Some folks affect you disproportionately. Brian has been one of those. I’m not sure exactly how to describe it. It’s probably silly for me to pull the word “hero” into the description, but I’m not sure I can really avoid the word either. Little things can confer that status on a young mind, and once conferred, it has a funny way of sticking.
My parents used to live in California. My dad’s a musician, and music was what brought them into a friendship with Brian and his wife Lynne. Music and, I suspect, a shared appreciation for goofiness.
Later on, my mom and dad moved to Kentucky, where dad started teaching at the university. Pretty soon they had their first kid, Cricket. (Actually, Chris, but until about 9th grade there was not a soul in this world who called me anything but “Cricket”. My oldest friends often still do.)
Anyway, Brian and Lynne stayed in touch, and visited a few times. I was five or six. Old enough to draw Lynne a picture of a rainbow, but too young to remember I’d done it. Then a few more years went by and we visited them. I don’t know exactly how old I was then, but it was old enough to remember. And remember I do. Because I was awestruck.
Brian worked at Apple Computer. And despite my infamously porous memory, the day he drove us over to see his office is not something I ever expect to forget.
The walls. The walls were made of white boards. All of them! Every hallway! I mean, you could just reach out and draw on the freaking walls! And you could see where engineers had stopped and talked and caught an idea right there without having to run back to their desks for paper.
I’m sure that many companies were doing something similar at the time, but I’m also quite sure I’d never seen anything like it and the idea of just walking over and writing on a wall was just mind-blowing to me.
Then there was…the hardware room. I have no idea what it really was, but I remember Brian leading us in. It was long, and it was not terribly wide, and on every surface lay a computer. Dozens of machines, with their skins off and their guts sticking out, and instruments for computer surgery sitting next to them. The room smelled of electronics and plastic. And everywhere, everywhere there were screens. Black and white screens, painted with the curious imagery of a dozen different screen savers. One in particular was burned1 into my memory: animal eyes. Blinking, blinking animal eyes, staring out into the darkness of the machine room when Brian flicked off the lights and closed the door to leave.
When I trace back the thread of my interest in computers, that visit with Brian lies somewhere near the very beginning. And if you dig through my hard drive you’ll find an old text file where I managed to save a few emails between us. Not a lot, but over the years, you could see his generosity and kindness shining through. I once wrote him an earnest, almost feverish letter describing a vision I’d had for Apple’s business plan. Or I’d talk about my science fair project, and then he’d describe what hardware problem he was working on, which I eagerly read, and then responded with naive but well-intentioned ideas about things he might try.
They were messages full of youthful, impractical energy. A less generous soul might have labeled them stupid.
But Brian was a sweet and generous soul. And he never, ever made me feel stupid.
Brian passed away yesterday at 6:45 pm. Cancer. A mysterious cancer that the world’s best doctors could not understand or, ultimately, treat. He fought it for years. He fought it with incredible humor and good will. I’ve been told that a couple of days ago, when he came home from the hospital, his daughter Mika asked him if he needed anything. His reply? “I could use some hair.”
A few years ago my parents and I met up with Brian and Lynne in Tennessee. He was there to see a doctor. My dad was nominally there for a music workshop, but more importantly we were there to see Brian and Lynne. We took a hike down some gorgeous trails, and we found a rock formation that we thought looked like a throne. Brian hopped up and gave us a regal pose:
Brian’s Apple employee number was 32. 2 He once mentioned that, as far as he knew, he was the oldest continuous employee of Apple. Not Steve Jobs. Not Steve Woz. Brian.
The world is down a creative and generous soul today. A gentle soul with no time for self-pity but all the time in the world for a geeky kid with big, silly ideas. And maybe it’s impossible to trace the causes of a life, but I suspect I might not be doing what I’m doing if not for Brian.
So here’s to you, man. Here’s to your kindness. And here’s to Lynne, too. And here’s to high tea at Tea on the Mountain. Here’s to all those discounts on new Macs you got us when I was growing up. Here’s to listening to kids and treating them with respect.
Thank you.
1- I suppose that’s ironic.
2- “When I forgot my badge just last week, the Building 5 receptionist did the time-honored wait-for-rest-of-the-digits pause.” – Commenting on his ID number in an email from January 16, 2008
It’s early Saturday morning, my wife just went to work, and residing in my mental register are about eight things that take drastically higher priority over writing a blog post.
So heeeeyyyeeeeeere I am. Top of the morning to you. I’ve got a date with the farmers’ market in about an hour, so let’s do this quickly, shall we?
Is your rage an innie or an outie?
Ha ha! Yes, it’s true! I’ve suckered you into reading another blog post about Outrageous Fortune. Oh, come on, you knew it was coming. Well, all you theater geeks knew it was coming.
Yes, back in December, I too, a C-list theater blogger, was offered a free copy of the ol’ O.F. In a bit of simple but effective marketing, I, along with everyotherfarmoreworthytheaterblogin existence, was given a chance to light up my little corner of the interweb with my own two tiny cents about this little bombshell of a book.
For those of you reading this from a position comfortably outside the bubble, here’s the skinny: the contents of Outraaaageous Fortióne are the scandalous topic of the whole darn theater world right now. If you read about theater on the Internet, you have read about this book. Isaac Butler even organized a team blogging effort to dissect the thing. (Currently in process.) It’s also leaking out into the broader media landscape, via outlets like the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.
So what we all really need right now is my take on it.
In which it is revealed I am a liar
Ha ha! I’m such a kidder! You need my opinion on this book about as much as you need the salary earned by an American playwright. Which is to say, I guess it could conceivably be useful for something, but the face value approaches zero in a suspiciously asymptotic manner.
So, as it turns out, this is not another blog post about Outrageous Fortune. Which is handy for me, since I haven’t actually read the thing.
Let me stress that
I have not read Outrageous Fortune. I want to be clear about that. I do not own a copy. I do not plan to own a copy.
And I’ve only barely managed to skim a handful of the ten thousand blog posts devoted to the book.
But this is the Internet, which never said “no” to someone who thought he had something to say.
And I do think I have one little, small thing to say.
