BIG (okay, small to medium-sized) CHANGES
(My last email on Mailchimp before moving to Substack)
Before diving into the pith of this email, I want to let my loyal subscribers know that this is the last time you’ll see this newsletter in its current format. I’ve decided to head on over and see what Substack is all about, so my future emails will be coming from jeffisawesome@substack.com under a new name: THE JEFF STREAM. There’s nothing you’ll have to do, other than check your spam folders regularly to make sure my precious words don’t get lost.
Why the change? Mostly, I find the current setup daunting. I try to cram so much into these emails that what was originally supposed to be monthly has drifted into a quarterly cadence. Turns out compiling a half-dozen items and formatting them into a single dispatch is an excellent excuse to procrastinate! And while I’m sure that hearing from me once every three months is PLENTY for most of you, Substack seems to make it much easier to share more regular, off-the-cuff notes without the expectations that come with this monster mailing. I’d also like this newsletter to be an opportunity for more regular interaction, and Substack has a bunch of interesting tools for that - notes, chats, cross-pollination with other members’ newsletters, blah blah. I hope you’ll come along with me to test them out!
The vast majority of my posts will be available to everyone, but I’m also going to give the paid tier a whirl. In addition to having full access to my archive (yay?), paid subscribers will receive a lot more experimental/in-process stuff - regular sketches and notes around Congress of the Monsters, previews of upcoming projects, weird stuff I don’t know what to do with, etc. My hope is that the accountability that comes with a few people’s hard-earned shekels will keep me from getting soft and lazy (or, more accurately, softer and lazier than I already am). The lowest Substack will allow me to charge for this bounty is $5/month or $50/year, but I aspire to generate some writing, images, and insights that will be worthy of such a sum.
So please enjoy the rest of this missive, and I look forward to seeing you on the other side!
Moving oningly,
Jeff
UNHAPPY ENDING WITH HAPPIER POSTSCRIPT
At the beginning of this year I decided to give therapy a try. It had been a crummy few months - largely a three-year-long accumulation of pandemic fatigue, but with a few more immediate factors to spice it up. I didn’t feel like I was in danger of anything dramatic, but at the same time I figured, why not try to prevent that?
Our insurance plan helped me find an in-network therapist for the six free sessions they offered. Part of the plan was to get out of the house a little more often, so starting at the end of January I started traveling into Manhattan every Monday morning to talk about myself for 45 minutes. It may not surprise you to hear that I loved it! Hope is a saint-level listener, but I’m a demon-level talker. The sessions served as a sort of pressure valve, where I could start the week rambling uninterrupted about everything on my mind and not feel bad about it.
It was also a great way to break up the work-from-home routine: I’d walk Dash to the subway for school, transfer after a few stops, get off at Canal, and traipse up to Midtown, grabbing a bagel along the way. I’d spend these brisk winter walks teasing out knotty little problems in my head, so I’d know what to talk about when I arrived. It became a highlight of the week, something that kept Sunday nights from feeling quite so blue.
One of the things I realized during the sessions was that, if Hope and I want to make good on our desire to remain in NYC long-term, we need to get a little more serious about saving money. My job had been slow for a few weeks, so for the first time in ages I spent some time digging into our finances to figure out where we could save a little here and there. It was exciting to feel like I was gaining some control over my life!
And that’s how I found out my therapist was cheating me.
I was really confused to see the unexpected charges - I was still using up my freebies, so there shouldn’t have BEEN any charges yet. And they weren’t small either.
The first thing I did was write an email asking for some background - maybe there was some sort of mistake? But the second thing I did was what I should have done the moment the insurance company gave me the therapist’s name: I googled it. It turns out this was a pattern of behavior - dozens of people across various websites complained of being defrauded by the same therapist in experiences similar to mine - unexplained charges, getting billed for sessions they didn’t attend, starting sessions late, ending them early, not feeling like they were being listened to, complaining that the therapist was staring at a phone screen the whole time…
The pieces all finally fell into place. The therapist DID spend a lot of time in our sessions looking at the phone, even interrupting me to answer a couple of calls. The sessions DID tend to start late and end early. And even weirder things - four of our six sessions were held in a break room of a shared office space, because there was a “misunderstanding” about the rented unit.
None of this had especially bothered me at the time, but looking back, the accumulation was alarming. I had been in a vulnerable state when I started, having had little experience with therapy - I felt lucky to have the privilege at all. So I talked and talked, and the therapist barely said a word, and I figured, well, that’s just the dynamic right now. It took me reading other people’s words to accept that I was being gaslit.
I’m hypersensitive when it comes to - well, pretty much everything. So even after a measly six sessions, the “breakup” wasn’t easy. Over an exchange of emails, the therapist tried to keep engaging me even after I definitively said “I’m not coming back.” My heart splintered my sternum every time I checked my email, until finally I just blocked the address. Hope resolved the situation through her insurance, but I still somehow felt insanely guilty about the whole thing. Had I misunderstood something? Was I somehow at fault here? Why did I feel like I’d done something wrong? But then I remembered, NO. In this awkward mixture of business and emotion, my vulnerability had been exploited. As miserable as I felt, walking away was the best possible move.
