North Texas Giving Day

A chance to support the arts in North Texas... with a little extra ooomph!

Kind people have pledged extra money to multiply your own kindness.  Now, there are lots of worthy groups, but I'd like call to your especial attention to theater in general and Kitchen Dog Theater in particular.

Your help is gratefully appreciated!

Two Things...

Two completely unrelated things:

First:

Whenever you're shopping on Amazon, please consider using the Amazon Smile page HERE where you can select Kitchen Dog Theater as recipient of free money! (Amazon donates 0.5% of qualified purchases.)  

Please and Thank You!  We're saving to fix up our future Dog House so we appreciate every penny.

Second:

A lovely and timely quote from Henry David Thoreau...

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion...

till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place which we can call reality and say, 

"This is and no mistake."

Isn't that a wonderful image?  

Courtesy of PublicDomainPicture.net

Anyone who's ever sat on a riverbank wriggling their toes in the green-y mud down to the cool, water-smoothed limestone below, you know how reassuring that solid, non-slip footing is.

Today - when life and especially politics! - seem especially slimy with opinion and lies... well, a fact that's an actual FACT is a comfort.  I believe strongly that at this moment it is our civic duty to wriggle down through the muck to find truth.  

Then to act on that.

The surface under our feet is shifting at this moment - rules for healthcare, the environment, the internet, education, immigration, trade, foreign wars and relations - all  changing.  We need to let our legislators know what we need and want RIGHT NOW.  

We each need to figure out what truth we stand on.

(Thanks to Chris Tucker's review of the new Thoreau biography for reminding me of this Walden quote.  Time to reread that book... and to look for that new bio: Thoreau: a Life by Laura Dassow Walls.)

Hooch & Pooch!

HOOCH & POOCH

David Carl’s Celebrity One-Man Hamlet

Gala Performance: March 25th
Additional Performances: March 26th 

The only Texas appearance of the critically acclaimed and wildly hilarious one-man show-David Carl's Celebrity One Man Hamlet. Details on the show here: http://www.buseyhamlet.com/

Gala Night is  Saturday March 25^{th   -} 7:30pm- 12am with sips, snacks, a small silent auction, and a DJ after the show. Additional performances of the show on Sunday at 2p & 7:30p. 

More Coolo NASA Travel Posters

NASA has the best travel posters!

I wrote about some of their earlier posters HERE.  Well, they're at it again - repeated graphic excellence.  Check out the new posters HERE.

NASA travel poster!

Isn't that gorgeous?  Just makes you want to buy a ticket to far star-strewn places doesn't it?  Between NASA's poster campaign and the new Star Wars films space is suddenly cool again... maybe we'll get that Mars Colony in my life time.

And now that I've set up an inevitable and not-in-my-favor comparison, let me show you some more of the protest postcards I've been designing lately.  (Protest?  Why ever?)

A handy be-kind-not-cruel card to send to legislators about immigration issues.  

A health-care issues postcard.

And, for ticked-off women who, whatever your politics, are annoyed by powerful men
Not Listening...

In my head the Statue of Liberty is starting to live quite a heroic superhero adventure.  The perfect avitar for this moment in American history.

Please, if you're writing to your congressional representative or senator and you like a postcard design, feel free to print 'em and use 'em.  Pass 'em on!  

(Print on card stock at 4 1/4" x 6" or stuff, any sized, in an envelope.)

Oh, and don't forget the artsy one - the arts need all the help they can get:

From a behind-the-curtain artist's view, all these designs are collages done with computer image / photo editing software (rather than scissors and glue) from public domain images.  Turns out, for me at least, political upset means a chance to hone my computer / art skills!  Who knew?  So, if our American Experiment slides into Authoritarian Tyranny, maybe I can at least get work as a Propaganda Poster Hack.  Who knows? 

Or they'll need artists on Mars.

And, before I lose this stickynote again, here's a gem of a topical poem I found in the NY Times written by Susan McLean:

Trump seethes at what the writers say.

He'll pull the plug on the N.E.A.

The jokes on him. Art doesn't pay.

We write our satires anyway.

Theater for All!

