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If you’ve been following for a while, you know I’ve been a stage manager for most of my working life and that I am currently working on a PhD in drama. While I’ve talked a bit about how my PhD program works, things I did to get accepted, and plenty of moaning about the financial life of full time students, I haven’t said a whole lot about what I’m researching. Speaking of, if you’d like to know more about the nuts and bolts of applying to a UK PhD program and life in one, y

I have spent a lot of the last year complaining about my finances as a PhD student, but not much time talking about actual life as a PhD student  - so today’s post is a review of what my first year as a theatre/drama PhD student has been like. It’s been a fairly strange journey. There are times when I feel like nothing is really happening, but as I’m reflecting on the last year, I have actually done a fair amount. To graduate, my school has two requirements – successful com

I was recently thinking about one of my favorite parts of stage managing and for me, it has definitely been travel. You get to be a part of some of the most exciting productions in the world, working with talented performers, designers, and technicians to create unforgettable experiences for audiences. One of the biggest perks of the job, however, is the opportunity to travel. Whether you're on tour with a Broadway show, working at a regional theatre in another state, or even

Between the recession and being right in the middle of this (possibly insane) decision to get a PhD, I have been dealing with more financial uncertainty than I'm used to. Every once in a while, I scroll through my old accountability updates and try to remind myself that I've weather periods of uncertainty just fine in the past. Overall, I have found my career choices in stage management highly rewarding and fulfilling, but I never love these periods of uncertainty, even more

May is right around the corner and it makes me think of being a shiny, new graduate. What an absolutely freaking terrifying exciting time! As a new graduate stage manager, I remember the challenges that come with navigating the financial landscape after graduation. It can be overwhelming to figure out how to make ends meet while pursuing a career in the arts, especially when facing the high costs of living in major cities where most theater jobs are concentrated. I remember

For the last several months I’ve been working very part time for my supervisor’s theatre company here in the UK. Between balancing school, my part time digital workshop work back in the US, and the theatre company… I wasn’t really doing alright. I had to talk to him about quitting at the end of my contracted period. That group has had several funding issues and as I was talking about not renewing my contract, he said “hopefully we get this next round of funding and we can b

**This is a sponsored post.** Sponsored post-ness aside, I do love Etsy. I’ve mentioned my fairly unhealthy and potentially bankrupting love of candles several times on this blog. And Etsy is on to me with their candle gift guides . I also like it for unique and personalized gifts. I’ve used it as a go to for cast and crew gifts many times (disclaimer: I absolutely do not think you ever have to give cast and crew gifts and this very much depends on your financial state, s

Friends, let me tell you a story about the power of a thank you note. Around the time Ringling Brothers closed, my resume floated to the top when Cirque was kindly trying to help rehome a lot of unemployed circus workers. I was not currently an employee at Ringling, but somehow my resume got flagged and I got invited to interview. I didn’t know why, but of course I took the interview . Working for Cirque is literally the last of two things on my stage management bucket lis

Leading up to my first week of school I spent hours Googling, trying to find an answer regarding what my first few days or weeks as a doctoral student were going to be like. I didn’t find much. A few posts, largely from scientists (a massive amount of information out there is geared towards STEM students), but nothing to give me a clue about what my days as a drama student were going to be like. I sort of get this now because everyone’s days are different, especially in th

So I have been in the process of starting a doctoral program, working a freelance corporate events job online, and sorting a move across an ocean for several weeks now and a last minute delay with one of my visa items has left me in the United States for a few extra weeks. Like any sane doctoral student I thought, what I need to do is more. Clearly I should try to stage manage something before I leave. The logistics of this get quite squicky once I move to the new country on

Full disclosure, I do not receive any affiliate kickback promoting the Broadway Stage Management Symposium, but I have been involved in both the expo and on panels in the past – so I am clearly a bit biased towards how awesome it is. Today I want to talk about the Broadway Stage Management Symposium . In case you are unaware, it’s a gathering of pretty much the coolest people on the planet (stage managers) with a variety of panels and keynotes that focus on various aspects

I was a very slow adopter of iPad technology. A few years ago I worked on a show where my ASM was all about. She did all her notes on hers, regularly accessed documents, and would call the show (which is still a pretty hard no for me, but to each their own on that front). I had a little extra money and the same show used Stage Write for all its blocking, so I decided it was time to make the investment and I bought a 7 th generation iPad after much debating back and forth ab

When I was an undergrad, I had a really awesome design professor and I thought he had the best job. I went to a very small school that had two full time professors (the acting/directing professor and the design professor) and a contract lecturer (management). The two full time professors split teaching the history, literature, theory courses and then covered the rest of the required curriculum in their area of specialty, because of that, the classes they taught rotated a lot

So I’m back home from my first show since the end of the pandemic and before I left, I was struggling a little bit with how to balance the healthy habits I’ve built in the many months of not working with how life is while out on a contract. I’d developed several really good food and exercise habits during the pandemic and as it came time to head off to the hotel for this contract, I was struggling a little with how I was possibly going to maintain them. There was no pool to

I was looking up some SEO information on Stage Management – for my non-blogger friends out there, that’s how to optimize for searches and found that one of the most commonly searched phrases is Stage Manager Job Description. And it got me thinking. It’s kind of a hard job to define, isn’t it? If you’re American and Equity, there is some guidance on what your job consists of – but even then, a panel I realized enjoyed at the Symposium a few years ago was about keeping up mo

A few weeks ago, I went on a bit of stage management specific tangent about anchoring and priming effects from reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I’m still thinking about this subject, but today I want to reflect a little on how, as performing arts workers, we get anchored in the starving artist mentality. Just to review, anchoring is when an individual relies too heavily on an initial piece of information when making future judgements. I think for many

Today’s post is all stage management, friends, sorry, we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled personal finance and sometimes moaning about life shortly. So my day job does a lot with apply cognitive behavioral science to selling techniques and a book that gets mentioned a lot at work is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. After several weeks of hearing the book mentioned, I decided I wanted to read it. It’s a pretty fantastic book, though it’s definitely not light r

A few weeks ago I was interviewed for the TheatreArtLife podcast and it sparked a pretty good conversation among us about sharing salary info. A key part of my blog is my accountability updates each month that breakdown where all of my money goes but also how I earn it – it gives readers a really clear snapshot of what a stage manager can make. And because it’s a blog that’s lasted for years and has tons of other stage management related posts – it actually gives you a pre

I saw an interesting question on one of the Facebook stage management groups I’m part of the other day from a younger member asking what any of us would do if we were recent grads this year and I thought a lot of the answers were pretty great. It left me wondering what I would do as a ’20 or even ’21 theatre grad. I graduated in ’05 with my theatre degree and then went right on to get a Masters in a different field and graduated in ’08 – what was previously a banner year to

Passive income is the dream, isn’t it? I remember reading a great book called Multiple Streams of Income by Robert G. Allen years ago and in it I learned that most millionaires have, on average, seven stream of income. That seemed insane to me at the time. And of course, the golden cow here is passive income. Income that you have to put no work into creating. The dream. And I have to say, I was stumped for quite a while on how to tap into any of that world. I mean, most o