Young At Arts + 20

I was delighted to return home to Boston at the end of February as a guest speaker at the 25th Anniversary Gala commemorating the Walter Suskind Memorial Fund's Young At Arts program at the Citi Center for the Performing Arts.

Joe Spaulding, (L), head of the Citi Center, handed the mic over to little old me.

Throughout the school-themed event, the audience of 400 was introduced through film to Walter Suskind, who helped transport 1,200 young children out of Holland during World War II.  His friends, the Vanderpols, founded the Young At Arts program as a tribute to Suskind, and 25 years after its inception, Young At Arts is still going strong.

Twenty years ago, as a high schooler, I was selected to be a part of the Young At Arts program, serving as a teen reviewer in the local paper, The Brookline TAB.  As a part of the "Critics Circle," I was given carte blanche in the Boston performance scene, seeing the Boston Ballet, opera, and all the major touring shows coming through the city at that time.  Then before I left Boston for college, I interned a year in the administrative offices of the Young At Arts program and learned a bit about arts administration.

I kept my remarks short and sweet (and joked, "like me"), thanking the Young At Arts program for giving me an invaluable education in creative collaboration, gaining many of the skills I use daily in running my own production company, Tongue in Cheek Theater, in New York City.

Thank you to all the wonderful people who have made Young At Arts a diverse, creative and collaborative program for 25 years!

Sky Mall Gifts: A Shopping List for Next Year's Holidays

Just got back from a trip that required flying.  I don't love to fly, but I do it.

I DO love to read, however, and for the first time I can honestly recall, I read the Sky Mall catalogue front to back.

I regret that I did none of my Christmas shopping through it, because one page basically held the ideal gifts for everyone in my immediate family.

For my brother (who is NOT named Bob), there was an entire selection of Gifts for BOB.  Ice cubes in the shape of "Bob," and various pithy t-shirts stating things like, "Bob: The Man, The Myth, The Legend."

For my sister's backyard: an Easter Island planter, where blooms sprout out of the Easter Island head.

For my dad, a sippy-cup wine glass.  No more spillage!  Is it rude to give him just one, or should I buy a set of 8 for when he entertains?

Perusing the other items, I had to rule out the rug in the shape of a cat sleeping and two pillows that say "Love you" and "Love you more" in needlepoint on them -- these are clearly intended for someone who loves cats or loves cute nicknames like "wuvvy-duvvy" for their significant other.

Just when I was thinking I didn't have anything for my sister-in-law, I saw the very travel mug that looks like it is a camera lens that I *DID* buy her this year.  I bought that for her.  Not on Sky Mall, mind you, but it does say something interesting about me that I mocked Sky Mall until I didn't anymore.

Finally, for my older brother, I flipped the page over and saw a mini statue of a little boy relieving himself, "The Peeing Boy of Brussels."  At $99.95, this would be a steal if he hadn't already given us this very object years before.

I leave you with one final thought: is there a version of the Sky Mall catalogue in, say, French?  If so, do they re-brand everything in French, and name the peeing boy statue something exotic to Europe, like "Petit garçon de Detroit"?

Last Days of Summer

Labor Day is a mere 5 days from today, and I am bummed.

Growing up, fall was always my favorite season: returning to school, buying new clothes, lining up my notebooks and folders for every subject.  So Labor Day was cause for celebration.

But now that I've been out of school for (cough) a long time, I realized recently that I love the summer best.  Especially in NYC.  

People laugh when I say that: it's true that a NYC subway station on a 90 degree day stinks like old foot (and is just as sweaty as that old foot's shoe).  But other than that, I love that the city empties out just a little bit every weekend in the summer.  I love walking down an avenue for miles while digging into a frozen treat.  Seeing summer festivals of theater and free movies.  Going to a Mets game and drinking the coldest beer possible under the flood lights.  Sitting in the sidewalk section of a local restaurant and watching people walk by.  Ahhhh. 

So, Labor Day, take your sweet time.  Don't be laborious.  Be lazy.  I need a few more minutes of these perfect, quiet, empty-headed, cold beer-drenched days to get me through a NYC winter that will somehow be here in a mere matter of minutes.  

And thank you, gods of the NYC perfect summer, for your best summer yet.

Best Summer Vacation Ever: Improv 101 at UCB with Corey Brown

The best thing I did all summer was take the 8 weeks of Improv 101 at Upright Citizens Brigade with Corey Brown.

Outside the UCBeast Theater in the East Village.

Top 10 takeaways:

10. Immediate street cred for taking improv at UCB.  The other night a casting director called UCB the Juilliard of improv (even though getting into 101 doesn't require an audition). 

9. UCB classes sell out in two minutes (no joke), testing our computer literacy and typing speed (perhaps that was the audition?).

8.  Intellectual rigor required.  One early exercise required us to act like an expert on any topic suggested, and damn, some people riffed on geo-political strife like it was their job.  Corey's feedback was equally intellectual and insightful, too.  UCB's motto is even in Latin: Si haec insolita res vera est, quid exinde verum est? (If this is true, what else is true?).  

7. A rising tide lifts all boats.  I took Ballet 101 with a bunch of chicks who were practically members of Alvin Ailey, and by comparison to them, I moved like a legless chicken.  In the case of improv, fortunately, more experienced classmates buoyed the scenes you were in, and everyone looked better for it.

6.  Laughing for three hours, once a week, for the bargain basement price of $400.  

5. Equal-opportunity class time. (Corey always kept things moving along in even increments for everyone, so no time-sucking divas could emerge.)

4. Free admittance to UCB house team improv shows Mon-Thur with your UCB student ID.  I wish I had seen more!

3. One of UCB's fundamental lessons is to "play to the height of your intellect"--if you understand a reference made by your partner, engage as fully and as honestly as you can. 

