Thanks Robin
I don’t know what I can say that hasn’t already been said a million times over.
When I was little, I had Mork suspenders from Mork & Mindy.
In junior high, my grandmother bought me a cassette of Live at the Met that I listened to over and over and over and over.
I can still, to this day, quote quotes from Good Morning Vietnam. “Hot enough in my shorts I can cook in them. A little ‘crotch pot’ cookin’.”
In high school, I cried at the end of Hook. When the little girl wakes up and sees her parents. If it was on right now, I’d cry.
When I first started working at Disneyland in 1993, merchandise with The Genie from Aladdin on it was the majority of what I used my cast member discount on.
After college, into my stand up years, I always totally respected the stories I’d hear of Robin just popping in to small hole in the wall places (The Mock Cafe in San Francisco) and watching comedy and doing a set. So amazing that a star would do that.
Thank you Robin.
Thank you for a lifetime of laughs.
Creative Mondays #032 – Prove them wrong.
If there’s one thing all creative folks have in common, no matter what their chosen artistic field is, it is that you will have your fair share of naysayers. People who tell you the creative goal you have in mind just simply cannot be accomplished. These people will, to your face, tell you that what you are doing isn’t going to work. Or that your creative goals are unattainable.
Now I’m sure there’s a deep psychological reason why these people do this. It could be jealousy, just plain meanness or any number of other things. I think these people are the absolute worst kind of people to have around because what they are doing is killing creativity. They are stomping on your dreams. Killing your confidence. They are, unfortunately, all around us and they can even be lurking amongst those who we consider our close friends or even our family.
People will tell you to ignore the naysayers and I agree. Ignore them. They should be meaningless in your artistic career. But I say do not just ignore them, use their naysaying to propel you even further down the path to your creative dreams. Prove them wrong. The feeling of proving someone who doubted you wrong is a feeling that can only be eclipsed by the feeling of producing a piece of art. I love proving naysayers wrong and it’s something I developed at a young age.
I remember I was taking a theatre management class in college and the teacher had us do some writing on a project. I forget exactly what the project was focused on but at the end when the teacher went over what we had written, he pointed out that two of us in the class had written about that there would be no greater feeling of satisfaction in our careers than to prove the naysayers, the people who said we couldn’t accomplish what we wanted to accomplish, wrong. It was at that moment I knew that I was not alone in my thinking that way. There were others out there too.
This was proven again to me wham I heard the song Acceptance Speech by the band Friendly Indians. In the song, the singer warns all those who crossed him to get ready to grit their teeth when he steps up to the mic to make his acceptance speech. This song clicked with me from the first moment I heard it and, to this day, I will listen to it to focus me back on the path getting creative work down and proving the naysayers wrong.
Also, this may be a good tactic to try if the main naysayer who is holding you back is you! If that’s the case, prove yourself wrong. Show yourself that the things you want to do can be done. If you do that enough, you’ll stuff your own personal naysayer back down where he or she belongs!
I will offer this one bit of warning, however. You don’t want to dwell on the negative things that people say about your creative goals. That’s a great way to rev up the old negative brain and that will not serve you at all. I’ve talked about the negative brain before on in this blog, but if you’re joint us late, once the negative brain is ramped up, it’s hard to shut down, so don’t let the naysayers get you going in that respect. Only use their naysaying as fuel to propel you further towards accomplishing your goals.
Prove the naysayers wrong.
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How do you deal with naysayers? Is there a better way than plotting to prove them wrong? If so, let me know in the comments below. Have a great week!
Creative Mondays #031 – Do it now.
One Sunday night, I was preparing the Creative Mondays post to go out the following morning and as I did I was thinking about the week ahead. I would be traveling back east to work a short puppet job and, as such, I would be getting home late at night next Sunday. I said to myself, “Self, you should probably set up the post to go out next week as well, then you won’t have to do it during the week when your Travel Panic* sets in.”
My body immediately rejected this offer. I was exhausted. Prepping the Creative Monday’s post was the last thing to do on a long to-do list for the day. I had driven an hour out to Oxnard, recorded several wrestling promos, driven an hour back to my office where I prepped some things for the job I was going on. Then I went on a long run, grabbed some dinner, came home and wrote my daily 600 words and wrote out checks for the bills and then, because I hadn’t slept well the night before, I was done.
My brain said, “What’s it going to take? 5 minutes? You can do it.”
My body refused.
But, it really got me thinking about putting things off, especially creative pursuits. We cannot put things off. We have to strike while the iron’s hot. Make hay while the sun shines! And all other manner of sayings like that. When it comes to creative work…DO IT NOW.