And in the end, there’s irony. I was only asked one good question during those sessions: “Why do you want to be in therapy?” After considering the immediate catalysts, I realized that I needed to open my world back up after a few tough years. I work from home, I’ve struggled to maintain my friendships and get out of my head, and this provided an outlet. I realized that, even though I didn’t get much value from the therapist/patient relationship, I could still gain something from the contours of the experience. I decided to continue starting my Monday mornings with a long walk rather than just diving into work first thing. I’ve done a better job of seeking out connections with other people. I’m paying more attention to the shape of my life, and changing things to make it better.
A couple of months isn’t long enough to establish permanent habits. But for the first time in a long time, I’m feeling decent about the future. I’m paying more attention to things, savoring small victories, making plans that excite me. I’m not sure whether or when I’ll seek out a new therapist - I might know better once the sting wears off. But even though it didn’t help me in the way I thought it would, I’m really glad I gave therapy a try.
THE HISTORY OF PIPER MCKENZIE, PART 2
Last month, I unraveled the origin of Piper McKenzie, the theater company I formed with Hope 25 YEARS AGO. It ended with the warm reception of our first production right out of college, as we peered over the horizon to our next adventure as successful bohemians in New York City.
Well, as anyone who’s ever lived a life may have guessed, the story didn’t work out quite as expected.
“What’s past is prologue.”
Following the show, Hope and I returned to our parents to regroup before our big move. The next steps are probably best explained in this comic strip I created a few years back. It involves a vomiting Easter Bunny, Mike Tyson, and a dramatic letter left in the care of a bartender. The upshot is that moving to NYC was more difficult than expected, so we decided to live upstate for another year. On paper it was a step backwards, but it felt like the only way to successfully assert our independence.
We managed to rent an apartment a few miles off campus. It was on the second floor of a small cottage, above a store that sold craft and knitting supplies. We hunched around beneath its low, gabled ceilings like clumsy trolls crammed inside a gnome hole. Many of our friends were still students, but now we were out of step with them - and before we knew it, they were gone for the summer anyway. Various temp jobs helped us survive, but we were hardly thriving. The humiliation and disappointment threatened to keep us frozen in place if we didn’t do something about it.
“How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in't!”
One advantage of that lonely time was something that feels like a luxury now: long, slow weekend afternoons. One rainy Saturday, we decided to read a play to each other. Despite studying Shakespeare in school, it turned out that neither of us knew The Tempest. Two hours later, we were floating above the clouds that kept us inside. How had this wonderful story stayed hidden from us for so long? There was magic and comedy and monsters and fairies and a lot of feelings about leaving your past life behind. It was WEIRD and FUN and NOT FORBIDDINGLY LONG. Even though we wanted to focus on original work, we decided to make this our next show.
As painful as it was to wait, we scheduled the show for fall. With school back in session, we’d be able to put our friends in the cast and the audience. We reached out to the space where we’d staged our first show at the beginning of the year - a small theater up in a rural warehouse, run by an artsy family - and they were happy to have us back. Months felt like years in those days, so it was like crawling back to civilization after nearly dying of thirst. Maybe our lives weren’t over quite yet!
“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.”
It turned out that a comeback was harder than a continuation. While before we were implicitly supported by our institutional bubble, everything was a lot harder this time. When we scheduled auditions, Hope was working a weekend job at a small lighting shop run by a semi-retired gay couple from the city. They wouldn’t give her the time off, so she simply walked away. It was the first time we ever sacrificed something - in this case, some sorely needed extra cash - for our work. It didn’t feel as empowering as we’d imagined.
We’d been excited to work with our friends, like we had in our first show, but the vast majority of them got cast in official school productions. And why wouldn’t they - it’s what their parents and scholarships were paying for, after all. This meant that most of our cast was incoming freshmen, who had no special loyalty to us and were already under enough pressure navigating their first semester in college. One of them (an intimidating, gothy guy who was a bit too well-cast as Antonio) dropped out via answering-machine after two weeks of rehearsals, forcing us to shuffle the cast around mid-stream. Barely a few years older (and probably no more mature), it was hard for us to feel gracious.
Another strained relationship was with the theater family. Where we saw a space rental, they saw an opportunity to collaborate - and, headstrong as we were, we didn’t want the help. Truth be told, we found their aesthetic pretty corny - we saw them as provincial hippies, whose unsolicited suggestions didn’t jibe with our lofty aspirations. This came to a head when we walked in one evening to see that the husband - primarily a visual artist - had painted our entire minimalist set with a spectacular array of colorful flowers, clouds, and other psychedelic motifs. Not only did it stand against the pared-down aesthetic we were going for, he hadn’t even consulted us about it. We did not enjoy asking him to cover the bounty of his labor with inglorious coats of black paint.