2. There's a book, The Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual. For $25, the learning continues until I enroll in 201 in November after my upcoming fall play.

1. Final class performance at the UCBeast Theater in the East Village.  Tremendously satisfying to put it all together and see the entire class making smart choices and making the audience laugh.  Can't wait to take 201.

Book Report: Robert Rodriguez and the D-I-Y Spirit

Working my way through a suggested reading list provided by K Callan in her book, The New York Agent Book, I decided to check out Robert Rodriguez's book, Rebel Without a Crew. I had a vague recollection of seeing his movie, El Mariachi, which he made as a college student in the 90s for the complete cost of $7,000 and which is the subject of this book.

Robert Rodriguez is a D-I-Y filmmaker extraordinaire.

Drawn from his detailed diary during the period it took to conceive of the film and see it through to completion, Rodriguez's credo is: if you want to create a film, dive in and do it.  It won't be good at first (he says everyone has 12 bad scripts in them), but you have to do the work to learn what your style is and how to do different things to make it better.  By the time he gets to college, he had made 20+ films featuring his friends and family and was circulating a short called "Bedhead" on the festival circuit. This love of making stories did not make him a shoo-in to the UT Austin film school, however, which had a GPA requirement that he did not meet; he gained admittance through showing his festival-circulated short and his cartooning abilities.

Tenacity, tempered by practicality, help Rodriguez set the goal of making a full-length feature film in Mexico one summer, using a good friend from high school's home border town as home base, borrowing a camera, and strategic planning of every shot and every cost (in his case, he did a 1-month-long stint at a medical research facility to earn $3,000 of his budget, and used that time locked up to write, story board and watch movies).

Side note: Rodriguez bemoans the credit card industry's preying on students, and does not take out a loan at any point.  At times in this film's unexpected rise to renown, he has no money to speak of, but he is always mindful to keep his spending in check.

Equally crucially throughout, Rodriguez seems to know himself well enough to find ways to keep himself motivated about the work ahead in editing and selling the film.  After shooting for an exhilerating but exhausting three weeks without a crew (you have to feed and pay crew!), his first created a compelling trailer for the film to make himself see the full-length film's potential.  He knew he was going to be logging many hours to edit the images and then the sound, and he could not lose interest this far into the project.

In the end, some very remarkable things happen for Rodriguez.  A thinly-held connection to an agent at ICM leads to meetings which leads to a bidding war on his services as a filmmaker.  He flies back and forth to LA and his home in Austin to festivals in Telluride, Toronto and Sundance, making a lot of money and gaining a huge following.  Throughout it all, he emphasizes that he was making this film as a practice full-length film, meant to go straight to video in the Mexican market.  He seems as surprised as anyone by this unexpected turn of events.

Best of all, the last chapter is a "10 Minute Film School" in which Rodriguez, in 1995, presciently says he would be excited for a time when anyone who wants to make films uses their home cameras to do so.  You just have to want to do it, and to paraphrase, let your work be bad to learn what does and does not work.  This clearly applies to any D-I-Y notion, be it a film, or any other entrepreneurial/creative endeavor.

RSVP

Had an intriguing conversation with a playwright yesterday about a creative methodology for collaboration called RSVP cycles.  A quick search for this term unearthed a Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSVP_cycles in which this theory is attributed to Anna and Lawrence Halprin and Jim Burns.

The letters in the acronym RSVP stands for:

Resources: anything we have to make a production happen.  Money, space, time, actors, director, etc.

Score: the written guidelines for performing the production.

Valuation: reviewing process of the work.  Rehearsals, notes, re-writes.

Performance: running the piece.

The point the playwright was making to me was that every creation of a project follows these same steps, and could be applied to a project I execute in my career in finance or in my creative pursuit as an actor and producer.  Fascinating stuff!

Month 1 of Year of Action!

Earlier this spring, I happened upon an article in my alma mater's Smith Alumnae Quarterly, featuring a remarkable woman named Erin Moran McCormick.

Erin Moran McCormick has written a book called Year of Action in which she recalls the triumph of trying things she always hoped to accomplish.  Clicking through to her Year of Action website, I was enticed to answer a call to women looking to take part in a pilot program, The Girlfriend MBA, that inspires women to have their own year of action.  Lo and behold, I was selected!

Starting in late April, Erin (as I now know her!) sent us copies of the book, which I read with gusto and promptly bought for friends.  Erin took bold steps to improve her life and it's a compelling read.

After reading the book, Erin granted the pilot-eers access to her website.  Over five weeks, Erin nudged us through a series of challenges to refine our goals, product, pitch, online presence, and marketing.  The website has worksheets (I love worksheets!), instructional videos, resources, and a forum on which we post our progress. 

Erin is a natural teacher who loves technology and inspiring people.  She pushes people in the right measure in weekly calls and personal e-mails with in-depth analysis on things like website updates.

A month doesn't seem very long at all (and maybe that's the point), but here's what I accomplished:

• Set my goal: book a speaking role on TV this summer!
• Completely re-organized my home office, making it a space I love being in
• Set a daily time, every morning, to work on my goals
• Clarified my brand on my website, www.JakeLipman.com
• Researched and inquired with fellow actors about their favorite classes and marketing strategies
• Launched Season 2 of my webseries
• Created a refined marketing list of industry contacts
• Enrolled in 3 workshops to meet casting directors on my list
• Set up an 8-week cycle of marketing to my list, having now sent out 4 of the 8 weeks of materials
• Educated myself on QR codes and added them to my marketing
• Enrolled in Improv 101 at UCB
• Put myself on tape for a TV pilot audition!

This week, the pilot program will be winding down, and I am vowing here and now to continue my year of action.  Stay tuned!