I can’t help but feel a tad harried these days.  I’m directing/producing a new play festival this week (www.TheatricsTheatre.org), prepping to teach a teen summer workshop that begins next week, dramaturging & directing a new play that goes into rehearsals in two weeks with performances at the end of July, and gearing up to move to Texas one day after that show closes.

Woof.

No wonder “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important… EVERYTHING” keeps running through my head.

Which has me thinking about my tendency towards overload – I am overloaded.  A lot. – and what needs to be done about it.

I think it comes down to the delicate and sometimes vicious dance I have to do in order to pay the bills/feed my soul/maintain some semblance of ‘I’m making progress’ in my internal mantra.   I’ve got three practically-full-time jobs, yet only one of them actually pays the bills.  The other two feed my soul and sometimes buy me dinner or printer paper.  Yet I can’t stop any one of them without suffering some kind of potential (worst case scenario) outcome: becoming homeless, losing my mind, or killing my soul off one administrative gig at a time.

So I try to do it all.  And with each new tree-ring I acquire, I wonder more and more at how long I can honestly continue to “BE ALL THINGS!”  (which we all know isn’t really possible to begin with)

I have a friend who is getting ready to start up her own theater company in a thus-far company-less town in AZ.  She is a talented director, actress, and playwright – and I’ve no doubt she will rock this new theatre company like a boss.  But as I was listening to her layout her plans to pay her artists, I felt a cold creeping nagging feeling come over me – “How are you going to pay artists and stay afloat?  How can a company in its infancy expect to make enough money to make money for its artists?”  and  “What does it say about me that my first reaction is balls-out skepticism?”

I think it’s time for me to move out of the Land of the Creative-But-Financially Stumped, and I’m not ashamed to say that I will probably need some help vacating the shanty I’ve got held together with fly paper.  I’ve never taken a business class, I don’t know the first thing about getting an LLC, but I think I’m going to have to do both in order to carve out a more comfortable artistic niche for myself  – something that doesn’t include money-panic on a daily basis or absolute calendar overload – something that is actually IN the field I love and have studied/practiced at so tirelessly these past years.

Which is all to say that I’m looking forward to the impending move.  I’ve had a number of creative successes in Prescott – and I’m so honored to have been a part of the artistic scene here.  But I’m damned excited to start fresh somewhere else.  And no, I’m not returning to LA (thanks for hoping) – and yes, I know how we all feel about Texas –  but a fresh start is like a blank page: chock full of possibilities!

~Tiffany Antone