It’s not even a snarky thing.
Oh, I admit it. I’ve been sorely tempted to snark about this book. Something along the lines of “NEWS FLASH: ARTISTS GET PAID SHIT.”
But I get that the point here is (probably) more subtle. (Again, remember: haven’t read the book.) I get that there’s a conversation going on here about the artistic ecosystem, and how in a team sport like theater, we’re shafting the playwrights even harder than we’re shafting everyone else, which is already a significant amount of shafting from the start. And I get that, if this is a conversation about the health of our national artistic ecosystem, this kind of exploitation of the fountainhead of our art form might be kind of like the global warming of theater: slow, steady, and ultimately devastating. Not to mention fucking unfair to all those playwrights.
Or is it?
Okay. Here’s the thing. And I say this with a heart full of love.
Getting shafted as an artist starts with you.
You signed up for this. I don’t know specifically why, but you did. You made a choice. And we need to start there. I’m not saying this pejoratively. I’m not saying this with the condescending tone of someone who thinks you made the wrong choice. I only want to stress very strongly that a choice was made.
Or, no, that’s not actually it. What I want to stress very strongly is the question: “You actually did make that choice, right? You’re not sitting here getting shafted under the impression that you had no other choice, right?”
Because in the full consciousness of that choice, we can legitimately and constructively talk about dealing with the results. We can recognize a powerful artistic system that some people subscribe to for the opportunity of its momentum, but which may need to be redirected before that momentum carries the system off a cliff. We can have that conversation, and it will be a conversation without whining, because we’ll know that the people in that system looked around, saw a universe of possibilities, and decided, yes, this system is where I can best spend my creative energy.
But what I see instead, over and over and over again, is something very different. I see people wandering across a landscape in the muddy, trampled path of the ones who went before, eyes staring feverishly forward, always forward, at the choices made by someone else.
Look left! Goddammit look left and see that field of flowers!
Roads work so damn well. They take you directly to a pre-determined destination. And that’s very often what you want.
But dammit, not always.
I only tell my own story because it’s the one I know the best.
Seven years ago I spent ten months in the Acting Apprentice Company at Actors Theatre of Louisville. And although I met some of my dearest friends there, I can’t really say it was an unmitigated joy. In ten months, we got two guaranteed days off: Christmas eve and Christmas day. (Although, in practice, we usually got Mondays free as well. And technically speaking, I actually didn’t really get Christmas eve or Christmas day off.) We got no free housing. We got no stipend. And we certainly had no time for a job on the side. We all lived on our meager savings and the generosity of our families, and many of us (myself included) got some extra help from food stamps.
At the end of that ten months comes the Next Big Step, in which the Apprentice Company organizes a showcase in New York to which they hope a million agents will come, and maybe one of them will be looking for you, and that will ease your transition into the great New York jungle where lucky actors will supplement their income with a lucrative soap commercial.
And I just. Could not. Do that. Wanted no part of that. None. I felt crushed by it from the very beginning. Getting crushed on the first step did not, it must be said, seem like a promising way to begin.
So I looked left, and over there to the left was this lovely green hill rising up toward a computer science degree. I didn’t really know what lay over the hill, or if the terrain beyond could curve back toward theater, but I did have some kind of base unformed instinct that a paycheck and health insurance was a lovely foundation on which to reach out toward theater from an as yet undetermined angle.
It took almost seven years to clear the brush on that path. It took a completely unexpected direction. And several times I found myself scared that I had really fundamentally trekked off to where I would never make direct contact with the artistic part of my life again. That was not a comfortable feeling.
But last summer, the path broke through: a theater company in Baltimore gave me a chance to make theater again. And you know what? It worked out. And I won’t claim that I’m especially good at it, but for whatever reason that initial chance has led to other chances. Maybe I’m not completely incompetent as an actor. But it can’t hurt that I also bring my own paycheck, my own health insurance, and my own completely flexible schedule.
Whatever the reason, I’m making art again. Art I’m fundamentally proud to be making. With people I truly respect. And I don’t have to give two flying farts about the average salary of actors in American theater, or how the hell can I afford health insurance, or how will I find the energy to work two jobs and still have something left to give to the creative process of making a play happen.
And that? That’s not just liberating. That is fucking fun.
Crap, this got long.
I’ve blasted way past my self-imposed time limit on writing this post. I need to get to the market and pick up some milk.
So here’s the deal.
My path is not necessarily your path.
And their path is not necessarily your path.
And I believe that intelligent people are saying intelligent things about a set of well-worn paths which have been no doubt thoughtfully mapped in this book Outrageous Fortune. And I think that’s cool.
But I also know, simply on the face of it, that I just don’t care about that path. I don’t have to care about that path. And I can accept that some people will care about that path, and I’m glad they do. And I wish them the best of luck.
I just hope, hope, hope that people don’t unthinkingly cede their fundamental power to create to a system that might kill it. Not without first looking left. And right. And up. And down.
And I’m excited, as I skim the ten thousand blog posts on this book, to see this basic idea bubbling in the soup.
What rules will you break today?
My life fundamentally changed the day I started working for myself. There was no company policy book. I was the company policy book. I was the system. No option was arbitrarily off the table.
I cannot stress this enough. This shift in perspective transformed everything. I’m convinced it is the secret source of power of the entrepreneur: knowing in your bones that the limits you encounter will be the ones that really exist. And that the definition of what it means for a limit to “really exist” is usually up for debate.
I just walked down to Eddie’s Market and picked myself up a few copies of today’s Baltimore Sun.
The checkout lady (who loves to gab and give advice) grinned and asked if I was in it. I guess buying four copies is a give-away. I mumbled yes, which sent her diving into the stack, ripping a paper out of the pile, throwing it open, and running around to all the other cashiers, waving the article at them and proudly proclaiming “his big article, yes!”.
She then instructed me to buy another copy for my parents, and another for my sister. “You have to show off to her a little bit.”
I love that checkout lady.
Anyway, as you’ve now gathered, the business section of the Baltimore Sun has a great article today about Figure 53. (Coincidentally, we have a brand new website up today. Just in the nick of time!)
