Master Your Audition Skills
Insights and Inspiration
This is where I think out loud. About leadership, theatre, creativity, grief, power, ego, and the occasional sacred cow that deserves a firm shove. Some posts are sharp, some are personal, all of them are honest—and none of them are written to keep everyone comfortable. If you’re looking for polish, this might not be it. If you’re looking for truth with a pulse, welcome.
5 Ways Community Theatre Directors Can Give Better Notes
If there’s one thing every community theatre director knows, it’s this: notes are part of the process. But how we give them — when, where, and in what form — matters almost as much as what the notes actually are. A recent article on OnStage Blog by Chris Peterson...
In Community Theatre, Your Reputation is Everything
Here in the land of regional theatre, there is no HR department. There is no agent smoothing things over. There is no publicist spinning your bad behaviour into “artistic temperament.” There is no paycheck large enough to justify misery. All you have is your...
Greed vs. Success
They are not the same thing. Stop pretending they are. Somewhere along the way, we let a dangerous lie take hold in our culture: that more money equals more success. It just doesn’t. Full stop. It’s the justification of greed, which is what happens when success...
Mocking Medication: The Last Refuge of the Emotionally Bankrupt
How Rachel Gilmore’s vulnerability exposed the hollow noise machines masquerading as humans. What do people get out of mocking someone for taking an antidepressant? Absolutely nothing—unless you count the temporary dopamine bump insecure people get when they mistake...
From Threatened to Thankful: What Margaret Atwood Taught Me About Being a Man
How fear, feminism, and fatherhood finally taught me to listen The first time I read Margaret Atwood — sometime in the 80s, when hair was big and good men were reliably oblivious — I was scared. Not scared like Stephen King scared. Scared like existentially...
Layoffs: Because Nothing Screams “Leadership” Like Firing Everyone Who Works for You
On the heels of layoff announcements from mammoths like Amazon, Starbucks, Oracle, Nike, Carter's, and others, there’s a disturbing reflex in corporate life that makes me want to slam my head against a whiteboard. Quarterly numbers dip, shareholders twitch, and some...
He Told Me I Was the Problem — And He Was Right
How Gary Pica turned tough love into a lifelong friendship — and made me a better leader in the process This post marks a pretty special milestone — the 50th TruMethods/Winners Circle Peer Group meeting. Fifty. That’s half a century of meetings if you count them in...
Three Things I Learned from Betrayal
Betrayal is one of those things you think you understand — until it happens to you. It’s not just pain. Pain has an endpoint. Betrayal lingers. It seeps into your trust, your judgment, your sleep. It makes you question your instincts — the very ones you’ve spent your...
“Don’t Take It Personally — It’s Just Business”
The Sociopath’s National Anthem Every time someone says “Don’t take it personally — it’s just business,” an HR department gets its wings. Let’s stop pretending this phrase is some kind of stoic wisdom. It’s not. It’s a moral escape hatch for people who want to screw...
President Bartlet: The Leader Every REAL Leader Wishes They Were
When The West Wing first aired, Sharon and I were obsessed right from the pilot. I mean don’t call, don’t visit, don’t even breathe near the TV hooked. This was before streaming, before “skip intro,” before binge culture — so every episode was a damn event. To this...
Your Trauma Is Your Toolkit (Sorry, But It’s True)
There’s this unspoken truth among actors that nobody really likes to say out loud: the best performances often come from the most broken parts of us. We don’t talk about it because it sounds unhealthy — like we’re romanticizing pain. But the reality is, if you’ve...
The Difference Between a Good Leader and a Great One? Vulnerability.
“Vulnerability” has become the latest corporate virtue signal.Everyone claims they “lead with it” — right up until it means actually saying something real. Because here’s the thing: most people love the idea of vulnerability… just not the practice of it. They’ll...