And I Wish Real Life Came With Back-Up Dancers

“’Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.”

                                                - Hamlet, Act I, scene i

--> I am tired of fighting - with everyone, about everything, every single second of every night and day.

I am exhausted by every audience member who believes that buying a ticket entitles them to take my photo, to film my acts, gives them access to me before the show and after the show and during the show and somehow makes them part of my life.

I’m tired of everyone who has ever - or never - seen a show and thus presumes to speak with great authority about the complexities of art and business and babysitting and relationships and talent and experience and personalities and effort and risk that go into every single second of what I do.

I’m exhausted by those who don’t understand the difference between thoughtful critique and adolescent whingeing, between creating and consuming, between opinion and fact, stage and reality, the internet and life.

I am tired of everyone’s hurt feelings and offended sensibilities and ranting outrage - which somehow exists simultaneously with a blithe disregard for the feelings and sensibilities and circumstances of anyone else’s reality.

I’m tired of bad performers who assume that the sheer fact of their existence entitles them to work; of bad producers who assume that the sheer fact of their existence entitles them to endless gratitude; of every single person who simply assumes that they can do what I do.

I am exhausted by colleagues and friends of nearly a decade’s acquaintance saying one thing to my face and another thing to Facebook. I’m tired of colleagues of minutes’ acquaintance somehow having opinions on my life of a decade past.

I’m tired of constantly having to defend everything I create; of having years of focus and effort and craft dismissed as “comic relief” by performers with a different aesthetic from my own; of being too smart to be the pretty one and too weird to be the fancy one and too much of a stripper to be a “real” performer; and of ever caring about any of that as much as I do.

I’m exhausted by the very idea of a loving and supportive artistic ‘community’ that thrives on factionalism and self-righteousness and dishonest business dealings. I am tired of public outrage when perpetrated against and wide-eyed blinking innocence when perpetrating in the exact same way.

I’m tired of this city. And suitcases. And subways and stairs and closing in on forty with increasingly bad knees and no health insurance and borrowed rent money and strings of cancelled gigs every time it snows.

I am tired of glitter. I am exhausted by the very words: fabulous, showgirl, glamour. I’m tired of leopard print, of spandex, of eyelash glue. I am exhausted by the debate over Swarovskis versus acrylics - by the very fact that this is, somehow, a debate.

I’m tired of having fun. I’m tired of talking about how much fun I’m having, of Tweeting about having fun and posting fun photos of all my fun. I’m tired and just right now, I’m not having any fun.