The Sun reporter, Gus Sentementes, also posted more notes from the interview (complete with video!) on his blog.
Thanks for being interested in my little company, Gus!
Speaking of TED talks, on Thursday Baltimore played host to TEDx MidAtlantic.
Among many brain-bending talks was one by Joel Salatin, the now-famous farmer from Polyface Farms.
In Joel’s talk he challenged us to bring nobility and sacredness to our work. He said:
My success is tied to the cumulative effect of everyday stories, and faithfulness to injecting sacredness and nobility into every little action of my day. And when we allow that kind of sacredness, and that kind of nobility, to permeate every one of our actions, the world will be ennobled. The world will indeed rise up to meet us.
Today, Dave Troy, the man who conceived and oversaw the organization of TEDx MidAtlantic, made an interesting observation. He wrote:
How can we imbue marketing with nobility and sacredness? Not a knock, just asking. Thoughts? Seems the ultimate challenge.
I find this just a fascinating, challenging idea. Is there, or could there be, a noble core to marketing? Or is that idea just a joke? Is it an activity that can be pursued in a sacred way? Or is it inherently ignoble?
In looking at my own company, I see that my attempt to be honorable about marketing could probably be summed up as “when in doubt, avoid marketing”. Which is, if not a total cop-out, at least a pretty unsatisfying guideline. It’s an un-principle. A “first, do no harm” principle. It doesn’t carry much insight. But it’s my way of trying to avoid the “sexy umbrella” syndrome, a.k.a. “manipulating people into paying me money for my work when the simple merits of their situation would not otherwise lead them to do so”.
The closest I can get to identifying something “noble” in marketing is the idea that one really good way to market is not to market per se, but to simply, you know, help people. When they’re in distress, I try to help my customers quickly and with empathy. I guess at some level I’m doing this because I want them to like my product and talk about it with their friends, but when a frantic message appears from an engineer across the world who is under stress due to the software I wrote, I tell you what, I am not thinking “sweet! check out this marketing I’m about to do!” It’s much more personal. It’s fundamentally empathetic. “This person needs help. I am responsible for helping them. I am going to feel terrible until I do.” And I’ve found the result of that empathy is that, just as Joel says, the world has risen up to meet me.
So that’s one way I think marketing can be genuinely noble: honoring your responsibility for helping your customers.
But does that idea cover all the bases? I doubt it. What other principles could there be? Anyone have any ideas? I’d really love to hear them.
There are many glorious TED talks, but this may be the most glorious.
I don’t mind telling you: I wept at my desk when I watched this video.
I took little time to share the video on Twitter, and it was not much later when my friend Jen Wang replied:
Re: TED. I don’t agree with absolutely everything he says, but it’s glorious indeed. I’d love to see his pre-concert talks.
Now, when Jen talks about music, I know well enough to listen. There are two reasons for this. The first reason, the technical reason, is that Jen’s at Berkley right now getting a PhD as a composer. The second reason, the better reason, is that Jen and her husband Sean (also a composer) are among the most literate, articulate talkers-about-music I’ve ever met in my life. (And my dad is a university music professor, so I’ve met my fair share of people who talk about music.)
I remember vividly a day about five years ago when Jen and Sean gave me a crash course on a series of modern composers who I had never previously heard. It was a revelation. The way they introduced me, a musical moron, to overtone singing literally sent me skipping around the room with delight. Ever since that day I’ve never missed a chance to get them to talk music to me.
Needless to say, then, I was pretty keen to know on which points Jen disagreed with Mr. Zander. I sent her a little inquiry. She sent me a little response back. It made perfect sense. The end.
But of course not the end.
Tonight Jen wrote me an email. I’ve asked her permission to reproduce it here, because I’d like to share it with you.
It’s a little long, but I want to share the whole thing with you. I think it’s important. Ready? I’ll join you again at the end. Here we go:
Hey, Chris!
I’ve been thinking lately about the TED talk, and how insufficient Twitter was for expressing what I’d thought about it, and it’s been on my mind since then. I hope you don’t mind; I haven’t been able to get it out of my head, so I wrote it out, and thought I’d send it along to you.
I loved the TED talk until the moment he told the audience to hold in your mind the memory of somebody you love that you’ve lost, and you’ll know “everything that Chopin has to say”.
It’s a gorgeous piece, and he plays it beautifully, and he’s spot on with his analysis. But when I hear this piece, I don’t hear grief specific to the loss of a person I love, unless instructed to do so. What I do hear is how the piece is essentially a long descent, and the interplay between the elegance and simplicity of the overarching shape with the delays and detours that are driven by the harmony (as a result of repeatedly thwarting expectation and resolution) is what makes the piece both simple and agonizing—you know where you need to go, but you just can’t quite get there until the end.
And even that end is both satisfying and (to me) not. The long, slow fall of the melodic line has ended but no resolution is given in the harmony, and it’s essentially a tag, a prolonged farewell, that delivers the final chords of the resolution. There’s no moment, like there would be with Beethoven, where the melody resolves the same time the harmony does, where everything comes together in one cathartic, deeply satisfying moment (that would then be repeated ten times just for emphasis, like the musical equivalent of ending a sentence like this!!!!!!1111one). It’s like the difference between coming home through the front door and sneaking in the back window, a bit at a time. You both get there, but in a context where homecoming as an event is a significant one, they come off in very different ways.
There are beautiful, incredible examples from this time period, in Chopin and Brahms and many others’ work, of similar moments where the melody “arrives” and the harmony doesn’t until later, and how wrenching that can feel. And part of the Romantic sensibility is to deny the clear-cut resolutions of middle-period Beethoven, even as they construct structures that make those resolutions seem deeply necessary.
I also love the difference between this tortuous route taken by the harmony and the melody, while the rhythm remains so simple and so regular. There’s something about that juxtaposition that to me makes the piece seem deeply introverted and quiet, that serves as a way of concealing or muting that extremely tense interaction. The fact that the accompaniment is moving while the melody doesn’t also emphasizes how the notes of that melody hang suspended in the air, not only above the eventual E at the end of the descent, but above the gently moving surface of the accompaniment. Each note of the melody just hangs there, you know?