Kitchen Dog Theater is proud to announce our new accessibility initiative: Admit:ALL - which provides 20 FREE tickets to every KDT performance this season (after opening nights) for those otherwise unable to afford them. 

These tickets will be available at the box office on a first come-first serve basis. Arrive half an hour before showtime and just ask for an Admit:ALL ticket! 

BIG THANKS to Communities Foundation of Texas for the seed grant to get this program off the ground! 

Paper Flowers - running now through March 11th. To see a full calendar of performance dates- go to kitchendogtheater.org 

Up is Down, Black is White

Feel like America has fallen Through the Looking Glass?

Me too.

Anyway.  

Whenever you're talking to, emailing, faxing, writing to, or protesting at your senator or representative on the latest Outrage du Jour, please remember to mention NEA funding too.  The National Endowment for the Arts supports all sorts of art - it's especially important in getting arts into the countryside and into smaller towns, where students (or adults) wouldn't otherwise have art funding at all.  

My personal experience of NEA support comes mostly from Kitchen Dog Theater, where for five consecutive years (the only Texas theater who can say this!) we have received national funding for our New Works Festival.  

New plays by living American writers!

If you do feel moved to write your congressional folk, you're welcome to use this postcard:

Please feel free to use - print at 4 1/4" x 6" on card stock

This year will be Kitchen Dog's 19th New Works Festival.  In our time we've produced 26 world premiers of new plays and 125 staged readings of new works.  That's NEW work by living writers.

Please help us - and all those other artists that count on it - by helping the NEA.

Inauguration Day

Well, Donald Trump gets sworn in today.

Yesterday's political-news leak was that his proposed budget cuts spending for the Arts and Humanities to $ 0.

The Hill's Alexander Bolton reports that Brian Darling, a former Heritage Foundation staffer now a Paul Ryan aide, said about this budget:

"The Trump Administration needs to reform and cut spending dramatically, and 

targeting waste like the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be a good first step ..."

Sure, every civilization up till today has created its Great Public Art - pyramids, Versailles, operas, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Bolshoi Ballet, Muppets - art that survives its era and glorifies it.  Historically, it is Art that makes a civilization remembered as great.  

Or remembered at all.

But that junk's all "waste" so why should the United States of America spend a nickel?

Sistine-Trump

public domain image messed with

ADDENDUM:
The Washington Post has a good article on the stupidity of this "budget" idea HERE.

Addendum #2:
Need the dollars and cents?  According to the NEA, the arts adds $700 billion - that's $700,000,000,000 - to the American economy every year and employs 5 million Americans.  For comparison, the oil and gas industry (as best I can figure out) employs around 2.1 million workers - less than half!

Watch a nice NEA film:

A New Dog House! A New Kitchen Dog Theater Home!

We did it!

Or, at least, we've taken the first big BIG step toward a new, permanent, we-own-it! home for Kitchen Dog Theater.

Woohoo!

The Dallas Morning News has a big article about it HERE.  (Give it a few clicks, eh?)

Basic facts?  A wonderful and anonymous couple gave us a challenge grant for $ 500,000 last fall if we could raise $125,000 (in a very short time)... which we did!  This generous gift became the cornerstone of our house hunt and allowed us to JUST CLOSE THE DEAL on a great building in the northernmost edge of Dallas' Design District.  

About perfect.

It'll be a while - 2018 - before we move in, but that's much needed time to plan, design, remodel, and raise yet more money.  Our goal is to own our new theatrical home free and clear.  It's going to be so... so... homey to have a place of our very own.  

So, if you've got a spare nickle, please toss it our way: Kitchen Dogs would be very grateful!  And, to those Anonymous Heroes, huge, grateful thanks!  If I never learn their names I may just have to hug every ticket-buyer I meet.

New Years, New Fun Stuff to Do

Traditionally, this time of year is a chance to wrap up last year's business and start fresh with the next year's.  Oddly enough, my own Last Year did round off to a natural conclusion (except for tax-filing) and This Year's projects seem to be starting up promptly.  It's not always so tidy.  

So what's up for this year?