Real life is a major pain in the butt and loves to throw things in our way. If we keep putting off being creative, we may wind up never being creative.
It’s hard and sometimes you have to push your self to do it. Give yourself a kick in the ass because that story isn’t going to write itself if you keep putting it off. That painting will never be painted, that dance never learned. You’ve got to win the fight. These days we are hardwired to sit and watch TV of plunk around on our phones or computers. There are so many distractions and so many reasons why we shouldn’t create right now. We have to kill those reasons and create. If we don’t, our art won’t live.
As much as I shouldn’t say it, because I’m trying to build a great creative blog here, if you had time to read this entry, you had time to at least START some piece of creative work or continue work on something already created.
So, I want you to stop reading. Well, after this next paragraph. Stop reading. Think about what, creatively, you could be doing right now. Something easy. Something simple, yet something that will get you just that much further down the patch towards your creative goals. Once you have it in your head, I want you to get up and do it.
Don’t wait. Do it now.
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How do you motivate yourself to ‘do it now’? What tricks of the trade make you get your butt up and creating? Share it with us in the comments below! Have a great week!
*Travel Panic is something that sets in before I’m about to go on trip that I, myself, have booked the travel for. Several days before I’m supposed to leave, my body puts itself in a constant state of “everything is going to go wrong.” I believe it’s because, even though I double and triple check everything, I know that something is going to go wrong with the travel. Nothing major ever has, but still the Travel Panic rears its ugly head. Funnily enough, If someone else has booked the travel, say on a Puppet Up! Uncensored tour, I never have Travel Panic. Just a peak into the messed up bundle of nerves that is my brain.
Creative Mondays #030 – Creative work is hard work
I was talking to a friend via text message the other night when an interesting exchange occurred. She has an incredibly hard job working with kids as a counselor and currently she is in school to get another degree. She was lamenting to me how she had over 700 pages to read in a book for an upcoming assignment. I asked if there was something I could do to help, I don’t know what I could have done, but I’m always willing to help a friend who has a lot of work to do. She said no and then said the main reason why not, besides the fact that she had to do all the reading herself, was that because she didn’t think I could be serious. I told her I could totally be serious and that The Jim Henson Company wouldn’t have sent me to Australia if I couldn’t be serious when it was time to be serious. The she said, “Your work is different than mine. A different kind of serious.”
This is something that creative people hear all the time. All the time. Creative work comes off as ‘fun’ to other people but that’s because, usually, they only see the art when it reaches the ‘fun’ stage. The movie screening. The gallery opening. The play premiere. The statue unveiling. The concert. They don’t see the hours, days, months, years, of work that came before. The work. (Although, I will say that the ‘fun’ examples listed above are all work as well, sometimes just as hard as the work that came before.)
Creative work is work. And, it is serious work. Ask anyone who has stared at a blank piece of paper, or empty word processing document, an empty canvas. Yes, you are using different muscles to do creative work than, say, a construction worker does, but it’s still hard work. (Again, I’ll add that caveat that a dancer does just as hard physical labor than a construction worker.)
In the Puppet Up! Uncensored show, we have several recreations of classic Jim Henson puppet pieces. I have been fortunate enough to have been asked to participate in both of the pieces: Java and I’ve Grown Accustomed To Your Face. These are put in the show as a tribute to the legacy of Jim Henson, but also to show the the folks who come to the show how they are performed. Learning these pieces was not easy and, in some cases, were harder work for me than learning, say, the opening and closing choreography. The reason being is that we are recreating pieces that the audience is familiar with and, in some cases, VERY familiar with, so recreating them accurately is extremely important. It took a lot of concentration and, step by step, practice for me to even begin to get these pieces close to performance level. This was hard work. And let me tell you, even though I’ve performed each piece a bunch of times in front of paying audiences, they continue to be hard work. Though, I will say, now that I’ve done them so often, I’ve started to actually have fun while doing them. That doesn’t mean I do my own thing, but it means I’m no longer completely stressed out that I’m not doing them correctly. They are some of the hardest things I’ve ever done. And lets not even get started talking about using the Henson Digital Puppetry Studio. That’s a whole other can of ‘hard work.’
Unfortunately, there are always going to be people who see me playing with puppets, or you drawing on paper or painting on canvas or practicing a dance or playing an instrument and they are going think, “That’s not real work. My work takes a different kind of serious.” There’s nothing that can be done about that. You’ll just have to take comfort in the fact that other artists know how hard creative work is. They get it. Don’t let the other folks who don’t get you down. Leave them to their hard work and stick with yours.
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Do people often say your creative work isn’t serious work? If so, how do you go about explaining to them that they are wrong? Or do you just let it slide? Let me know in the comments below!