I feel that tension, that subversion of expectation, that tortuous working-through of the interplay of these elements. And that’s what moves me: the suspense, the release. It’s not a happy piece; the narrative of the piece isn’t about delivering results and satisfying expectations. The melody is extraordinarily beautiful, more so because it’s so simple. It’s really just a gem of a piece.
But because of all this, when he says what he says about the Chopin, I felt kind of crushed. Because assigning the piece an external, concrete narrative was, to me, a way of cheapening the piece in this context, as if the notes themselves weren’t enough to make you catch your breath and listen, when for me they really, really are. I can totally see why a piece like this, especially one that is so gentle and yet inexorable in its progress, could tug at a person and deliver a cathartic moment about something in their lives. But I think those moments remind me most of the way that, when I sing an A into the body of my guitar, the A string will vibrate sympathetically. That inexorable progress excites your inner life in some way, makes you vibrate sympathetically somehow. Maybe the way the progress of time is similarly undeniable? Maybe the way what you expected is no longer what you wanted when you get it? Who knows? That may all be true, if it makes you think of a loved one that you miss. But was that “all that Chopin had to say”? I don’t think we have the ability to know that, and (frankly) I don’t think we need to know that in order to be deeply moved by the piece.
Does that make sense?
Wow, this got way, way longer than I thought it would. But I’d love to know what you’re thinking about it.
Jen
A quiet moment.
.
I hope you know very little about music.
I really kind of hope you don’t know much about music. At least, not in a formal sense. Because for those of you who already know a lot about music that text probably didn’t have the same effect on you as it had on me. But for those of you who don’t know so much, you might have had the same feeling I did. Namely, the feeling that someone just gave you a piece of the world as a present.
Simply making art isn’t enough. It is the responsibility of the artist to speak about the work, to write about the work, to contribute insights to the development of the field.
When I read that line this morning, I nodded to myself and carried on with my day. But when Jen wrote me that email, I felt what it meant.
Every time Jen or Sean has talked to me about a piece of music, it opened up that music in a way I couldn’t do on my own. Even with stupid pop music, it still helps me listen. And not just listen, but hear. Hear things I simply did not hear without their help. And just like I felt with Mr. Zander’s talk, it feels glorious.
And also? It also makes me really, really hungry for more.
My response to Jen
Here’s what I wrote back to Jen:
I wonder about whether he actually thinks about the piece as conclusively as he talks about it. I have this feeling he might not. I have this feeling that it was a little white lie, to give someone who doesn’t understand music a chance to GET it with a capital G. I get the feeling that for him, the first thing he wants to do is make sure you believe, really and truly believe, that a piece of classical music can, like, change your life. And I get the feeling he’s willing to play a little bit of a trick on you to teach you that. But I bet he’d probably say it’s just a trick to get you to the next place. The place where you can hear a piece and take it with all its mystery intact, instead of taking it with all its mystery boiled down to one possible interpretation…..
I don’t know…obviously I don’t know what he thinks, I just get the feeling that he’d say something like that. Because to get to the point where I could hear all of the things you just helped me understand, and to do it like I got hit by a truck, would I think take longer than the time they get for a TED talk…. :-)
I think we both kinda came to the conclusion that this may have been what Mr. Zander was doing, but I’m not totally sure and anyway that’s not the point.
The point is that you? You have the power to teach. Please use it.
This is neat. I like this idea, and in the spirit of public feedback about it, here’s, uh, some public feedback:
The Metrics I Generally Dig
@mentions — Measuring mentions captures something about both re-tweets and conversations. Both of those things feel very important.
Followers — Measuring the number of follower certainly seems, on the face of it, to be a good yardstick. But: it only captures one level. I suspect this metric could be improved by factoring in the 2nd degree followers, i.e. how many followers do your followers have? My own Twitter account doesn’t have that many followers, but when I wrote a proposal for a new funding model for theater it reached the eyeballs (and struck the fancy) of Jess Hutchinson. It was Jess’s tweet, not mine, that gave that post traction. At the time Jess was a 2nd degree follower, through Nick Keenan. So I’d like to see a more sophisticated model for measuring followers.
Web Badge location — I don’t now how to weight this, but I’m so glad Devon tried. I know it can take time to modify a website, and maybe you want to test the twitter waters gently at first, but eventually, if you’re in, then freaking go in all the way. Make the choice. Commit. Don’t go weaksauce on us.
Twitter Name — Again, I don’t know how to weight it, but kudos to Devon for trying. It’s not just a branding thing, it’s a user interface thing. Think like a software developer and imagine what it will be like to actually use your Twitter name. I bet you a lot of money that a lot of people misspell GLTFCleveland.
The Metrics I Generally Don’t Buy
Frequency — Proof by counter-example: I have no qualms about un-following Twitter accounts that won’t shut up, even if they’re great tweets. In my experience quality and quantity don’t seem closely correlated on Twitter.
Total Tweets — See above.
Time in existence — I mean, if you were on the ball early on, cool, but I don’t think you get extra points for this. Maybe you knew you didn’t know how to use Twitter, in which case you should get extra points for not putzing around. Late to the party is no big deal if you come out swinging.
Client — Devon describes this metric as follows: “Included under the assumption that theatres using desktop applications (like TweetDeck) are able to better manage their Twitter presence”. I think that’s a bad assumption, and anyway, don’t grade the tools, grade how they’re used. A great foley artist could beat a lousy QLab user without much trouble.
Running with it
I’d love to see Devon’s metrics refined and extended. I’d also like to find a way to close the loop on evaluating the metrics. Can we connect these numbers to, say, ticket sales? Or volunteer hours clocked for the theater? Until we do something like that, it’s all speculation.
Speculating is fun, though
After reading Devon’s analysis, I wanted to play with some numbers too. However, I don’t really know anything about most of those LORT theaters (with one huge exception). Instead, I wanted to play with numbers for which I have some real-life context. To do that, I browsed through the Baltimore theaters I currently follow. Here they be, ordered by number of followers:
First off, what’s that “ERS/ING Ratio” thing? I propose that it’s one way to measure the strength of your magnet. If that number is high, your followers sought you out. A high ratio means you didn’t just troll for followers as a Twitter whore. (The tactic of following every single account you stumble on and hoping for a tag-back.)
