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Professional acting, dancing and singing in the theater can financially support a good life.

That is….if you consistently book jobs acting, singing or dancing in a theatre associated with professional unions and therefore get actually useful paychecks. To get paid for what one loves to do …well…that’s sort of the point, right? Ideally? Of course. And the television, film and recording industries can make even women wealthy, in fact, enviably so…look at Taylor Swift and any number of top liners in popular television shows…show business can be very good business for the performer, and often is.

Everyone knows by now, though, that that is not always the case.

Parents are slow to allow their kids to go into show business because they fear their child will starve or die in a gutter in some large cold city that has ignored them. And this particular story line has been proven real a lot. Show biz is hard, competitive, grueling, fickle, cruel, cold, haughty, infuriating, exasperating,……and yet….and yet….somehow, fine as well. That is because it is a world fueled by a wonderful form of human passion: that eternal need to communicate and gather together around the village campfire. People in show business, no matter the level of achievement, are viewed as stars and therefore admired and paid because stars shine bright in a dim, dark world. Light is valuable, even if it is streaming from your local amateur theater group’s dullest effort. Light is light is light.

Light is proof we are not all by ourselves in the night.

Light warms us, shows us the way, makes the scary critters scurry back where they came from.
But then again , even those scary critters need Light.
A lot of it.

A profession in the Business of Show allows the performer to generate that light, to prove that the Light comes from within and does needed things for others. That’s a powerful lure. So powerful, in fact, that, quite often, far more people fling themselves into the profession than there are jobs to support them, that is true….BUT, no matter: they PERSIST! Take classes, go to audition after audition in the early morning cold, have agents who ignore them, competition that flattens them, take on jobs as food servers and nannies to pay the rent. And then they go to the next tap class that they can now afford because of that “day job” and bravely present their talents at the next possible audition.

This, my friends, as foolish as it may seem, is Love.
And show business people live on it,….thrive on it.
But, since when has Love ever been anything but foolish?
It is and always has been a sort of madness, this Love thing….there is no art form that does not deal with that pure unavoidable truth: Love is a driving force that maddens as well as gladdens. It is fuel for living.
Certainly the fuel for creating.

Love is quicksilver that appears in so many different forms to so many different people, we often mistake it for something else, like Terror or Rage….or Meanness …or Determination…all the things that make show business a difficult business.

But those of us who have spent their existences in show business have always lived on this Love with a sort of dutiful devotion that allows us to sleep at night and get up the next morning ready to go on.

And on and on and on…..
Even into retirement.

I no longer perform, but I live still on the Love of it.
It is my heart.