Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 391

Posthumous vindication sucks.

On this date in 1456, Joan of Arc was declared innocent for heresy.

Unfortunately, she was declared innocent 25 years after she was burned at the stake.

Being incorrectly burned to death is certainly worse than losing your bout with cancer and dying just hours before being announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize for your work in cancer research that actually prolonged your life, but anything that happens posthumously to a person sucks.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Death is hardest on the dead. 

Carte Blanche Summers: My first column

Look what showed up at the house today!

Seasons magazine, and my first column, entitled Carte Blanche Summers. The magazine publishes in four different markets (soon to be six), which explains the different color covers. 

You can subscribe to the magazine, of course (and you should), or you can read it online.

 

The payoff for a writer or a performer is an infinitesimal sliver of the job. Too many forget this and aren’t willing to do the work.

Saturday was a good day for me.

It began with the first performance ever of “Caught in the Middle,” the tween musical written by writing partner, Andy Mayo, and myself. It was produced at a performing arts camp in Bloomfield, Connecticut, and like our previous musical, The Clowns, I fell in love with the show while watching it performed on stage.

   

Then Elysha and I left for New York so I could perform in The Liar Show in the West Village. I told a story about my unfortunate participation in a bachelorette party in a McDonald’s crew room when I was 19 years-old.

A friend was kind enough to comment on how much I had going on that day. “It must be exciting to have so many creative things going on in your life,” she said.

It’s true. Days like Saturday are exciting, but they come with a cost. When I talk to fledging writers, storytellers, and other people involved in the arts, I’m always quick to remind them that days like Saturday are few and far between.

They account for about 1% of the job.

The other 99% of the job is a lot of hard, tedious, and lonely work.

“Caught in the Middle” was more than a year in the making. It involved writing, collaborating, rewriting, revising, and more rewriting. It was hundred of hours spent crafting scenes, integrating music, developing characters, and agonizing over plot. My writing partner, Andy, had to poke, prod, and cajole me to continue working.

It wasn’t easy.

My invitation to perform in The Liar Show was the result of almost three years of storytelling, including more than 40 appearances at The Moth and other storytelling shows and the launch of our own storytelling organization, Speak Up. Thousands of hours of work have made me the storyteller I am today and gave me the opportunity to perform on Saturday night.

I didn’t happen overnight.

I was reading Billy Crystal’s memoir, Still Foolin’ ‘Em, and learned that in order to pursue his career in comedy, he became a stay-at-home father in a time when that was exceptionally rare. When his wife arrived home from work in the evening, he would join her for dinner and prepare his set for later that night, sometimes writing and sometimes rehearsing.

Then at 10:00, he would embark on an hour long commute to New York City, hoping for a spot on the stage at Catch a Rising Star before 1:00 AM so that he could perform his ten minute routine.

Then he would return home by 2:00 or 3:00 and begin the routine again at 7:00 when his daughter awoke and his wife left for work.

Billy Crystal did not become the entertainer and star that he is today because he was talented. He worked exceptionally hard, made enormous sacrifices, dedicated his life to his dream, and was smart enough to marry a woman who supported that dream.

By the way, he sacrificed to find the right woman, too. He transferred colleges as a sophomore, leaving Marshall University, a baseball scholarship, and a chance to play the game he loved at the college level for Nassau Community College and later New York University after meeting his wife and knowing that a long distance relationship would probably not last.

Rather than risk losing the woman of his dreams, he gave up baseball to chase her down.

The man understood how to make sacrifices.

So yes, Saturday was a great day for me. I loved watching something that I had written performed onstage. Hearing my words in other people’s mouths is always thrilling and makes me want to write for the stage again.

And yes, performing alongside the likes of Ophira Eisenberg, Tracy Rowland, and Matthew Mercier at The Liar Show was thrilling, too. Simply being asked to perform in this popular and well-reviewed show was an honor.

But it was a long, long road to Saturday’s payoff. Many, many miles.