The trouble with this ratio is that a high number is good, but a low number isn’t necessarily bad. For example, you yourself might be a tag-back follower. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, at least for an organization. If your style is to tag-back your own followers, then they might have all clicked “Follow” before you returned the favor, in which case you’ve still got a great magnet even though your ratio is diluted.
“I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.” ~ Ralph “Doomed to Ironic Appropriation” Emerson
Another thing worth noting: Lots of tweets don’t translate to lots of followers. Yes, I’m looking at you, CENTERSTAGE_MD. Yes, I know you’re running The Importance of Being Earnest, aka “the mildly amusing play that theaters will NOT FREAKING STOP PRODUCING”. Yes, I know Oscar Wilde was a clever fellow. Now stop using Twitter to quote him every single day, because no one cares.
Is it just me, or is it getting young in here?
Maybe this means nothing, or maybe it’s just to be expected, but I’d like to note that the theaters run by younger people (Single Carrot, BIG Improv, The Strand) are all kicking the Twitter asses of the theaters run by older people (CENTERSTAGE, Everyman, Theatre Project).
I have gone on record respectfully needling the older theaters about their relationship to Twitter. I don’t think anything I said in that post has really changed.
You Don’t Have To Twitter
Look, I’m big on Twitter. I think it’s the best, cleanest, coolest combination of personal and practical social networking that we’ve seen so far. But I can dig that it may not be your style. I genuinely don’t care if you use Twitter or not. I’d much rather see an organization use one kind of marketing really really well, than ten kinds poorly.
One thing I get from these numbers is that the bigger, older theaters maybe shouldn’t be jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. That would be okay. No, seriously, I’m a huge technology geek and I’m telling you: it’s okay to not use technology. The marketing that works best is the kind that comes from your heart. Find out what that means for you. If that means marketing a romantic show solely with the stunning use of letter-press printed postcards that double as a buy-one-get-one free coupon, which is the single way in which anyone can get a ticket for your event, which in turn leads to a massive “date night” for your show and you never even think about Twitter at any step of that process, dude, go for it. That would be so hott.
We need data
Despite all that stuff I just wrote, my biggest realization from looking at this table is that I simple don’t know what these numbers really mean. I want tools to give us more data. I want to see follower break-downs by locality (near/far). I want to see multi-level follower counts (1st degree/2nd degree/3rd degree). I want to track the effect of tweets on ticket sales, or volunteer hours, or something else I care about. I want to keep a running tab of how many local actors, designers, carpenters, or directors were found through Twitter connections. (I got my first acting gig in Baltimore because of Twitter.) I want to quantify the strength of the relationship on a per-follower basis (how did they start following? how often do they get into a conversation? how often do they re-tweet?). I want, in a word, more data, with more granularity. But we’ll need some tools to gather that stuff. (Do they exist already? Anyone know?)
Final Thought
Dude, Theatre Project. I love you. I am literally wearing your t-shirt right now. But come on, guys. You didn’t even try. You just gave up.
Until very recently, I’ve been able to write this blog in the comfortable confidence that no one was reading it.
It is therefore with mild horror that I now realize at least a handful of people are actually, um, reading this blog. I remain (intentionally) ignorant as to exactly how many times the server is spitting this text across the Internet, but blogs I respect and admire have done me the kindness of putting in a good word with their readership, so I must assume a few people are at least giving it a shot.
To you adventurous new readers I say hello, welcome, lovely to have you here, and if I may I’d like to introduce you to the rules and principles by which I sculpt this blog.
Rule 1: HOLY CRAP I HAVE NO RULE NUMBER ONE I DON’T EVEN KNOW IF I HAVE A CONSISTENT TOPIC
Not even a consistent topic? Not even. Or to put it another way:
This blog has a location, not a name.
Somewhat unfortunately, since it doesn’t have a name, the location becomes the name. (Location: ChrisAshworth.org Name: Uhhhhhhh…that blog on ChrisAshworth.org, aka “Chris Ashworth’s blog”).
Nice work, douche. Can’t you name it and put the focus on your topic instead?
Um, well, you have a great point, but again: I wasn’t expecting you to actually be here reading this. I didn’t install Wordpress because I had a topic, I installed it because I needed somewhere to respond.
I do stuff on the Internet. Sometimes I need a place to do it. Result: website. I used to have photos hosted here. Used to have a resume here. Used to put grad school homework assignments up here. They got stale. They’re gone now. (With one exception.)
This blog has no name because it has no theme. No theme except: junk I’ve been a-thinkin’ about.
Will I be writing about theater, small business, marketing and those other things that might have brought you here? Yes. I’m face-deep in all those things right now, and will undoubtedly need a place to explore more ideas on those topics.
I’m not trying to scare you off. God forbid. I’m totally stoked you’re here. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts. The greatest part of blogging is that I already disagree with half the stuff I’ve written before. Smart people called me out on things I got wrong.
All I wanna do is let you know: I’m not locking this thing down to one theme. I can’t do that. I can’t make stuff like that. Sorting my energy into themes just kills me. It kills me that when I went off to grad school for computers, everyone thought I’d given up theater. I wasn’t giving them the category they understood, so my life in theater, as they understood it, was dead. I hated that. That urge to force people and topics into a category. Their eyes would glaze over, and their categories would slice right through my life, and leave me in two pieces. I think that’s why this blog has no name. Names are powerful, and important, and manifestly necessary. But what makes them powerful and important and necessary is how they change and capture and fence in an idea. It’s very useful to fence something in, except when it isn’t. Sometimes the cage kills the thing you’re caging.
So welcome to this blog, a place where this guy named Chris does some writing. I’m completely thrilled you’re here. I can’t wait to talk to you. I just can’t tell you what we’ll talk about, because I honestly don’t know.
