**This is a continuation of the story that begins here.  I’d highly recommend reading that first to be caught up. It won’t take that long, I promise. So… The lead actress and the director arrived at last.  She wasn’t really speaking because she’d lost her voice that morning and was going to have to croak, […]

Putting together any kind of creative performance – dance, a play, shooting a film – requires such delusional, quixotic optimism, that when I got a call this Saturday asking if I was available to play a part in a scene for a web series on Sunday, and the associate producer said: I knew there was […]

As most people know, there are agreed upon nonverbal signals ranging from fairly minor – like the “okay” signal or an eye roll to communicate an “Oh, brother” reaction – to very important non-verbal distress signals. *** But the truth is, there are an incredible number of situations in which non-verbal communication is crucial.  Here […]

When I was in college I spent a couple terms in Nottingham, England.  Toward the end of Fall term I decided to go to Amsterdam – by that point, though, almost all the Exchange students had already gone, so it was down to the scraps: Two guys from Maine, a southern belle, some random guy […]

A while back I wrote about one of the first paid stand-up comedy gigs I ever had, in the lovely Winnemucca, Nevada.  (Here, if you want a little context for today’s story)  At the end of it, I mentioned a guy from the casino taking us out to show us Winnemucca’s “nightlife.”  I said it […]