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
But the worst offenders were ourselves. Not only had we decided to co-direct the show - a bad habit that took us years to break - we had humbly cast ourselves as Ariel and Prospero. Having to divide our attention between our roles and our responsibilities was tough enough, but the characters’ power dynamic strained our still-developing creative relationship. Who was in charge here? Both? Neither? We argued about it in front of the cast, who couldn’t muster much sympathy for either of us.
Artistically speaking, the show turned out okay. It wasn’t exactly one for the ages, but not a total embarrassment for two 22-year-olds who’d never staged Shakespeare before (one of whom was playing a role he shouldn’t have touched for at least another 40 years). One of our old-school British professors summed it up with a begrudging nod as he left the theater: “It’s a beginning.”
But the real inflection point of this show wasn’t anything that happened onstage. One night during the second week of our run Hope and I finished shutting down for the night. We burst outside full of that post-show glow, ready for a smoke or a drink - only to find an empty parking lot. Silence. The entire cast of 20 had disappeared without even saying goodbye. A cold breeze literally blew dead leaves across our path. In an instant we finally understood that we weren’t part of that world anymore. We were the grown-ups now.
“This thing of darkness / I acknowledge mine.”
Well, fine. If that was the way things were, we were damn well going to act like it. When we sat down with the family to reconcile our finances, we decided to play hardball. We didn’t even have a contract - they were hippies, after all - so we decided to demand what we thought we were worth. The conversation quickly descended to tears and recriminations and all sorts of unprofessional nonsense that we wouldn’t have walked straight into if we actually were grown-ups.
In retrospect, they were barely grown-ups themselves - they were probably much younger than we saw them at the time, and still new to this business themselves. We never spoke to them again. It’s a shame, because they gave us our start, though we never had the courage to reach out and thank them. They’re still running their theater upstate, bless them, through a succession of bigger and better locations. I often wonder how long we’d have stuck with it ourselves if we’d stayed up there, but that’s water under the (long-burned) bridge.
“Let us not burthen our remembrance with / A heaviness that's gone.”
As it turned out, this was our last production in upstate New York. Within six months, we’d be living in Brooklyn and planning our first NYC production. Before long, we'd squeeze all the words out of Shakespeare before turning on him completely. Empires would rise and fall, we'd have a child, leave the theater - and after all that, I still can't tell you if we're grown-ups or not.
YES, IT'S BOOKS!
I’ve freighted you with enough prose for one day, so I’ll make my media roundup brief - quick blurbs about some recent books of note. One of the features I hope to bring to the new format is more frequent and thoughtful one-off writings about things that I’ve enjoyed, so I might revisit some of these in a future installment.
The Case of the Missing Men / The Case of the Cursed Hermit, by Kris Bertin and Alexander Forbes
Surreal, uncanny, deeply Canadian comic stories about teen sleuths uncovering municipal conspiracies and eldritch horrors.
The English Heretic Collection, by Andy Sharp
Deeply allusive and self-consciously bonkers “psychogeographies” and “hauntological investigations” exploring the connections between British folk culture, contemporary cinema, the occult, and every other kind of weirdness.
Selected Poetry of W.H. Auden
Some of the loveliest, funniest, snarkiest, catchiest, and most energizing verses to be wrought in the English tongue.
Haven, by Emma Donoghue
Three early-medieval monks take a boat to start a monastery on a desolate crag off the coast of Ireland. What threatens to be dry and claustrophobic blooms into something expansive and moving.
Cary Grant's Suit: Nine Movies That Made Me the Wreck I Am Today, by Todd McEwen
Brisk memoir-cum-movie criticism filled to jostling with laugh-out-loud observations and insights about growing up in the shadow of Hollywood.
WHO SIGNED OFF ON THIS?
So in the mid-’90s Nickelodeon tapped a class of NYC kids to write, direct, design, and star in their own interstitial video, and it is utterly unhinged.
Only the most dangerous, irresponsible adults would attempt to make something so starkly terrifying. I suppose this is why Whitney Houston told us the children are our future.
THIS MONTH'S EXTRA THING
For a few days over Dash’s spring break we brought him to Washington, D.C. for the first time. We hit a whole bunch of the Smithsonians, but the one that charmed us most wasn’t even on our docket. When we had an hour to kill before catching our train home, we stopped at the National Postal Museum right across the street from Union Station. For graphic design lovers like us, exploring the vast collection of stamps was an insufferably nerdy delight. But what truly won us over was this guy:
Owney (as photographed here by Hope) was a 19th-century mutt who was adopted as a mascot when he wouldn’t stop hanging around the Albany post office. Eventually someone let him start riding the mail trains, and people around the country gave him medals and crap. So after he died they stuffed him and made him a national treasure.
God bless our Postal Service!