I’ve mentioned before my attempts to suss out a philosophy of marketing. I’ve got plenty of sussing left to do, but some central principles are becoming relatively clear.
Central principle number one? Be remarkable. Be worthy of remark.
Easy enough to say, I know. But I’m not so sure it’s actually that hard to do. Because all it really means is that you are doing something that is not ordinary. That’s actually pretty easy.
I mean, not everything extraordinary is easy. Creating an extraordinary product is, I admit, not usually easy. Why? Well, usually because everyone else is trying to do it too. You say you’re in a band? Great, everyone is in a band, and they’re all trying to rock. Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to rock. You absolutely should. Striving for exceptional quality at your core is going to be the basis of everything else you do. Accept no substitute for core quality.
I’m not saying you can take a shortcut past doing a good job. I’m just saying that once you do a good job, there are ten million ways to not be ordinary, and a bunch of them are easy.
Seriously. Just pick something about your company. Anything. Pick something boring. Pick the most boring thing you can think of. Then flip the creativity switch, and find some way to make that thing less ordinary. And if it seems hard? Pick something else! Somewhere in your company is an opportunity to not be ordinary. An opportunity that’s stupid easy.
Yes of Course I was Leading Up to an Example And Here We Are
This summer I bought a bike. I needed one to get back and forth from rehearsals.
I went in to the shop and came home with a SWOBO Baxter. She’s a beauty:
Now, SWOBO makes great bikes. They no doubt work hard to make them. All that hard work convinced me to walk out of the shop owning a much more expensive bike than I had expected to own when I walked in. Good on them: a hard-earned sale.
But the story doesn’t end there. I wouldn’t be writing this blog entry if the story ended there. I love my bike, but frankly I am not enough of a bike nerd to blog about it just because it has disc brakes and a sick retro/modern design and some kind of fancy self-contained ten gear shifting mechanism that I don’t really understand.
What makes me write about my Baxter—what, in this specific case, makes it remarkable—is something I just found while recycling a bunch of waste paper from my office.
Sorting through a pile of junk, I found the manual for my bike. Just to be sure I wasn’t about to recycle something important, I flipped through it. You know: scanned a page here and there. As I expected, it was nothing I cared about. Nothing I couldn’t get more directly from the friendly folks at Baltimore Bicycle Works.
But right on the last page, the very last page, right before I tossed the whole thing in the bin, my eye caught a single sentence:
Uh, wha?
That’s certainly out of the ordinary. Okay, well, I can’t throw it in the bin until I’ve looked closer.
Page 1
You can click to enlarge this image if you want, but don’t bother. It’s just what you’d expect from the legal guys:
Page 2
This one? This one you should click to enlarge:
That there? That there is remarkable. I mean: the warranty. Seriously. Can you pick a more boring piece of your company? Doubtful. But instead of making it a throw-away piece of crud on the last page of their manual, they turned it in to a surprising, funny, vulnerable, remarkable bit of prose. So remarkable that I actually, you know, remarked on it. And it wasn’t hard for them. It was already the way they were running their company, they were just brave enough and creative enough to write it down. That was it. Not hard. With one page of copy, they A) transformed my sense of them as a company, B) cemented my feeling of loyalty, and C) got me blabbing about how cool they are on my blog.
Just a little creativity and one page of copy. Remarkable.
Ever since jotting down a few observations on theater’s crappy business model, I’ve found myself mildly obsessed with finding a solution to the problem of funding theater.
No, of course not. At the level of physical law, no one deserves anything. At the level of human law, we deserve some things, like the freedom to pursue happiness. But it’s important to remember that, when it comes to things we might deserve, “running a financially successful theater company that pays its workers a living wage” doesn’t show up on the list. It strikes me as healthy to keep that fact in view. No matter how many people you know and love who are killing themselves trying to make a living in the theater, the painful truth remains: they don’t deserve it just because they want it really, really bad and are working really, really hard.
But:
We accomplish many things we don’t deserve.
Many, many things.
Is there any hope for this particular thing?
I think so. I think we can build theaters that don’t rely on slave intern labor. I think our theater educators can stop selling snake oil. I think we can give good story tellers a chance to tell good stories without disproportionately favoring the wealthy on both the telling and listening ends.
I’m not entirely confident we can do these things, but I think we can, and I think it’s worth trying.
Ready for some brainstorming? Great. Here we go.
On Profit
Must theaters be non-profit? How far away is the current theatrical model from representing a successful for-profit business? I have no first-hand knowledge of the balance sheets in Baltimore, but I do have a lot of friends who work in the theater. So I started asking around: “How much of your income is from ticket sales?”
Wait, just ticket sales?
For the moment, yes, let’s just focus on tickets. If you prune out the non-profit-y things like grants and donations, what primarily remains is ticket sales.
My informal inquiries suggest that theaters both large and small in the Baltimore/DC area see only about 25-40% of their income in the form of ticket sales. Anything in this range is considered pretty healthy. One venue had, at one point, hit 70%. This was generally agreed, in the circle where I inquired, to be surprisingly high.
Pretty challenging numbers. But they don’t even capture the half of it.
Don’t forget the unpaid labor
Consider my favorite theater company in Baltimore. Last year they were selected as the best new theater company in the city. This year they dropped the qualifier, and boasted the best actress in Baltimore to boot. This band of ten young artists is attacking the creation of a new company with intelligence, vigor, rigor, and moxie. (Moxie!) Every one of these highly educated folks must serve both an artistic and a business development role in their theater. They’re exploring new ways of marketing, they’re drumming up subscriptions, they’re selling out entire runs of shows. They pour their lives into this company, and their rapid success is widely and justly considered astonishing.
This young company has also publicly disclosed that they work under a yearly budget in the low six figures.
The math is sobering: ten extremely talented full-time employees, over several years of effort, have managed to build a company that grosses little more than ten thousand dollars per employee. Before any costs. And this is regarded an astonishing success.
Fight that Sinking Feeling. Fight It!
