There’s a high school musical in jeopardy? Quick, to the Howardmobile.

I’m kidding, of course. But when I got an e-mail at 11:30 a.m. yesterday, saying that parents and groups were going to protest a production of Sweeney Todd at Amity Regional High School in Woodbridge CT at that evening’s board of education meeting, I was extremely, nerve-janglingly upset. While I have spoken out against censorship of high school productions before, most vocally in Waterbury CT, and written about other such efforts as well, this threatened action struck a bit too close to home.

Howard’s back. And this time it’s personal.

Amity was my high school, where I acted in six shows between 1977 and 1980, where I was recognized for my professional work in theatre by being inducted into the school’s “hall of fame.” I was still in high school when I saw the original Broadway production of Sweeney Todd with a group of friends, chaperoned by one of our English teachers. Second only to Buried Child, Sweeney was a major part of why I chose a career in the theatre.

I happen to have Angela Lansbury right here.

I immediately reached out to the drama teacher, the school’s principal and a member of the school board. My instinct was to rush up to the meeting to speak on behalf of the show, but I didn’t want to inflame the situation, or be seen as an outsider, carpetbagging my way into a local issue. I also didn’t want to go if I wouldn’t be allowed to speak. In the meantime I thought, ‘Dammit, if only I had a day’s notice. I would call Hal, I would try to reach Mr. Sondheim, to gather letters of support. I even checked my “world clock” to see what time it was in Australia, where Angela Lansbury is currently performing in Driving Miss Daisy. Alas, she was presumably asleep, and likely wouldn’t rise before the board of ed meeting; otherwise, she is a rapid e-mail responder.

What we have here is a failure to communicate

When I was told by the school board member who I had contacted that my voice would be welcomed at the meeting, I did rush to rent a car. While the bright blue Honda hybrid from Zipcar was hardly the Batmobile, it whisked me to Connecticut, filled with a sense of purpose, as I thought all the while of what to say. I hadn’t had time to write anything; I was going to have to wing it. ‘Avoid inadvertent puns,’ I told myself. ‘Remember you can’t say that the opposition is half-baked, or that this is an issue of taste. You can’t risk inadvertent laughter. Listen and respond to the other speakers. Don’t talk about yourself. This is about the show, the school and the kids.’

No man is a failure who has friends

Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, there was rapid circulation of the situation among many people with whom I went to high school, and though I drove up on a lone mission, I was ultimately joined at the meeting by one of my drama club friends and by my sister, whose older daughter is a senior in the school. My brother, with whom I was not on speaking terms during high school, apologized that he couldn’t be at the meeting to support me and support the production. I learned that one of the “parent liaisons” to the drama club was the sister-in-law of one of my very closest friends and she welcomed me with a hug; her daughter is the stage manager for Sweeney Todd. The Facebook network reached out into the Connecticut media, resulting in a TV crew from the NBC affiliate; my own tweets and Facebook notice alerted The New York Times to the story.

They agreed to a sit-down

The meeting about the drama group was, ultimately, not one of high drama. A member of the clergy spoke first, saying her reservations arose from an interfaith leadership meeting two weeks prior, at which there was discussion about how to curb representations of violence, in the wake of the Newtown massacre. Several parents questioned the choice of the play and wondered whether there weren’t other vehicles available. One of those parents had a child in the show, and she wasn’t pulling her child from it, despite her own reservations. Others spoke of the story’s long history, of the musical’s fame, of the high regard in which Stephen Sondheim is held. So even when I stood up, with notes scribbled moments before, I was not in a lion’s den, but in the midst of a respectful exchange of ideas. (A balanced report appeared in The New Haven Register this morning.)

And so, from my off-the-cuff, at times ungrammatical, remarks: “Stephen Sondheim, who has already been lauded here, is very famous for a song that he wrote in another one of his other musicals in which we hear the line ‘Art isn’t easy.’ Creating art isn’t easy and the content of art isn’t easy…Sweeney Todd can create a learning opportunity. The responsibility of schools is to create a context for young people to understand the world around them and as much as we may want to keep that world away for as long as possible, it is not possible. While we can choose to do other works of literature, to read other books, to sing other songs, we are denying them the opportunity to learn.”

