One Day at a Time
Part of the Invisible Diaries series:
Week 6 / Day 1
I am excited and a little mortified at writing these blog entries. I wonder if having an archive of how I spend my days is a good thing or a bad thing. If I had to dramaturg my life/career, what would these posts say about me and the story of my life? I feel like everyone (including myself) is about to find out how my life is terribly boring.
I tend to work in starts and fits, working on several things at the same time to keep my mind chugging along. For example, right now, I am prepping a lecture/workshop on Digiturgy for the Yale School of Drama that I will do with their interested students on Tuesday and Friday – but I also ended up taking a meeting with some key members of the LMDA 2020 conference planning committee today: we needed to sort out some details for the conference handbook, as well as think through our online platform resources and how to best use what is available to us in order to facilitate our conversation.
A little later, I have a meeting with a graduate student who I am mentoring. I am the “outside” mentor on their thesis project – which is fun! They were a student of mine at my former institution, and reconnected with me when they needed someone for their thesis. They are working on a project regarding a devising company they started with some former classmates, and I am looking forward to checking in about their work today.
With all that, I am crossing my fingers that I get some plays read today. I am reading for a playwriting client as well as for a theatre company, and really enjoy reading plays in both of these situations.
(I am not sure how I managed to do this but, my life has returned to being just as busy as it was pre-the global pandemic… yikes. I am still figuring out how I feel about that.)
I find working one-on-one with a playwright is not something that I get to do much since my schedule is so jammed most of the time, but there is something lovely about it. I think the introvert-masquerading-as-an-extrovert part of me thrives just slightly better in a one-on-one situation. Whilst I have figured out how to compensate for my introverted tendencies over the years, the global pandemic has allowed me to start the process of mentally replenishing and focusing on things that bring me joy. I have been running around, pretty much non-stop, for the past few years.
Last but not least, the plan today is to get to my garden – an amazing “apocalypse” garden, built for me by my spouse. This is the first time since we moved to the Hudson Valley in NY that I have been home this time of year and able to plant. So, all the veggies went into this garden – especially important because the pandemic has hit NY so hard that finding some kinds of produce has been a little difficult. I am sure that, by the time they are ready for harvest, I will be able to find them in the grocery store – but, at the moment, I find the calm and purpose of growing veggies so rewarding.
I realise I am so incredibly lucky and blessed to be able to do the things I am doing right now. There is so much going on with the world, and having a University job that is not talking about furloughs – at least for now, as my Dean so eloquently emphasised last week – has allowed for stability and flexibility.
I hope all of you reading this are staying safe – and I hope my life gets a little more interesting over the course of the week!
Martine Kei Green-Rogers is an Assistant Professor at SUNY New Paltz and President of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas.
Her dramaturgical credits include: The Greatest with the Louisville Orchestra; Four Women Talking About The Man Under The Sheet, and Silent Dancer at Salt Lake Acting Company; Fences and One Man, Two Guvnors at Pioneer Theatre Company; Clearing Bombs and Nothing Personal at Plan-B Theatre; Sweat at the Goodman; productions of King Hedley II, Radio Golf, Five Guys Named Moe, Blues for An Alabama Sky, Gem of the Ocean, Waiting for Godot, Iphigenia at Aulis, Seven Guitars, The Mountaintop, Home, and Porgy and Bess at Court Theatre; The Clean House at CATCO; Hairspray, Shakespeare in Love, UniSon, Hannah and the Dread Gazebo, Comedy of Errors, To Kill A Mockingbird, The African Company Presents Richard III, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Fences at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Headshot photograph by Joe Mazza.