Too often, I think that writers, performers, and other people striving for a career in the arts see those 1% Saturdays and dream the dream, forgetting about the 99% (or worse, glamorizing the 99%) that is required to make those Saturdays a  reality.

The best moment on Saturday for me was a simple one. Standing off to the side, watching these teens and tweens perform the show, I caught sight of my daughter, sitting in the audience, watching my show with rapt attention. Bopping her head to the music. Smiling. Leaning forward in anticipation. Laughing at my jokes.

This was better than all the applause I received that day.

 

The best clause in any contract ever

Samuel L. Jackson has a clause in all his movie contracts stating that he gets two days off a week to play golf and the producers must pay for it.

I have always respected Jackson. His acting skills are superb. He’s been an ardent civil right’s and political activist for his entire life. His work with charitable foundations, including his own, is admirable. His attempts to raise awareness of testicular cancer may have saved lives. He’s been married to his wife for 35 years, and together. He attends each of his movies in theaters as a paying customer.

But this golfing clause in his film contracts impresses me more than anything else. 

What are the odds that I can get a similar clause written into my next teaching contract?

Stay close, little ones.

A recent post to my children on a blog that I’ve written to them everyday since my wife became pregnant with our daughter:

The summer is here, little ones, and that means lots of time spent outdoors. The two of you love spending time in our backyard, but really anywhere that we can find a little water to splash in is good enough for you.

The best thing, little ones, is how well you play together and get along. Remember this. Embrace it. Never let it go. My brothers and sisters were incredibly close as children, but when we became teenagers and started making our own paths in life, circumstances interfered and we drifted apart.

Uncle Jeremy joined the Army after high school and we didn’t see or hear from him for a long time. Years later, he would disappear for another five years when tragedy struck his life. We’re closer today than ever before, but we lost so many unnecessary years, little ones.

I lost my stepbrother, Ian, and stepsister, Meghan, through divorce. We have never managed to reconnect even though we spent most of our childhood as brothers and sisters.

I can’t imagine this ever happening to the two of you, but as a child, I would’ve never imagined it happening to me, either.

Stay close, little ones. Be kind and sweet and gentle to each, or as Clara would say, to eachosher. Always.

  

Most of us don’t watch Fox News, little ones.

When my children become adults, they will watch the historical footage of Fox News and wonder what the hell we could possibly have been thinking.

I will remind them of this:

The average age of a Fox News viewer in 2014 is 68.8 and climbing yearly.

The average age of the audience for their most popular show, The O’Reilly Factor, is just over 72 years old.

Only 1.1 percent of the Fox News audience is black.

Fox News makes a lot of noise, but their audience is old, white, male, and dying out.  

Most of us, Democrats and Republicans, weren’t watching that nonsense, little ones. 

You can’t blow out electric lights…

But no one tell my son. It’s too cute.

There are many reasons why the death penalty should be abolished. But one reason should be reason enough.

Will Saletan lists six reasons why support for capital punishment is evaporating in the United States.

All six are perfectly valid, and I actually agree with all of them, but really, there’s only one that matters:

Innocence.

Since 1973, 144 death row inmates have been exonerated of their crimes.

It’s impossible to think that the our government has not executed innocent people.

As a person who was arrested and tried for a crime he did not commit, I understand the how easily an innocent person can be accused of a crime and how easy it is to be wrongfully convicted.

In my case, the judge said, “I think you’re probably guilty, but there isn’t enough evidence to convict you. I hope you realize how close you came to going to prison.”

The arrest and trial, which took almost two years from beginning to end, changed my life forever. Had I gone to prison, I can’t imagine where I would be today.

I will never understand how supporters of the death penalty are able to ignore the dangers of executing an innocent man or woman. In the past 41 years, more than three people per year on average have been released from death row after proving their innocence.

These are statistics that cannot be ignored. And yet they are. Even with capital punishment rapidly losing support in this country and executions on the decline, more than 50% of respondents to a recent Gallup poll expressed support for the death penalty.