Stand down, but remain alert

No one demanded that the show be stopped. No vote was asked for or taken, and the board listened without response, since the whole discussion was not on the official agenda, but was merely part of “public comment.” To call it civil suggests a frostiness I did not feel, to call it polite suggests underlying anger. Might there be repercussions down the line, as some seek to exert authority over what can and can’t be performed in future years? That’s possible. If so, if welcome, I’ll be at those meetings as well.

I noted in my remarks that this was not an isolated incident, that censorship of high school theatre happens all too often. Some may dismiss it as merely a school problem, but it is important to anyone who loves theatre or believes in the value of the arts. Yes, I have taken up the cause of allowing students to grapple with challenging material before, and while yesterday struck particularly close to home, I’ll speak out in support of threatened high school drama whenever I hear about opposition (sorry, no Grapes of Wrath paraphrase at this point).

But I have only one hometown, one high school. The only way we can insure freedom of expression, freedom in the arts in teens – who will be our future artists and our future audiences – is if we are all aware of what is taking place near us, or back home, and if we speak out.

*   *   *

Addendum, March 16, 10 am: On the Friday immediately following the Board of Education meeting described above, which took place on a Monday evening, Dr. Charles Britton, principal of Amity Regional High School, sent the following e-mail to the district. I hope it becomes a model for other schools that face such challenges:

“This past week, the media widely reported some objections that have been raised against this year’s spring production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Some members of the Amity community and parents believe this production is too graphic for a high school audience. The administration and Drama Department at Amity High School respectfully disagree with these objections. The production is PG-13 and designed for a high school level audience. The show is produced in high schools across the nation. When carefully considering all academic material for Amity students, the faculty and administration at Amity never select material that is gratuitously violent or purposefully titillating in nature. All material is selected for the deeper meaning and value of the work of art, literature, or related academic resource. In the hands of talented teachers and directors, this academic material engages students more effectively and promotes our efforts to stimulate critical and creative thinking.”

*   *   *

Addendum, March 16, 3 pm: I have discovered some additional local reporting on the Sweeney Todd discussion, and will provide links with no comment, other than to say that it is worth reading not only the articles, but the comments that follow each of them. It is also worth noting which outlets reported from the event, and which reported solely from other news reports.

“Controversy Over Sweeney Todd: Let’s Take a Breath Here,” from The Naugatuck Patch, March 11

“Sweeney Todd Pros and Cons Aired at Amity High,” from The Orange Patch, March 12

“Sweeney Todd Protest: Residents Denounce Staging of Violent Musical at Connecticut High School,” from The Huffington Post, March 12, updated March 14

Nonprofit? Not-for-profit?

Do you have a preference between the two? Do you use them interchangeably? Has your company determined a “house style” for the use of one over the other?

This may seem a semantic game, but I would argue that it is vastly more important than the “er vs. re” argument that rears its head over the spelling of theatre every so often. That silly debate is largely etymological and cultural, while this one is about meaning and understanding.

To get the simplest issue out of the way: hyphens are primarily a style issue. It may stem from the country you live in, or what manual you use as a guide. The hyphen is, basically, irrelevant, at least in regards to meaning.

Legally, there is no real difference between “nonprofit” and “not-for-profit.” Numerous resources confirm that they are essentially interchangeable, save for the Internal Revenue Service. Our friends at the I.R.S. say that “not-for-profit” is an activity which does not undertake to produce revenue, like a hobby, while “nonprofit” is an organization that doesn’t seek to make a profit from its activities, and does not consist of individuals or shareholders who personally benefit from the revenues of the company. You can find helpful descriptions of these terms at Idealist and Grammarist; the Merriam Webster online dictionary is caught in a endless loop, merely defining one as the other.So for organizations’ fine print on fundraising solicitations, since that’s about tax benefits for donations and status with the I.R.S., “nonprofit” appears to be the correct term. But we don’t speak in strict I.R.S. language on a daily basis, and that’s where my interest lies.

Although numerous sources say nonprofit and not-for-profit are interchangeable, I think they carry different connotations. On a purely anecdotal basis, I have arrived at a preference between them; it would be fascinating to test them to see if this bears out.

