No one goes to college theatrical productions. Actually, I take that back. Family members of the cast go to college theatrical productions. However, when I wrote Team Win Comes Alive, I quickly realized that our family members should not be our target market. I needed to find a way to catch the eyes to the collegiate student body enough to where hopefully not only were our family members not the only crowd in attendance, but better yet, the show was already sold out before they could watch their progeny make fools of themselves. To do this, I wrote and directed commercials for a business that two of the play’s characters owned. I purposefully left off any mention of the show in the commercial its self so that those who saw the commercials, and recognized their absurdity would ask questions and elicit the “viral” effect of word of mouth. When paired with a mystery crossword puzzle that I snuck into the college newspaper as well as the official show poster,  people started to put the pieces together. We sold out every night. My parents still came. All I got for Christmas this year was socks and a college loan bill…in my stocking.

Mimes are weird. They’re especially weird when you think of them as an occupation. The level of weird just continues to rise when you think of what it would be like if your father raised you on the wages of his mime work, coming home with smeared black and white make up all over his face, like he had just worked a half day in the coal mines, then finished the day off in the chalk mines. What a curve-ball to throw at your career fair though - Sandy Koufax style.

I’m diggin’ this one out of the archives. I wrote a piece for the anti-tourist while I was in Finland in September. The article was about a rock bar in Tampere, Finland called “Ruma“, but had an elaborate subplot revolving around a series of words that I found written on my forearm the next morning. The phrase was “space shuttle to Venus”, and I wasn’t quite sure what it meant or where/why I would have written it on my arm in the first place, so I tried to deconstruct my night using the article as my memory canvas. It’s still an unsolved mystery.