Sometimes, as a performer, surprising things happen. In fact, I'd say that part of the joy of performing is dealing with surprises. Much of the time, I feel crazed and irritated by surprises, but the more I improvise, the more I treasure them. I'm involved in an...

For a while I thought I could just record my thoughts with my phone and come back a year or two later and know what I was talking about. From the edited transcript of moderately intriguing thoughts below, I see now that might have been an error in judgment. The basic...

Recently, I became aware that you were using words I'd written on your website. I no longer think of those as precisely "my words," since a client paid me to write them, and since nobody can really own words (more on that later), but still, you didn't ask if you could...

I. John Donne covers the difference between apart and separate in his poem "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," which I once had by heart but when I rewrote the last line, I figured I'd better return to the source. This poem came into my mind at Friday's Clearwater...

I'm interested in what is the least you can tell the audience and still keep the story moving. The hint, the suggestion, the blank spaces that correspond precisely to a set of letters that you won't recognize immediately but whose pattern will suddenly leap into the...

When I was teaching college, I used to share William Pastille's 1998 commencement address with my favorite classes. (Yes, I had favorites but didn't play them. Some groups of people who come together just jell better.) Mr. Pastille was a tutor of my sister's at St....

When I got home tonight, I was feeling a bit upset. For no reasonable reason. Luckily, there's a Big Big Love at home who loves me, and he was all up for going upstairs and lying down and talking. First, we talked about a bunch of ways I feel I'm not addressing the...

Yesterday, I got The Call. T., who  hired me to do marketing on the fall show for his company, said he and his producing partner were discussing the best way to use my talent and my time, and they wanted me to keep my focus on one area of inspiration. Good idea, guys....

I have arrived: Somebody copied copy I was paid to write and pasted them into their own website. So, hooray, I'm stealable! It's interesting to think about the value this guy placed on my words. They're good enough to use to communicate ideas and attract others to his...

The only one I know by name is Peter Klein (though he may have had a different first name). The first and only story about Peter ends, "Hitler got him." Peter was one of several brothers who came from Hungary to the U.S. in the early 20th century, many of them via a...