Tag: Theatre

  • Playing Sports (Unedited)

    My kid is on her school’s soccer team, and she loves it. We love it too, as it is the best way for her to burn off the huge amounts of energy that she has in reserve, and it keeps her off a screen. I don’t know if she will be a life longer soccer player/fan and honestly, I don’t care. I like that she’s playing on a team, and doing something physical.

    If you are not aware, I come from a very competing family. I wasn’t blessed with the athletic gene (though I wasn’t too bad at tennis) but playing and winning at games was a big thing in my family growing up. Lots of board games and wiffleball in the back yard. With two older brother who were nine and seven years older than me, it was difficult to beat them at sports as a kid, but that didn’t stop me from trying. My oldest brother played baseball, and my other brother was all about basketball. I tried my hand at both, but didn’t have the skills. I could through a baseball well, but couldn’t hit to save my life. As for basketball, I don’t ever remember feeling that I was coordinated enough to be good at it.

    My father had a rule in our house, which was we had to play a sport up until we turned sixteen. After I washed out of Little League, and junior high basketball didn’t have a place for me, my father suggested that I take up tennis, which was a sport he played. I took lessons once a week for two years, and I got kind’a good, but not that good. But my father’s point did sink in; you have to stay active and physical, or you will just go pot.

    So, I guess I am keeping the tradition alive. Going to keep her in a sport until sixteen, when she can decide for herself if she wants to continue.

    When I turned sixteen, I stopped the tennis lessons, and committed myself to my high school’s theatre department. Which, in a round about way, is also a team sport.

  • Middle School (Unedited)

    The kid started middle school. There has been a great deal of upheaval and change in our little apartment, not to mention the world. I am happy that the kid is growing up, and she is very excited about staring middle school, and leaving elementary behind. For her, she likes a challenge, and going new places and meeting new people, and middle school is that. Her only complaint has been that she wants to get at the learning and new classes, and the first day is just dull; learning the rules, and where things are.

    I will tip my cap to my kid; she is so much braver that I was at her age.

    I was terrified to go to middle school. Everything that everyone had told me was that the 9th graders ate the seventh graders alive. There was nothing in middle school I was looking forward to. It was all awkward and mean and rough, and embarrassing, and every school nightmare I ever had wrapped up into one.

    The funny thing was that the night before middle school started, my kid had trouble sleeping. She had butterflies in her stomach. Though she was excited about starting middle school, there was still a little nervousness to it. As I was talking to her, trying to help her relax and sleep, she asked me if middle school will be the worst time of her life, because me and her mother had told her some stories of how difficult it was. That and she’s seen enough tween TV and movies that have also painted middle school as a grinder box crucible of adolescence.

    I was prepared to attempt to paint the rosiest of pictures for her that it was this fun place, and only a few bad things happened to me, but that would have been a lie. And then it struck me; there was a silver lining. I told her that middle school was where I discovered theatre and performing. It was the place that where I first started reading great books, books that open your mind, and help you start to see the world in new and fresh ways. But most importantly, middle school was where I made some of the first truly great friends of my life. People I bonded with over books and movies and music. People I that are still in my life today, who I can’t fathom not being intertwined with to this day. I told her that middle school was the start of the process that made me the adult who I am today. The person I am proud to be.

    Don’t know if it did the trick, but she eventually got to sleep.

    And maybe I’m getting old and looking for silver linings in awful memories, or maybe those sharp edges and rounding off as the years go by.

    Nope. Middle school was the worst. I just had the best friends imaginable, which is how I survived.

  • Local Middle-Aged Man Buys Shoes from His Youth

    Local Middle-Aged Man Buys Shoes from His Youth

    This is a long story, but follow me here…

    So, back in 1992, I was a sophomore in high school, and the way my town ran their schools, 10th grade sophomore year was your first year in high school. As such, we sophomores were the new kids in class, and as such, we were all figuring out how high school worked.

    I had come into high school with this idea that theatre was going to be one of my things, as my high school not only had a proscenium theatre, but also a theatre classroom and a blackbox theatre as well. Now, let’s not get crazy here, this was still Texas, so the entire focus of the school was on football, and that got all the money and attention. Yet, for some reason, there was this little pocket of theatre in the high school, and I wanted to be a part of it.

