Feast or Sandwich
Indeed.com knows more than I give it credit for about being an artist. Today’s “for you” picks of jobs in my area are:
musical theatre professor at a local college
lice specialist
In case you aren’t familiar (I wasn’t), a lice specialist is someone who gets paid $20 an hour to pick lice out of children’s hair, “helping families in a stressful situation.”
I don’t apply for lice specialist, but I do apply for after school poetry teacher, k-8 substitute teacher, cocktail bartender at a pizza place, and cannabis trimmer with a company called Lovely Ladies Who Trim. Then I screenshot the lice-and-musical-theatre page and send it to a friend with whom I collaborate on musical theatre projects. He responds that, between the two, lice specialist might be a greater service to the community.
Last month, I was on an artist residency with this same friend. For ten days we were paid to hang out with a couple dozen other writers in a bucolic town where we traveled by golf cart, we were fed three meals a day (including, to my friend’s delight, dessert at both lunch and dinner) and spent tipsy evenings discussing each others’ work and wandering one of the town’s multiple outdoor labyrinths. Banners everywhere welcomed us; the coffee shop in town gave us free drinks. We were, for a week, honored guests in an alternate reality where instead of earning us debt and blank stares, writing for the theatre earned us a key card to a pool and endless lemon bars.
I check my bank account to decide whether I should also apply to the next tier of slightly less appealing jobs, or whether I can wait a few days and see whether any of these employers reply. I have enough to get through my expenses at the first of the month, so I decide to wait.
The phrase, of course, is feast or famine. But even if famine didn’t immediately bring to mind the last several months’ worth of headlines and helplessness, the latest reminders of what famine looks like when it is not a metaphor, even if I were willing to use famine, in this moment, as a metaphor, it’s not the right one. Famine is an emergency, and what I’m talking about is something more mundane. Something humble, perhaps a bit depressing, or perhaps pleasant in its simplicity.
I take a lap through the house. I’ve been home a week, but I haven’t properly tended to my houseplants. A lot of them have browning edges, and I’ve lost track now of whether it’s from too much water or too little. I think of the apartment I was subletting in Brooklyn last week from another artist, a friend of a friend. It was overflowing with plants, an indoor garden she was struggling to keep up with as she cycled between being out of the city for jobs and in the city for grad school. I myself was in New York for a workshop of a play I’ve been writing this spring. I was grateful to have a commission, aka a reason to write a play that I wanted to write but would otherwise have probably evaded me for much longer. The culmination of the commission — at least for now — was this workshop: three days in a room with actors, finding out how what I wrote sounds and looks in the world.
The workshop was so short that, on its own, it may have felt like a blip, the same way that, on its own, the residency I went to with my friend might have disappeared in memory as just a weird thing we did, a week of adult summer camp. But because these two opportunities came almost back to back, together they created the feeling of a little season of abundance. A burst of connection and encouragement. A buoy. A feast.
The feast-and-sandwich cycle is not new to me, but it feels more dramatic these days. When I lived in Oakland, and the theatre I was making was purely local, feast times and sandwich times existed in the same physical place. Sure, I might be in between projects, but my housemates and coworkers and my neighbor had all come to see my last show. Both sides of me were known to those around me. Maybe if I manage to stay in one place long enough I will experience some version of that integration again. But the work I’m striving to do now is not purely local, because the truth of being an artist in 2024 is that “success” and “local” are antithetical to one another. New York and LA offer some, though not total, exception to this rule, but anywhere else one might choose to live in the country, home is something closer to the place you land in between gigs. And at this stage, in the winding path to getting productions, or financial support from institutions, “gig” often means reading or workshop or residency or fellowship or conference, nor “putting on a play.” I’ve discovered that this complicated currency of resume-building is pretty illegible to those outside the industry, meaning that when you land back at home, people don’t really know what to ask about the time you’ve been away. So when you try to explain how deeply important it felt to eat lemon bars with 20 other playwrights in rural Indiana, you are understandably met with some confusion.
Where is my restaurant resume? I know I could just remake it, but I don’t want to. Is it in “personal”? Is it in “old stuff”? At last I find it, inside a folder titled “restaurant” inside a folder titled “resumes” inside a folder titled “application stuff” inside a folder titled “Scripts — latest — for submission.” I briefly consider fixing this immensely poor organizational system. I don’t. I print ten copies and look up the addresses of several wine bars and two breweries.
I guess you can see by now that when I say “feast or sandwich” I’m not really talking about money, though of course money is part of it. Getting a new job brings back all of the same questions — should I continue prioritizing time to write and flexibility for art making over jobs with benefits or other long-term perks? What’s the goal for this next season? Am I just trying to break even, or am I trying to save? Do I depend too much on the fact that my partner, who has a steadier income and more savings, could bail me out if something unexpected happened? What happens if and when we fully combine our finances? Will I be expected to make more money? Am I too comfortable without a safety net? Have I always been too comfortable letting my safety net be friends or family with more money than me? But the biggest question inside the transition back to sandwich season is not a money question. It is, simply: how do I hold both realities at once?
Sometimes I think this Substack is like an advice column where I am both the columnist and the advice seeker. Dear Addie, writes SADDIE (Sudden Art Deficit Deepens Inevitable Ennui), What am I supposed to do now? How do I hold onto the fact that I am, indeed, an artist within a larger community of artists, despite that community being, suddenly, intangible? How do I trust that something else will come along even though there is, as of now, nothing else on my theatre calendar for the year? How do I get invested in a new money job, and a new set of coworkers, when I might just up and leave again, if a theatre opportunity does come along? Dear Addie, writes SADDIE, please tell me it is not sandwich season yet again.
I have several perfectly good pieces of advice I could give SADDIE, and several platitudes I could offer about how it’s actually not that bad. But to be honest, I’m not really in the mood. Maybe it’s something pathetic in SADDIE’s tone, or maybe I’m just tired of trying to solve larger structures with personal habits. Either way, I’ve got no wisdom for SADDIE today. In fact it feels much better, or at least more honest, to just hang out with the questions than to spool out answers. Because it isn’t a simple thing, is it? To keep track of how or where we belong when the structures around us keep changing. To know how much chaos is tenable, how much predictability is numbing. To trust that a season is just a season and not a forever. No, it’s not a simple thing. Dear SADDIE. Best of luck.