Over the course of my career, I’ve had a number of occasions where I have been asked to explain what a “non/not-for” company is (for the moment, before I explain my conclusion, I’d like to hedge and call these “N/NF”s). While it has always been second nature to me, and to the people I talk with on a daily basis, it’s actually not something, apparently, that comes up in a lot of people’s education, institutionally or practically. It almost seems anomalous for those working outside of fields where the status is prevalent (social service, health, religion, arts).

My friend Michael, who has an engineering degree, summed up the confusion best when, years ago, he said to me, “So your company can’t make a profit, right? What’s with that?” And that’s where my semantic preference was born, after what was a very lengthy conversation.

While N/NF’s are focused on generating profit, they are not forbidden from ending their fiscal years showing one. Certainly many N/NFs struggle to get out of the red and into the black, but it is hardly unheard of for these organizations to yield a surplus (a more proper term than “profit” in this context). Where they differ from commercial enterprises is that the funds stay within the company; they’re not distributed to partners, workers or shareholders. In fact, when these groups seek funds, donors often like to see that they’ve had a surplus: not so small that it looks like bookkeeping shenanigans, not so large that it looks like they don’t need support or are operating too close to a for-profit mentality.

Consequently, I have developed a strong resistance to “nonprofit,” because it seems to suggest that any company operating under that status is prohibited from showing a surplus. Secondly, I think it also suggests that the organization is the opposite of profitable, which to many businesspeople, would indicate failure. Without profit, how does a business survive? While those who travel in the significant universe of N/NF organizations may have no confusion, those we seek to cultivate and secure as donors may experience significant cognitive dissonance when they encounter “nonprofit business.” To some, it may be an outright oxymoron.

I think that “not-for-profit” suggests a mindset, rather than an operational stricture. It does not seem so hard and fast as to preclude profit or, again, surplus. It intimates that the company has something else on its mind, whether it be fostering the creation of art or assisting those in need. It doesn’t mean we can’t succeed financially beyond breaking even, and that exceeding that goal is wrong; it means that when we do, we use the funds to further the organization’s goals. I think “not-for-profit” is less likely to prompt people to an immediate conclusion, and while it may open up a conversation, that can only be to a company’s benefit.

Yes, perhaps it’s just the English major in me that invests “-for-“ with such meaning, but coupled with my real-life experiences, I’ve come to believe there’s more to it than that. I don’t expect you to just take my word for it; at least have a conversation with the key communicators in your organization about it, test it, make a decision. This may be a question of degree and nuance in the words we choose to speak and write, but to everyone fighting the good fight in not-for-profits, every little advantage helps. Even if that advantage is simply two hyphens and three letters.

P.S. For those in the arts, god save us all from “charitable.”

Does this ornate type treatment represent your view of “the arts”?

Art. The arts. Fine arts. Performing arts. Visual arts. The lively arts. Arts & entertainment. Arts & culture.  Culture. High culture. Pop culture.

The preceding phrases are all, on a very macro basis, variations on a theme. However, were you in a research study, and I showed you each of them, one at a time, I daresay they would provoke very distinct associations, very clear delineations of what each encompasses in your mind. Those responses would also likely change depending upon the order in which I showed these to you.

I could also take any two and combine them in a Venn diagram and the overlapping segment would be quite clear. But incorporate a third or fourth and you might find one of these categories the odd man out.

Why do I bring this up? Because as the “arts community” fights its valiant, essential and never-ending battle to convince the public at large of the value of “the arts,” I cannot help but wonder whether those on the receiving end of such messaging each hear very different things when these words are presented to them. I’m prompted to these thoughts by a variety of “real world” examples and experiences, some quite personal. I’m hoping that perhaps someone will want to test my assumptions.

Perhaps this modern treatment is how you like to think of “the arts”?

Visit the websites of a few newspapers. The New York Times “Arts” section is a big tent, where theatre, dance and opera fit in alongside movies, TV, books, and pop music; only on Fridays in the New York edition do they distinguish between performing arts and fine arts, by dividing them into two printed sections. The Huffington Post (to which I contribute) combined “Arts” and “Culture” not so long ago under the “vertical” of “Arts,” but you’ll find that “Entertainment” is something altogether different – and more prominent. In The Washington Post, there’s an “Entertainment” section, in which “Theater & Dance” is a subset. In The Philadelphia Inquirer, “Arts,” “Movies” and “Music” are separate sections of “Entertainment,” but music is really only “popular music,” while classical work is part of “arts.”  I won’t go on.

