REDUCE!

2014 has gotten off to a Rockin’ start with cruise ship contracts for Royal Caribbean, Celebrity Cruises and Princess Cruises! In fact, I’m just coming off a three ship run for Princess that had me hopping from one ship to the next for about five weeks. I’m grateful to each of the lines and to my agent, Don Casino Productions in Miami for these opportunities and a ton more that are coming up in the weeks and months ahead!
 

So what on earth does this have with the notion of REDUCING? Well, being away from home as much as I have been recently, I’ve continued to realized that I don’t actually need very much ‘Stuff’ to be happy. The more I've been thinking about it, the more I've realized that ‘Stuff’ comes with a weight, both real and psychological that can inhibit my capacity to see unexpected opportunities in every day. Finding ways to reduce my ‘Stuff’ during 2014 has become a priority and I hope that it will allow me to move through life more open to the experiences that I might have missed otherwise. Now, if only I wasn’t so fond of all the props I use in my show and could learn to travel with less…

REUSE!

In 1990 I took my very first contract in Japan at the Hana Haku, Flower Expo in Osaka. It was eight weeks of three shows a day, six days a week in a culture and language I had never experienced before. Between 1990 and 2005 I ended up getting to Japan two or three times a year working for various clients and gaining enough fluency in the language to be able to perform my entire show in Japanese, ad-lib when unexpected things happened during the show and carry out conversations with audiences members after shows as well. The fact that in 1995 a beautiful woman from Japan said yes when I asked her to marry me probably helped inspire some of my ability in Japanese, but that’s a completely different story.

I’m really excited that in the weeks ahead I’ll be using my Japanese and my ability to perform in the language for contracts aboard Royal Caribbean’s Voyager of the Seas and aboard the Diamond Princess and Sun Princess. How AWESOME to be able to REUSE this ability for two of the cruise lines I work for most often. Fingers crossed I’ll get to do many more contracts in Japanese in the future!

RECYCLE!

I continue to produce a podcast called “Stories from the Pitch” which releases short stories and Bio-Episodes from the Street Theatre sub-culture. For the past couple of months I’ve been fearing the learning curve of switching to the industry standard audio editing software, ProTools. 

Well - between shows on this recent tour for Princess I dove in and really started to wrap my head around working with the new software. This included consuming hours of tutorial videos and experimenting with short 1 minute ‘teasers’ that I’ve started creating for each episode. These one minute teasers are being released on ‘Yappie’ (yet another social media platform which allows users to share one minute audio snippets with followers around the world - check out the feed here). 

Slowly but surely I’m wrapping my head around how to maneuver within ProTools and am delighted that so much of the knowledge I’ve acquired from the previous editor is being RECYCLED with in this new package. With each episode that gets released I continue to learn and grow as the producer and editor for this project. It taps into a part of my brain that thrives on a completely different kind of creative process than when I create for performance - Fun!