Life Between Shows: It’s Not All About Me?

Life between shows can be challenging to someone like me.  As I may have mentioned before, I am a mostly self-absorbed person for perhaps eighteen to twenty-six hours a day.  I don’t even have to be conscious; even my dreams are all about me, me, and me.  It’s hard to look out and see the bigger world, the one that doesn’t revolve around me.  It doesn’t help that because I’m so concerned about my own wellbeing and comfort, I’m one of those people who don’t watch the news if they can possibly avoid it.  It’s full of depressing and horrible things, and it’s not about me.

Now I’m sorry for that tendency—not because I’ve missed the latest bizarre and hideous crime spree, but because I’ve missed several of President Obama’s more important talks.  I don’t say “speeches”, because with Obama these come out as more like specific advice for the troubled, like: “Dear ‘Single Mother Out of Work’”, or “Dear ‘Lost My Career in Auto Assembly’”.  He gives good, solid, effective advice, too.  How, you may ask, does all this relate to Renee or her career: the great business of Show Business?  I will explain.

Recently, while between shows, I’ve received several interesting communiqués.   The first was from an old college friend who I’ll call Dr. Smith.  We hadn’t been in touch for many years, and I was surprised to find that he had become a game designer.  He was also surprised that I had not become a dolphin scientist.  But we still had some important old and now new things in common.  He’s designing a role playing game involving cetaceans and incorporating some of the hallowed tenets of my favorite television series (and now film) Star Trek.  He looked me up in part because he wanted to find out how dolphins’ minds might be different from out own.  Coincidentally, I had been thinking about him often over the past few months myself, wondering what he’d done with his life, because he was such a creative and passionate person.

Actually, when we reminisced the other day he called himself ‘angry’ and said I was also angry back then, which is true.  When we were seventeen, we both wanted to change the world, and we didn’t have the power (or the wisdom, being so young and inexperienced at life) to effect change.  Instead, as the years passed, we struggled to make a living and still be creative, getting buffeted by events beyond our control, getting more angry, going through deep crises and self-examination, confronting our core values, seeking some sort of balance for the sake of our sanity, and we both came out the other side being Taoists philosophically, being less angry and more powerful, at least in our own lives.

I also received an interesting email yesterday from Ted, “an artist, sculptor and designer” with the subject line: “Dolphins, Sea World, Production Design”.  Ted had found my website, http://www.reneeprince.net/ and discovered some interesting common threads.  He, like me (and Dr. Smith, and probably most of you out there reading this who are over thirty), had “lived a number of different lives in order to keep the ball rolling”.  He eventually ended up with a career in exhibit design and fabrication.  He’d written because, as he put it: “I think it’s not a terrible idea for people with common interests, talents to connect with each other and offer fresh perspective”.

The third communiqué that ties into this was from Sy Montgomery, the author I mentioned in my last blog.  She has written extensively on the natural world, and my favorite book of hers is Journey of the Pink Dolphins: An Amazon Quest.  I had emailed her belatedly with the news that I had quoted her in my blog, and she wrote back the next day saying, among other things, that she has always wanted to collaborate with someone on a film about the pink dolphins. “If you ever want to try to do such a thing”, she said, she would like to work with me.

I would love to do such a thing, but I immediately thought to myself, “What could I, as a standby painter or even a production designer, possibly be able to contribute to such a film?”

Enter President Obama.  This morning, while searching out information for a short magazine article on the environment, I stumbled across a May 8^th, 2009 talk where Obama was promoting a new way of thinking about unemployment.  He said we should use that time to go back to college, to learn new skills to better ourselves for a new economy, where knowledge is the most valuable thing we will have to offer on the job market.

He also said, “We’re moving forward because now is not the time for small plans.  It’s not a time to pause or to be passive or to wait around for our problems to somehow fix themselves.”  He wants to change the unemployment benefits rules to allow for educational grants and even has a website devoted to this.  If any of you out there are between shows, take a look.  Who knows what your future might hold? Check out Opportunity.gov.

So, integrating all these messages to me (because it’s really all about me, most of my waking and sleeping life), I’ve undergone a shift in my thinking.  I’m not as angry anymore; I’m not as inexperienced and powerless as I was when I was younger.  I just sold my first flip house and managed to make a profit even in this shipwrecked economy.  Sure, it’s all going to pay off the usurers—I mean the credit card companies—I’m in debt to, but if I can make a profit once, I can do it again.

Eventually I’ll have enough money to buy a Red camera or something equivalent and perhaps I’ll start my own small business with the camera equipment.  I’ll add exponentially to my knowledge of filmmaking.  I could help make that movie about pink dolphins as a camera person.  Or perhaps I’ll have enough capital to invest in the movie, or help produce it.

It’s all about changing perspective, about making the kinds of plans that bring out all your potential.  It’s about cultivating hope, instead of settling for where you are now, feeling victimized by the world’s woes, or inadequate in the face of accelerating change.

And why do I want to make movies about dolphins?  Because, as I tend to forget when I’m the center of my own little world, always afraid of failure and going broke, and losing what relatively little I have, it’s really not all about me.  I love, without conditions, all dolphins and whales for good, well-researched and scientifically validated reasons as well as other, more personal ones, and I want to change the world so that they have a higher, more exalted place in it—so they can survive and thrive.  I also love the ocean like I love cetaceans—an unconditional love that feels like a necessary part of my soul.

I want to be a part of both of them, a helper—a player, not a hater. If I can make films or write, or whatever I can do with the knowledge and power I’ve managed (and will manage) to build within myself, I’m going to continue to live the dream, and I’m going to make this the best dream I can.  But this dream won’t be all about me—at least not all the time.