    And as I navigated this new world of high school theatre, with all of the pretension and promise, one of the upper classmen, a senior whose name I no longer remember, told me as he looked at my Reebok high-tops, that theatre people wear black high-top Chuck Taylor All-Stars. I was gullible and desperate for approval, so clearly I had to go out and get a pair of All-Stars. To my mother’s dismay, as she had just bought me a new pair of Reebok high-tops for school, I had her take me to Dillard’s so I could spend my own money ($20) to buy a pair of black high-top Chick Taylor All-Stars.

    From 1992 to this day, I have always owned at least one pair of All-Stars.

    Now, the only change that has occurred with my owning a pair of All-Stars came in 2000, when I went to buy some, but the store was sold out of high-tops, so I bought a pair of the low-tops.

    And Thus! From 2001 to 2025, I have owned only black low top Chuck Taylor All-Stars.

    Except when I went shoe shopping with the kid the other day. As she was looking at a pair of pink All-Star high-tops, I was drawn to the black high-tops. More for a lark than anything, I tried on a pair just to see. The kid encouraged me to get them, as she hasn’t seen me in anything but low-tops her whole life. I had to make sure she wasn’t messing with me, like telling me to do something to make me look silly. But, my kid isn’t vindictive like that, so she must have meant it, that the shoes looked good on me.

    Funny how that guys comment from high school has stuck with me; He was probably messing with me when he said it.

  • My Least Favorite Part

    One of the goals that I set for myself this year was to submit my work to more magazines. I sent out a bunch in 2023, and sort of fell off the wagon in 2024, and that is why I am hitting the ground running in 2025. Well, at least relative to my situation. My goal was to send out to ten different magazines this month, and today, I accomplished it. Not an enormous step, but a step none the less.

    And as I was reading issues and guidelines from new magazines and journals, I started to feel like I did when I was acting, and going out on auditions – which was nervous, a little anxious, and also a touch of faked confidence. I mean I got work, but like all actors, I struck out more often than not. I accepted that it was part of the business, but I never learned to enjoy it. I have friends who love to audition – get in the room, try stuff out, see what works. They like the challenge of it all.

    For me, auditioning was the necessary evil that I had to go through to get what I wanted, and that was rehearsal. I loved every part of rehearsal. The table read, getting there early, making new friends in the cast and crew, learning how each other works, the discovery of the process, the bad days, and the good days, and that feeling of at any moment it could all go off the rails but somehow always magically came together. Not always, but most of the time. Performance was extra, the icing on the cake. Rehearsal was the fun of work. And I really do miss that.

  • Thoughts on Diane (Unedited)

    (This is a follow up on my post from Monday, which dealt with the passing of my dear friend and mentor, Diane Simons.)

    As this week has gone on, and I have reflected on the time that I spent with Diane, I am filled with overwhelming gratitude. For a very important five years of my life, I was guided by and witnessed the creativity, kindness, compassion, optimism and love that Diane filled her life with.

    Working for her out at Hip Pocket Theatre has defined what I view and expect when it comes to leadership in the arts. She was selfless in that regard – the theatre was the thing, and not her. She supported all of the artists that came through the doors, and never wavered in her optimism in that place. No matter what the challenge was, and we faced some pretty serious one, she had faith that we would all make it though the other side. Having spent so many hours with her, I saw her get angry enough times, but she never let that dissuade her from optimism. That and she cleaned the bathrooms before every show, which is still my yardstick when it comes to people I work for in the arts; would they clean the bathrooms in their own theatre? The answer for 90% of them is no. Diane was committed to doing whatever was needed to be done to make the show happen.

    She also taught me what it means to be an artist. How important it is to get out every idea, and see what sticks. To never limit yourself, or say that something can’t be done. She taught me to collect ideas and influences, and the importance of have a notebook, or a sketchpad near you at all times. That art is giving and sharing and encouraging creativity not only in yourself but in others. That fostering creativity begets more creativity and what you put out you will get in return. That being an artist is fun, but it’s also hard work that can be a lot of fun. I can hear her in my head, “Hell Matt, just give it a shot.”

    But what I find myself coming back to often this week was Diane and her family. Her husband and her two daughters. Oh, how she loved them. If you mentioned any of them in her presence, she would just light up. She was so proud of the women that her daughters became, and how unique and individualistic they were. She so loved being their mother, and was excited about what they did, and loved being a part of their lives. But her husband. “That man,” she’d say, and you could tell and feel how much she loved that man. She would get all giggly and flirty when he was around. Theirs’s was an epic partnership; they co-founded Hip Pocket Theatre, but they also taught theatre to thousands, and created a family of artists. They forged a community out of their love.

    And I am just heartbroken for them. They loved her so.