are lost. The upside is that you have a frozen slice of time that you can then keep locally on your computer, plus back-up offsite, should Rollingstone shutter its doors and your glowing review of your debut album be lost.
In some instances you might find what you're looking for using the WayBack Machine but it's not comprehensive archive.
3. Organize: The nice thing about organizing is that it's all about creating a system that work for you. Often times we look to other people for systems that work and then mimic those. The main point is that whether you think best chronologically, categorically, or autobiographically it's all about how you can most readily find past information in the future. When the curator of the Whitney calls and interrupts your Sunday morning to request that pull quote from Thomas Pynchon, you want to be able to send that off and be back before your tea gets cold. As I mentioned above, social bookmarking sites use tagging systems to organize materials by topics that you choose. They also operate chronologically and allow you to add notes, in case you want to included specific details about the article for yourself or others.
And there you have it; Automate. Save. Organize. Three simple steps to put you on the road to being on top of your press.
Labels: career advice, organizing, press
eed to worry, I loved my part and I took it very seriously. I remember the rehearsals in the big dance studio at the university, how professional it felt. I remember my brown corduroy suit and my black ballet shoes. I remember how tough the teachers were, how we had to sit with one leg crossed underneath and one knee up – at attention – while we were waiting for our turn to dance. I remember mastering the hand-over-hand grapevine. I remember the day of the first show and that my Gramps sent me a "break a leg" telegram (yes, a telegram!) I remember waiting backstage and being in awe of the professional dancers – real ballerinas. I remember how hard they worked. I remember the hush of the audience, the music, the smell and the aliveness of being on stage.