Okay, so we’re clearly not talking about a field where a hop, skip, and a jump will take us into the land of profits and honey. Ticket sales apparently don’t provide remotely enough funds to make theater. Fair enough. Well, that means we’re back to being a non-profit, with all those extra funding sources. But what kind of non-profit, and what exactly is our funding structure? Oh, neat, they’ve classified them for us. Looks like it’s some form of Beneficiary Builder, wherein the total cost of delivering the benefit (theater) is not covered by the fees we charge the beneficiaries (ticket prices). Get the rich beneficiaries to help subsidize the cost for others, mix in a little old fashioned advertising, grab a government grant with an argument about your benefit to society, and look: we’ve got a theater!
Great, now we have our funding model, right?
No. I do not accept that we wind up where we started. Where we started is not working. I do not accept that this is the best we can do. If this is the best we can do, we suck.
Throw Your Business Models In The Air Like You Just Don’t Care
You know what annoys me a little bit? Theaters may fit inside a non-profit structure, but they share a lot of territory with for-profit companies. Any non-profit that fits inside the Beneficiary Builder model shares huge swaths of territory with for-profit companies. Unlike other non-profits, their beneficiaries are their customers. And from where I stand, it can look like an awfully fuzzy line between a great non-profit company providing a service their customers can’t afford…and a crappy for-profit company that can’t make their service affordable.
So you know what? Forget I ever said theaters should be non-profits. I hate that idea. It might be true, but just forget it. For the purposes of this conversation, that idea is a crutch and I am kicking that crutch out from under you RIGHT NOW.
You only get the crutches back if you do something creative and new with them.
Frantically Searching for the Beat
We’re all trying to find the beat. We can hear the music changing. We don’t recognize the new song yet, but we know something is going on. Witness:
Throw a stone and you’ll hit an organization trying to find its bearing in a new culture.
Which means?
Which means I don’t know the answer either. It would be presumptuous to claim I do. But I do have a proposal, and if you’ll stick with me for a few more moments I’ll do my best to sketch it for you.
Back to basics
Let’s get back to basics for a minute. Remember: we’re working under the assumption that our theater must survive as a small for-profit business. To that end, let’s look again at tickets.
Let’s say I’ve got a 100 seat theater. Let’s say I’ve got 10 people in my company. Let’s say I want to pay them each 50K a year. Let’s say I run shows Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, that each show I produce runs a month, and that I do six shows a year. A solid schedule. That makes 96 days a year I’m opening my door, or 9600 seats I can possibly sell. If I sell every single one of those seats, I’d have to sell them at over fifty bucks a ticket to pay my company members, and I’d have nothing left for rent, production costs, or anything else.
Clearly, the numbers stink. This is why our non-profit theaters subsidize ticket prices with charitable donations from individuals, governments, and organizations. But we don’t have those tools right now, remember? We have our product: theater. We have our customers: the audience. Those are our tools. I can add more seats, I can add more shows, I can cut my (generous?) paychecks, but try to wiggle any of these numbers and I hit the limits real fast. How many more seats can I add? 100? 400? 600? When does that transform the product you’re making into something you don’t want to make? How full can you keep all those seats? How many shows can you physically make in one year? The system is against us.
And aside from the fact that the economics of ticket sales are so sobering, there are other arguments against focusing too much on ticket sales. For example:
Wouldn’t a theater funded fully by ticket sales experience pressure to reduce artistic risks?
If we pay undue attention to commercial metrics like ticket sales, aren’t we missing the point of our mission as a theater?
Doesn’t the entire concept of tickets inherently damage the arts, by dividing us into art producers and art consumers?
I get it, I get it, selling tickets sucks.
And that’s where I disagree.
Wait, what?
This poo-pooing of ticket sales as the foundation of revenue: I don’t like it.
But! But!
Yeah, I know the economics look bleak, but I’ve got some ideas about that.
And the other stuff?
First off, I don’t believe exchanging money for an artistic experience damages the arts. To be sure, it would be unhealthy to think this experience captured the whole value of the art. I strongly support Scott Walter’s work on the CRADLE project (formerly the “<100K Project”). But I want access to the art I cannot make myself, which is, oh, most of it. Exchanging money for art is a way to complete my artistic life, not damage it. That’s what money is for: translating what I can make into what you can make, and vice versa.
Second, it is not a bad thing for me to measure how many people experience my art. How often each one is engaged with my artwork. Whether or not they bring their friends and family to see it too. Tickets are not a bad approximation to these things about which I care very much. The metric can be based on tickets and still be about the mission.
Third, I think it is exactly the wrong idea that you should buffer your artistic risks by disconnecting from your audience. That logic leads you to producing edgy, grant-funded work to an empty room. Your artistic risks should be buffered by the strength of your connection to your audience, not by your financial independence from them.
But the money!?
Right. We can’t make enough money from tickets. But I think giving up on tickets as a basic economic engine is throwing in the towel too soon. They’re not working great, but they’re not completely broken, either.
But byproducts are the bonus, not the bones. Bones keep you standing up. Byproducts give you a Christmas bonus.
And here’s the problem:
Tickets are a byproduct.
You, my friend, are selling sawdust.
And you’re throwing away the wood.
Bull.
Not bull, and you know it. You’ve said it. You have said, at some point in your artistic life, a sentence very much like this one: “Art is about the process.” You sagely observed to a student that “it’s really all about the process”, or “my work is about a process of [fill in the blank]“.
You’ve said it. Admit it. And then after you said it, you went and sold someone a ticket to the final product. The thing your art is only fractionally about.
The process is the product.
There is a moment in the production of every play when the set designer presents her work to the actors. She reveals the world her imagination has built, she pulls the drape from the model, and the whole team sits in rapt attention.
There is another moment when the costume designer passes his painted designs around the table. You pour over his work. You become excited.
There is a moment when an actor tries a new choice, and the room erupts in laughter.
There is a moment when an artistic director chooses a play the company will embody. He feels a surge of anticipation.
There are hundreds of these moments. And your customers are missing all of them.
But…so much of the process is so boring.
I don’t deny it. Recognizing your product is not the same as packaging it.
