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I’ve been working in theater for 12 years and this month is the first time I’ve ever had a job fall through at the last minute. There’s been the occasional job way off in the horizon that didn’t work out for some reason or another, but there was plenty of time to recoup and find something else. This job was cancelled less than 24 hours before I was supposed to leave. After two and a half weeks of being unemployed. A month after being unemployed for three weeks. So. Yeah.

Stage management can be a pretty rough gig . It’s difficult to find any work at all and even when you do, the vast majority of it is stipend work that is wildly underpaid. As a matter of fact, if you are offered a stipend and then divide it based on a 40 hour work week (which is almost certainly a lie, it will probably be a minimum of 48 hours, because the theater world doesn’t think it needs a 2 day weekend, and the lie is furthered because as the stage manager you will like

If you can hear fairly well, Rev might be a way to bring in a little extra cash to hit your 2017 goals. Rev is a company that has 3 subdivisions – captioning, transcribing and translation. I don’t know anything about the translation pool of freelancers, but for captioning and transcribing, you submit an application and take a test. Captioning The application starts with a very simple Grammar test. Then you’re asked to provide a writing sample based on a few prompts about

For my last job, I had to live on a tour bus, and almost everything I Googled to try to figure out what this life would be like was pretty useless. The only thing the internet told me, on every single site about living on a tour bus, was don’t poop on the bus. (It’s true.) But there are a lot of other little quirks to living on a tour bus that I figured out over the last five months of living on one. Tour busses can be laid out a bunch of different ways. For our show, the

So you’re heading out on a tour? Here are some apps I can’t live without on the road: Google Maps I love me some Waze too, but Google Maps walking function is unbeatable when you’re constantly trying to find your way around new cities. Venmo I probably use this at least a dozen times a week. Between getting stuck at work and asking someone else on the crew to grab me dinner, to splitting cabs, to splitting the cost of a giant bottle of shampoo between 4 girls… this app is

For the better part of two years, I lived in hotels and spent a fully ridiculous amount of time in a 16 passenger van. I’m not gonna lie – it was one of the better touring experiences I’ve had. I was lucky the company I worked for gave us pretty free reign with the van. As long as we got to the shows on time, we could go pretty much anywhere we wanted as long as we paid for the gas difference if it was a big deviation. I also had two amazing casts who loved road tripping and

Congrats! You’ve just landed a job that makes you live on a train – and if it’s the circus train, this is probably the post you’re looking for. Packing to move onto a train is a strange task when you’re not sure what’s about to happen to you, but here are some tips on things to bring with you, what you can buy once you’re there and other tips to help you minimize moving costs as you run away with the circus. To begin with, the circus train has several different types of roo

In college, my parents were horrified when I said I wanted to major in theater. I was actually forbidden from doing it, so I just quietly double majored while they didn’t pay any attention to where their money was going. Mentally, I think I was prepared for a Plan B from the get-go. I’ve maintained a substitute teacher license for the past decade “just in case.” Even when my schedule is so busy I can barely function, I keep brokeGIRLrich running “just in case.” A few years

Side hustlers aren’t born overnight – in most cases. In my opinion, they’re often birthed out of frugal overload and even then, it can take a lot of tries to get it right. After I hit my frugality limits trying to pay off student loans, it was time to figure out how to bring in more income. I’d say my first ever side hustle was mystery shopping . When I’m living in a big city, it’s actually not so bad. If the shop is on my way home or to work or to wherever I’m going, I mi

A few years ago, I wrote about the financial dangers of touring . It’s really easy to turn into a spend thrift without paying attention when your life is just wandering from place to place. Lately, I’ve come to face to face with another money peril on tour. Getting sick. When you get sick at home, in your comfy apartment or house, you have a system. You may not know it, but you probably do. There’s probably a few cans of soup that only get used once your nose starts to run

Fair warning, friends, I'm kind of in a #rant mood today. Entertainment is a really weird gig. I’m in rehearsals right now for a touring musical, something I’ve wanted to do for a while, since college really, since there’s a certain amount of prestige to musicals that you just don’t really find with… Clifford the Big, Red Dog  (not that I don’t love the heck outta Clifford). Running a musical is usually a little more complicated, so there’s that. But our rehearsal days are

So you just landed a job on a cruise ship and now you need to know what to bring with you, right? If this is your first time away from home for months at a time, trying to figure out how to pack is incredibly daunting. For my first contract, they told me they would supply uniforms onboard. I packed a single duffle bag of clothing and toiletries and hopped onboard. I packed totally wrong. Odds are good you’re flying out to meet this ship. Hopefully you’re getting your lugga

I love the tradition of opening night gifts for the cast. I think it rewards them for the hard work they’ve put in up to that point. I always try to include a personalized card with something I’ve appreciated about their personality through the rehearsal process, but I really like to include a little something else. On some shows the schedule gets so hectic it winds up being a piece of candy slapped onto the card, but when I have enough time, I like to do a little better. Th

So you think you might want to be a stage manager? Let me warn you now, almost everyone who works in the arts thinks they can be a stage manager and the vast majority can’t. Just because you are an organized human being doesn’t mean you have the skillset to be an excellent stage manager. Here are some skills you should amass before embarking on this journey (and if you’re in school getting a bachelor’s degree, a lot, although not all, of these will probably be covered there)

If I could give every aspiring young stage manager one career tip, it would be: do what you say you’re going to do. And honestly, I’d give anyone aspiring to do anything that tip. I really wish I could remember the first person who told me that, because it definitely lodged itself in my mind early on and has hugely colored how I live a lot of my life. The vast majority of compliments I’ve gotten over the course of my career boil down to this. Just as equally, the vast maj

It’s important to know your worth. I could sound off for the 800 th time about why there’s nothing sexy about being a starving artist , but instead I will admit we’ve all been tempted. Whether it’s flat out insulting pay or abominable work conditions, they’re actually so common in the arts that nearly everyone has a story of a job just going incredibly sideways on them. For a while, I was side hustling building props around NYC and I mostly loved it. Until the show that

I’ve written a few times about how my main side hustle outside of stage managing is substitute teaching . What I don’t think I’ve written about is how much I dislike it. Besides the fact that teaching is totally not my thing and I’m not a huge fan of kids, substitute teaching is incredibly, mind-numbingly dull most of the time. You’re really just a baby-sitter trying to keep nearly grown ups sitting in their seats and not touching each other. This is more difficult than you

I write a lot about hustling here. Planning ahead and patience seem to be the key to any good side hustle, and right now you’re reading my most successful one so far. That’s right, my blog actually makes some money. Recently, it’s been the equivalent of an extra paycheck a month and I am solidly a part time blogger. That being said, it did not happen overnight. I started brokeGIRLrich in July 2013 with a post called WTF is this Stock Market Thing? (Step 1) . I’m not sure I

Otherwise known as... the perils of variable income and how to come to terms with it. I remember one of the toughest things to wrap my brain around as a college stage manager was a professor warning me about how non-linear a career in the arts can be. While the majority of the world climb a ladder, starting at a small entry-level job and then increasing in responsibility and pay as they go, that’s not really the case for stage managers (granted, probably several other caree

Let’s back up a little and assume that you’re just starting college. You’re trying to balance all your theater classes, along with those pointless other classes to make you well rounded, mandatory hours in the scene shop, and rehearsals. College is tough. Here’s a hint, the real world is worse. Here are a few things you can do to make the transition to the real world a little less painful: If at all possible, get a job and sock away every penny you can. When you look at th