If you found the foregoing paragraph confusing, imagine what messages audiences are receiving, outlet by outlet, city by city. Even as “popular culture” and “high culture” have supposedly grown closer over the years, there’s labeling and categorization that seek to draw barriers between the various forms. Even if it’s for purely organizational reasons on a website, it carries forward potentially divisive messages about the various forms.

I’ll take The Ramones over Rachmaninoff any day. Gabba gabba hey!

Now, a different tack, rather more personal. On a macro basis, I would certainly self-identify, and those who know me would (I hope) concur, that I support “the arts,” not merely in venues, but in education, in our lives. But when it comes to being a consumer of “the arts,” I am rather more narrow, with theatre paramount. Although I can read music (haltingly, these days) thanks to a brief stint of cello lessons in elementary school and a year or so of formal guitar lessons in junior high, as well as my recollection of many a “young people’s concert” in my childhood, I rarely attend classical music concerts or listen to classical music at home, despite a small collection of some of the great works on CD. I don’t mind classical music, but I don’t retain it, I don’t connect with it; in contrast with my public persona, I’ll take The Ramones, Ben Folds or Elvis Costello any day of the week.

I’m even less attuned to opera, despite having had a college housemate who was a devotee and proselytizer. Recently, when I expressed this gap in my cultural appreciation on Twitter, Tom Godell, general manager of WUKY in Lexington, generously started suggesting works I should sample. When I replied with a list of operas I have seen (among them I Lombardi, The Turn of the Screw, The Magic Flute, Wozzeck, La Boheme and Tosca), he realized that I had indeed made a good faith effort on behalf of opera. It simply didn’t take.

My entire study of art history came in this box. As a result, when I visit museums, I try to guess the artist of each work from afar.

I am an avid consumer of movies (in theatres, as they’re meant to be seen) and TV, some high art, some lowbrow. I try to visit major museums (a vestige of a board game called “Masterpiece” that I owned as a child), but if there’s an aquarium nearby, that’ll top the list.  Whatever you do, please don’t ask me to draw anything, which triggers childhood traumas that are only one notch below gym and recess.

When we make the case for the arts, it is essential to understand that not everyone hears the same thing, or is stirred by the same discipline. Just because one supports “the arts” doesn’t mean that they therefore have an affinity for every form of art and we cannot judge those who don’t share our particular passion, nor can we necessarily convert them, as if all they need is simply more familiarity.

I perpetually warn of the dangers of “talking to ourselves” in the arts, by which I mean that we spend so much time with likeminded people – our co-workers, our friends, our existing audience members – that we assume that everyone shares our understanding and commitment to the arts as a whole. But the moment we step outside our self-created universe in order to draw in others – or to draw in their time or their money – our common language is not necessarily understood in the way we assume it to be.

My entertainment may be your high culture. Your art may be sculpture, while mine may be a script. One size does not fit all. So when we argue on behalf of the arts, we need to think more about customizing our arguments for each audience, for each affinity group. And even that, while increasingly a science, is unto itself an art.

As I write late in the evening prior to the second TEDx Broadway conference, I find myself wondering how much the presentations tomorrow will focus on plays, which have become the poor stepchild of The Great White Way.

Over the summer, I wrote about Narrow Chances For New Broadway Musicals and considered Do Revivals Inhibit Broadway Musicals? I counted the most produced playwrights in recent years in The Broadway Scorecard: Two Decades of Drama and, responding to what I saw at a glance as some misguided copy in the promotion of tomorrow’s event, I spoke out strongly with the declaration False Equivalency: Broadway Is Not The American Theatre.  Embedded in these posts were data, analysis — and my opinion — depicting Broadway as it is, not as some might perhaps wish it would be. As I noted in these posts, musicals dominate Broadway, both new and revivals, with roughly 80% of all Broadway grosses coming from musicals, even if the number of plays produced in most seasons outnumber new musical productions. Plays are admired, but when it comes to defining Broadway, the musicals by and large grab the lion’s share of money and attention.