I suspect that their opinions on the matter would change if they were arrested for a crime they did not commit.

Faced with the evidence that this is happening, these people are unmoved. I have to assume it is the result of one of two things:

An inability to empathize with people in positions different than their own
A failure of imagination. They are simply unable to envision themselves or a loved one in a situation that they know is routinely taking place in this country.

Either way, it’s ridiculous. We need to end capital punishment (as most Western nations already have) because we cannot be a nation that accidentally, unintentionally execute innocent people.

I’m left handed but learned to play baseball right handed to save money.

We took our son to his first baseball on Father’s Day, heading over to New Britain Stadium to watch the AA Rock Cats take on the Trenton Thunder.

We took our daughter, Clara, to her first baseball game in this same stadium when she was almost two years-old, but she was barely cognizant of the game at the time. She napped through most of it and played with toys for the rest.

Charlie, by contrast, could easily be directed to the action on the field. He would stare intently, watching pitches pop in the catcher’s mitt and homeruns sail over the fences.

I think he liked it.

My parents never took me to a baseball game as a child. They never even taught me how to play the game. I’m a lefthander who plays baseball right handed because I was given a hand-me-down baseball mitt for a right handed player when I was a kid and no instruction whatsoever.

Given the equipment, I had no choice but to learn to play with my non-dominant hand. As a result, it took me a long time to learn to hit the baseball well, and I still can’t throw a baseball.

I look ridiculous even trying.

I will spare my children these indignities by teaching them the game and providing them with the correct equipment.

I look forward to the day when we can play catch in the backyard.

Hopefully that process began on Father’s Day. 

      

My first paid writing gig was for my very own paper mill. It made me the writer I am today.

It may not come as a surprise to you that for a fee, high school and college students can employ writers at a paper mill to ghostwrite essays and term papers for them.

A recent addition to the paper mill industry is UnemployedProfessors.com, which offers a twist on the typical paper mill.

Rebecca Schuman of Slate writes:

UnemployedProfessors.com is a paper mill based out of Montreal—but it’s not just any paper mill. If you’re going to pay $200 for someone else to write your essay for that professor who insists essay-writing is the most important part of college, then at least have that essay be written by another professor who also believes that essay-writing is the most important part of college.

I’m not sure how often paper mills are used by high school and college students today, but when I was in high school, the Internet did not exist, and by the time I got to college, the Internet was still shiny and new. Search engines like Lycos and AltaVista still dominated the landscape of cyberspace, and most people wouldn’t have dreamed of entering their credit card number on a webpage. Hiring a writer to complete my assignments in high school and college would have been difficult, if not impossible.

Finding a professor to write my papers? Forget it.

Besides, I was always willing and able to write my own papers. And it wasn’t like I had money lying around to pay other people to do my work.

As a teacher and a writer today, I am opposed to paper mills.

Write your own papers, damn it.

I haven’t always felt this way.

Back in 1986, my first paid writing job was writing papers for fellow students while I was in high school.

As a high school student, I opened my own paper mill.

In the spring of my sophomore year, I began offering my writing services to my classmates. I charged $50-$100 depending on length of the paper and topic (topics that interested me were discounted). Most of my customers were male upperclassmen, but I also did work for students in my own grade and even even a few freshmen.

Until I went to work for McDonald’s in the summer of my junior year, business was booming.

I had no access to a typewriter at the time, so papers were handwritten and required typing by my clients. Had I been able to type the papers as well, I suspect that I would’ve made a lot more money.

Still, I earned enough money to buy my first car, a 1976 Chevy Malibu. I also bought by first pair of Levis jeans, my first stereo, and tickets to my first concert: Poison and Tesla at the Worcester Centrum.

Want to turn a teenage boy into a writer?

Find a way for him to earn enough money from his writing to buy his first car and attend his first rock concert.

I already loved to write by the time I launched my paper mill, but the idea that people would pay me for stuff that I made up in my head was incredible. It cemented the desire to become a novelist someday.

I was hooked.