Thursday, 22 August 2019

[scenicdesign71]

It's kind of a melancholy Thursday.

Over the past week, I was briefly under consideration to design an honest-to-god Off-B'way play at one of the fancyish resident theatres here in town, which would have been a notable step up for me career-wise.  But yesterday evening I received the official rejection email.

As with the other two projects that have fallen through in rapid succession over the past couple of weeks -- one of them almost as exciting, in its own way, as this Off-B'way thing (and correspondingly almost as disappointing when it fell through) -- I'm trying to remain philosophical.

(The third project, the smallest of the three by most objective measures, is no huge loss; I actually ended up backing out of that one myself, and don't really regret doing so).

With no further excitement currently visible on the horizon, after the anxiety and disarray of juggling three "maybe"s while wondering when, or whether, I would ever return to my steady-if-unglamorous TV gig, it's almost a relief to settle back into the usual inertia.

But if nothing else, while it lasted, this recent whirlwind did finally nudge me into making a good start on my portfolio website (better fifteen years late than never?).  And it has prompted some soul-searching regarding such opportunities, my attitude toward which has long tended along the lines of "ah, but / if you have no expectations, / you can never have a disappointment".

Now and then it's good to be reminded of the obverse: roughly, "if you don't have a dream, / how you gonna have a dream come true?", though I don't necessarily expect to stop flipping that coin anytime soon.

And then, for irrelevant but effective mood enhancement, I stumbled across this article -- my real excuse for starting this thread -- a 3000-word dopamine bath that I can't resist sharing:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/arts/music/sesame-street-anniversary.html

Plus a delightful sidebar listicle:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/arts/music/sesame-street-fun-facts.html