That said, there’s one more, rather simple, data set that’s worth having in mind as tweets, blogs and news reports slice and dice tomorrow’s event (and I’ll be among those doing so). Here’s a listing of the Pulitzer Prizes for Drama and the Tony Award winners for Best Play, from 1984 to the present. I’m not suggesting that these awards are the final word on plays of quality, and awards success hardly guarantees box office success, but the two prizes provide a manageable universe for study. Why 1984? It’s an arbitrary choice, to be sure; it’s also the year I graduated college and went to work in the professional theatre, a microcosm of the celebrated plays of my theatrical career.

The honored plays above, shorn of duplicates as well as the years the Pulitzers honored musicals, make up a total of 43 different works that were recognized for achievements in playwriting in 29 years. Only nine works appear on both lists and The Pulitzers are only for American plays, which helps to reduce duplication.

Now here’s the key question: how many of those works actually had their world premieres on Broadway? The answer: only five. Those plays were Rabbit Hole, Lost In Yonkers, The Goat, The Last Night Of Ballyhoo and M. Butterfly. The others all began in not for profit U.S. venues, as close as Off-Broadway or as far as Seattle, or in subsidized or commercial venues in Ireland, England, and Europe. That’s not to say that there weren’t worthy plays that weren’t recognized which may have been produced directly on Broadway, but the ones that reaped the conventionally accepted big awards didn’t begin there. In the Pulitzer list, there are many that never played Broadway, at least in their original incarnations, as I discussed in At Long Last Broadway.

So as the future of Broadway is a subject on many minds in the next 24 to 36 hours, it’s worth remembering that strikingly few new plays debut there, as they commonly did in the days before the resident theatre movement really bloomed. If plays are to make their marks in Broadway history under the existing models of production, they need to be discovered, birthed and nourished elsewhere. National and international recognition may still be New York-centric, but the most honored works start overwhelmingly just about everywhere other than Broadway. Could that ever change? Should it? And if the answer is yes, then how?

I wanted to title this particular post, “Theatres: Hotbeds of Disease,” but that seemed, after due consideration, to be a bit alarmist and a potential deterrent to attendance. That is not my wish. However, it is extremely apt that just as I prepared to write this, I retrieved a message from my friend Mark, who referred to coming into New York as ‘entering a giant petri dish.’ Not a quote for the tourism posters, to say the least.

We are, as the news has been alerting us hourly, in the midst of a significant outbreak of the flu, which, when it was called influenza in the books we read as young adults, seemed more appropriately alarming. The contagion has blanketed the country and wherever you go, you hear people talking about feeling like they’re getting sick or how sick they were, accompanied by tweets and posts from people in the throes of illness.

Any place where people gather carries enormous risk for the uninfected and residual risk for the uninoculated: theatres certainly fit the bill, but so do schools, offices, mass transportation, stores and, worst of all, doctors’ waiting rooms and hospital ER’s. Anyone remember the rather horrifying scenes of microscopic droplets entering the noses and mouths of a movie theatre audience in the film Outbreak? Maybe it should be required viewing just about now.

We’re told, again and again, that the best deterrent is frequent hand-washing with soap and warm water. But while countless public places offer touchless Purell dispensers, I have been struck in the past couple of weeks by how many theatres, live and movie both, seem to have taken the Victorian workhouse approach to manual hygiene. Put more simply: why don’t they have, now or ever, warm water in rest room sinks?

In my highly unscientific study, not one venue restroom offers sink water above a temperature that might be politely called frigid. Dual faucets seem to simply mock us, each producing the same icy stream; the increasingly prevalent motion sensor faucets offer us no thermal options and dispense water somewhat arbitrarily.  This strikes me as a major break in the chain of public health and personal hygiene.

