how do you reconcile people you respect settling for slop?
pick-a-little, talk-a-little | week 1
this is pick-a-little, talk-a-little, a pilot of a potential advice column i’d put behind a paywall after this week. i’d focus on interpersonal and industrial theatre bullshit and whatever else you want to ask me.
What's the best way to bring an abuser in the industry to justice?
at this moment, i genuinely do not believe individuals have the power to bring an abuser in the industry to justice. look at the news that just came out from every broadway outlet at once! scott rudin is back, baby, and there’s nothing you can do about it except prostrate yourself at his feet! even with mountains of evidence of wrongdoing, the right combination of money, maleness, and whiteness makes you impenetrable, Even In Theatre, Especially Right Now. with that being said, what we CAN do as paeons in an industry that was never meant to be An Industry is talk sooooooo much shit.
i don’t mean “endanger your livelihood” or “treat that NDA as NBD”; i do mean that the best thing we can do to ~bring an abuser in the industry to justice~ is to be clear with each other about who is safe to work with and who is not. be direct and tactful. be honest! abusers fail upwards on the strength of the opportunities they’re given to do it, and the only thing we can do is choose not to work with people (even talented people! especially talented people) who have mistreated their collaborators. this is not a new tactic, it’s as old as time and theatre. but it’s worth reinforcing that all we really have is each other.
dear miss jae leiber, when we were kids, i always had a little bit of a crush on my best friend’s older cousin. he lived on her street, and he would ride over on the lawnmover and call us names. i recently heard he was going through a divorce — he has a handful of kids and his wife ran off with the baby???? — and i asked my friend about him. (this was several weeks ago)
last night, however, after i’d spent the day with my friend, her cousin texted her asking about ME! so she gave him my number. he wanted me to come over, but i was already asleep. this morning, i went to text him back, and the mssg didn’t go through. ?????
weird! it makes sense to me that he’d be on your mind after hearing about his divorce. i’m not sure if he found out you were hanging out with his cousin or if he independently thought of you, but it makes sense to me that you’d be on HIS mind either way. social media and nostalgia are powerful binding agents, especially when you’re in a moment of flux and taking stock of what you have and what you’ve lost.
i think you can wait a beat and try to reach out again if you’re really interested. there are a million reasons a message doesn’t go through that have nothing to do with you and everything to do with service and phone-being-on-or-off. either way, this is low stakes! as much fun as it would be to reconnect with an old crush, there’s no harm or foul in stepping back if you’re unable to contact him. if he’s blocked you or if he doesn’t respond, you can take that as evidence that he’s re-evaluated his capacity for new relationships in this clearly weird and stressful time in his life.
There's a play up right now that everyone I know is calling a revelatory work of genius, but I honestly thought it was mid. Nothing to be done I guess, but how do you reconcile with people you respect settling for slop?
i try very hard to be open to the fact that some plays/films/TV shows/music resonate with people in ways they bother and torment me. i’m thinking about that when i’m writing criticism, and it’s something i try to practice in conversations where people i respect praise something i thought was pretty dumb or short-sighted. there is no accounting for personal taste! i think of myself as discerning, but there is no accounting for the fact that the movie that’s made me cry the most is Ralph Breaks The Internet, there is no accounting for the fact that i think St. Elmo’s Fire is good, there is no accounting for the fact that i couldn’t stop rolling my eyes during The Substance. even impenetrably perfect things, like St. Elmo’s Fire, are open to criticism; even deeply stupid things, like The Substance and Ralph Breaks The Internet, were sculpted by people who cared about them.
i think it makes sense to feel discomfort when other people resonate with something you didn’t, especially in a media landscape where human hands and personal touches are harder to come by than they once were. i feel that way all the time, and i try to interrogate it in writing as much as i can. acknowledging why people liked a thing i didn’t doesn’t challenge my worldview as much as it helps me get even more precise about why a thing didn’t work for me. when people i respect settle for slop, i think about why i love all the slop i love.
It seems like you’re often Doing Things & seeing people and living in community with others. Any advice for someone who wants to do that but has no idea where to start & is honestly pretty anxious about being with strangers?
first of all, thank you for saying that! it means a lot to me to have cultivated a community to the extent that you have noticed.
i moved because astoria/new york city is where a bulk of my village lived; it was the main feature, not something that happened as an unintended consequence of being here. i loved living in my beautiful philadelphia studio apartment in 2020-2021 until vaccines became available and i went to visit friends in new york. i left that trip utterly incapable of continuing to live by myself in my apartment, with no friends or community at my disposal, and i realized i was willing to sacrifice some lifestyle stuff to make it happen. i had in-unit laundry… and a dishwasher… and a walk-in closet… all for less than i currently pay to share the top floor of a duplex with two roommates, but i wouldn’t trade the last three years of community-building for any of that.
that’s coming from the very privileged position of having my community of college friends remain mostly intact in new york city for years after we graduated. i’ve been very, very lucky — throw a rock in my neighborhood and you hit a member of my collegiate a cappella group, throw a pebble and you hit someone i never spoke to at muhlenberg but whose name and business i nevertheless know too much about.
what i can say generally is that community is a practice, just like relationships are a practice. friendship is not something you are as much as something you do. that means nurturing the bonds you already have, whether or not the person you’re bonded to lives near enough to you to be your in-person community; it also means acknowledging what you need from in-person community and taking small steps towards larger goals. it is incredibly scary to put yourself out there and create new friendships (i would say “especially as an adult,” but that’s scary at any age). it’s not easy to surmount the anxiety of sharing yourself with new people, but it is necessary if you want to build and maintain community. every friend of yours was once a stranger.
something that has historically worked well for me is being loud and specific about what i like on the internet. so much of my new york community started with a cold DM to or from someone who shares a common interest, and now i have friends i didn’t have before. start small! go to a community event, send a cold DM to someone who shares your interests. be brave. anxiety feels incapacitating, and indulging it is easy. fighting through it is always worth it.
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