First on my board are designs for I'm Gonna Pray For You So Hard at Kitchen Dog Theater (just now working on construction drawings), Clever Little Lies at Circle Theatre (just starting its build), and Kind Lady at Mainstage  Irving - Los Colinas (which needs me to Get Going!).  Probably the shiniest show I'm looking forward to so far is A Winter's Tale for Trinity Shakespeare this summer.  Summer Shakespeare in air conditioning!  What a concept!

First thing though is to clean up my studio so I can work.  During the holidays the room tends to become a dumping ground for wrapping paper, ribbon, and all-the-stuff-to-hide-from-company.  As studios do.

So what rounded out Last Year so nicely?  Kitchen Dog met its fundraising challenge!  It's only a first step, but it's a very BIG first step on the path to creating our own permanent home.

Every Dog's Home is its Dream Castle...

Fervent thanks to all those who helped us!  Sincerely.  We are so grateful.  

Now time to dig out my own ol' Dream Desk here...

Update on the Dog House Challenge

We're at 90% people!

Just need that liiiitttttle bit more to reach our goal and meet the ever-so-kind fund raising challenge grant.  So, if you have just an extra $1... please think of contributing toward Kitchen Dog Theater's new home before the end of the year: your single dollar bill can become $6, just like that!

HERE's the donation page.  

Here's the story: our hard-working (and award-winning) theater company recently lost our home of twenty years.  Our goal is to own our own performance space.  There are all sorts of possibilities - as an architect and designer I'm pretty excited.  But first we need to prove to our generous challenge backers that we can get our friends excited and raise actual money.  

I, personally, have donated.  Till it hurt.  So... please, as you clean up between the holidays, scrounge all the change you can find from under your sofa cushions and send it to us!  

Please Help the Dogs Find a Good Home.

Kickstarter is Kickin'!

I've written about Kickstarter before, when a friend used this crowd-finance site to fund his short film Perfectly Normal.

Yesterday Kickstarter made big news - and big numbers of fans very very happy - when the campaign to film a Veronica Mars movie reached its two (2) million (2,000,000!) dollar goal in eleven (11) hours.  (I myself kicked in enough to get a film T-shirt.)

In case you missed it on TV or DVD, Veronica Mars is a witty, noire, teen-detective show that was canceled about five (5) years ago... but remains loved.  Now revived from the dead by pure fan-love.

Crowd-funding.  What a great idea!

HERE's the Veronica Mars campaign - with a fun video plea.  And HERE is the page for my buddy's much smaller budget short film - also worth investing in.

ADDENDUM:  And HERE's an interesting LA Times article about the Veronica Mars film funding "...the economics of love."

Woohoo! Arts Funding

Terrific news! Kitchen Dog Theater has been awarded a sizable NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) grant to support its new play festival this coming spring.

One of only four theater grants in Texas.

This is a huge boost.  Thank you NEA!  We'll put your funding money to good use.

Now for something completely different...

My printer, Lulu.com, is having a buy-it-in-time-for-Christmas sale on my how-to theater design book Alice Through the Proscenium.  You can find out more about Alice  HERE at Squidoo or see the Lulu.com page HERE.  Don't forget the secret-santa-saving code word!

And, if you like, you can think of this purchase too as Funding for the Arts... because I'm in the throes of starting a sequel to Alice Through the Proscenium, which is about scenery design, with a new volume about scenery building.  

I've gotten such a great response to my Squidoo page "Theater Set Questions Answered" that it's become obvious to me that there is a throng of desperate readers just waiting for such a book to be written.  Take heart! Gentle Readers, it will (eventualllllly) come.  Meanwhile, there's a lot on set construction and painting in Alice... available in soft covers at Lulu.com or as an epub book for NOOK etc. at Barnes and Noble HERE. 

Kickstarter

Most of us have now at least heard about Kickstarter, an innovative way to crowd-fund arts projects: ask publicly for pledges (kinda like NPR does) and, if enough people are interested in your project and they pledge enough money to meet the stated goal before the deadline - Viola! - cash for creation!  The tricky part is that a goal has to be fully funded if the project is to get any money.  So The Word has got to Get Out.

A knuckle-biter.

Well, that friend I told y'all about raising funds for a short film Perfectly Normal... made his $ 20,000 goal!  (More HERE.)

So... Kickstarter works.  At least some of the time.  Good to know.

Kickstarter image from gigaom.com POST