But “packaging” isn’t quite the right word. I don’t want you to wrap a little plastic around the surface of your process. I want you to design it around accessibility. I want you to aerate it. The process won’t be exactly the same anymore. It will need to loosen up and let a little sunshine in. Because the surface area of your company determines the depth of its relationships. And what you need more than anything else is really good relationships.
Relationships and their Consequences
Building your revenue around relationships instead of tickets has important consequences. But one of them is not that you get rid of tickets. Ten years from now, there will still be tickets. True, our theaters can’t just churn out a bunch of ticketing transactions. Tickets alone don’t get us there. But that doesn’t mean you kill tickets. It means tickets transform from an artifact of a transaction into an artifact of a relationship.
But what does that mean?
It means you only sell tickets as a last resort. It means people pay you money for something other than tickets, even though they do get tickets as part of the deal.
It means you sell memberships, not tickets. It means that if I pay you ten bucks a month, I get access. I can visit every rehearsal. I get a guaranteed ticket to every show you do. I get unlimited empty seat passes after I use my guaranteed ticket. When a guest artists comes to do a Suzuki workshop with your acting company? I get a chance to sign up too. For free. When you have some down time, your company members teach a class, and I get to come. For free. It means that instead of throwing your unused costumes and props in the dump, you throw a souvenir party. I get to come take home a souvenir. For free. Because I am a supporter, and that special-purpose prop is just more sawdust to you. Could you sell these things in other ways? Sure. You could do a prop auction. You could sell seats in a summer acting workshop. You can sell individual tickets. But I don’t think that’s the best way to sell the sawdust. Remember: we’re trying to stay away from simple transactions. We’re trying to concentrate our value into a long-term relationship. Don’t encourage your customers to track dollar-for-dollar what they get out of every transaction. Encourage them to understand that theater is a process. A process that costs money, but produces hundreds of wonderful results. Let them invest in the process, and then let them reap the results.
Use technology to increase your surface area. Live stream your shows. Post daily rehearsal photos on Twitter. Invest in a qualified videographer, and use the hell out of them. Build a living production document of every show online. Let your audience see how a scene is evolving from rehearsal to rehearsal with a quality video record of the evolution. Annotate each clip with a description of the director’s instructions, of the actor’s new choices, of the salient theatrical choices that made this version of the scene different from the last version. Put them up in a timeline. Let us see the process unfold, even when we can’t be in the room. Let me see how a scene is taken from a written blueprint to a live performance. Edit out the boring stuff.
It bears repeating: Use technology to increase your surface area. Give me a chance to be your dramaturg. Create a Wiki for every production. Let me talk to you about what you’re doing. And then actually listen to what I say. If I come up with a great idea for your production? Use it! And then make it clear you did! Let me influence your work. Give me a chance to become a real part of the process. Can I vote on which set I would most like to see for this new production? Can I tell you what stories I most want to hear? I’m not saying you should run your theater by popular vote, I’m saying give your audience a chance to affect what you do. Find ways to channel their creativity and interest. Don’t hoard the process to yourself unless you want to fund it yourself. Don’t think a few after-show talkbacks count as “opening up a healthy dialog” with the audience. Give them more than that, and I believe they will give you more in return.
As your relationships develop, so will your opportunities. When there is a production you want to fund, you will be able to come to me first, not last. Once our relationship is real, you don’t have to play this stupid guessing game: “People loved the last show, but will anyone care about the next show?” Don’t wait until the end to hope I care about what you’re doing. Let me show that I care up front. I’ll do it if I trust you. I’ll do it if I’m excited about the process.
Focusing on relationships over transactions splits your risks into smaller pieces. Focusing on relationships over transactions means you’re making money on the work you do 365 days a year. Not the work you do 96 nights a year.
Explore the model.
So what does the model buy us? Well, instead of selling 9600 tickets at 52 bucks a pop just so we can cover salary, we get to focus on signing up 4200 members at 10 bucks a month for the same result. We’re asking a lot fewer people for a little more money, and we’re giving them a lot more art in return.
Now let’s refine the structure: use tiers. Figure out what you will give away for free. Make it significant. Good relationships start with an offer, not a demand. After the free tier, build a low-cost tier. Then build the tier for your deepest relationships. Give me a path into the deep relationship, but don’t over-complicate it. Keep it simple. No more than a few options. Ask me to make a choice among a few fair alternatives. Add too many tiers and it feels like you’re just trying to play me. If you create a complex sliding scale I start thinking about our relationship as a negotiation for money. Respect me enough to make it about the relationship, not about the money. When it’s about the money you give me 20 different “membership levels”. When it’s about the relationship, you ask me to choose between “I’m just curious“, “I’m exploring“, or “YES. I’m on board.”
And now that we’ve got a solid revenue structure, give yourself the option to add back the crutches. But don’t do it automatically. The time you spend applying for grants is time you can’t spend developing your relationships.
Winds of Change
Facets of this new model have already appeared on the landscape. But it’s not an easy change to make. The institutions of theater give every sign of being opposed to it. For example, the institutions tend to see technology as the enemy. They think YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and basically the entire Internet is a tool to steal transactions, instead of a tool to increase surface area. And if you are one of the unlucky theaters to be working under the backward-looking constraints of the institutions, I extend my condolences. But all you little companies are free. You’re free to show the world a new way to make theater. You’re free to build a company that won’t burn you to a crisp. You’re free to show the bigger, older companies a better way. You’re free to lead, instead of follow.
Making the Move
What I’ve just described is neither easy, nor complete. I’ve sketched out a plan of action, not a complete and proven result. But I deeply believe in the principles of this plan. And I’m not just saying that. My company, Figure 53, is spending our hard-earned money to build tools based on these principles. Tools that we think will support companies as they make the transition from transactions to relationships. As a software engineer, that’s one way I can help nudge the theater world in a healthier direction. I want to nudge it as an actor and a theater maker too, but I have less leverage there. So until I start a theater company of my own, you get a long blog post and the promise of tools to come. And if you live in Baltimore, you get a neighbor who wants to help. Because I have too many friends killing themselves trying to make a living in theater. I want to see you beautiful people living a more stable life. We’ve got a chance to try. Let’s try.