Mind you, I understand that people are unwilling to stay home when they have tickets for a live performance, especially when no exchange or refund is offered. I can’t hit the, “if you don’t feel well, stay home” note very strongly, as it falls on deaf ears (though we can dream). However, in my more controlling moments, I do wish we could require anyone who coughs or sneezes more than once during a performance or screening to wear a surgical mask; if we go masked at Sleep No More, why should there be any stigma about obscuring one’s nose and mouth in public for the benefit of others (I once saw a show which passed medical masks out to the audience, but for effect, not prophylaxis). And while we all wish the coughers in particular would stay home, as they disturb both the audience and performers in live theatres, I recall in years past Ricola sponsoring bins of cough drops at classical concert venues; perhaps that effort could be renewed or expanded in an effort to silence those around us.

But let’s start with the basics. Even though the production of hot water has a real expense, I think theatre owners and operators might push the thermostat on the hot water heater up to a minimally therapeutic level (whatever that may be) during a national epidemic, at least. Aside from helping to stem disease, which is no small matter, you’ll please your patrons and keep theatres busier because, as someone surely said at some point: warm hands, warm hearts. And I imagine we’d all rather be producing hits instead of illness.

Yes, the eagle is missing and it’s drained of color. Intentionally.

Trustworthy? Loyal? Helpful? Friendly? Courteous? Kind? I don’t think so.

I think the leadership of the Boy Scouts of America has abandoned its right to claim these words that are part of their “law,” with their actions both today and in the past. The failure to protect boys from sexual predators in their midst, the dogged refusal to reveal information about those crimes until forced to do so, and the emphatic stand against gay scouts and leaders combine to make this an organization that has successfully managed, at its top levels, to destroy its honored traditions.

While those who know me as an adult find something incongruous in the fact that I was a Boy Scout, I was one for many years. I started in Cub Scouts, participated in the oft-forgotten Webelos, and then spent much of my junior high and high school years as a full-fledged Boy Scout, holding pretty much every leadership position at the youth level. I even spent several summers at Boy Scout camps, including a strange but rigorous stint in their leadership training course.

I began to drift away from active scouting beginning in 10th grade, when I fully discovered my love of performing, specifically theatre. Monthly camping trips came into conflict with drama club performances, as well as chorus concerts. Of course, I was not simply trading one activity for another. I was gravitating towards my true calling in life, equipped with some of the knowledge and experience I gained from Boy Scouts.

During my days in the Scouts, I have to confess to an almost complete lack of knowledge of homosexuality; “gay” wasn’t in my vocabulary when it came to sexual orientation, though it was a word of undefinable denigration. No one I knew was “out”; such a thing was invisible if not inconceivable in suburban life in the mid-1970s. In hindsight, surely there were young men in my scout troop struggling with their sexuality in those still deeply repressive days; meeting some of them later, as adults, has made clear that there had indeed been gay young men beside me.  Though I wasn’t an antagonist to them (at least I hope not), I wish I knew and understood then what I know now, so that I might have been a better leader for everyone, and a better friend.

But to be honest, sexuality was irrelevant to the activities of scouting. There was no merit badge for picking up women, no rank that required knowledge of strictly traditional sexual matters. We were there to learn about the outdoors – hiking, camping, orienteering – but there was recognition for writing, reading, music and drama as well. Only now, looking back at an oath I used to recite often do I spy the language of restriction and oppression. Obey? Morally straight? The seeds were always there, but I was too naive to understand.

As for sexual assaults by leaders on Scouts, revealed in files kept by national Scout organization, acts which took place during the time I was a scout? Of course we now know that such violations were sadly too common in both rigidly hierarchical structures and in family rec rooms. At the time, I never heard even a whisper of such things. The adult leadership of my troop, including my own dad, were role models, men I cared for deeply, all gone now. I believe they were there with the best of intentions, and nothing has ever suggested otherwise. But I shudder to think what was kept from view in the national “perversion files,” even if my troop was free of assault.

Early yesterday, there were news reports of a California Scout council going against the national prohibition on gay Scouts and gay adult leaders by recommending an openly gay former Scout for the vaunted rank of Eagle. It gave hope to many like me who revile the organization’s anti-gay stance. By last night, those hopes were dashed as the national council denied the award, destroying the brief chance of finding a chink in the armor of prejudice that has come to represent this organization that once meant so much to me.

Growing up, my parents largely let me find my own way in life, because I was so self-motivated in all things, and fairly immovable about the things for which I had no affinity or interest. However, I do recall my father lobbying me, without subtlety, in an effort to get me to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout. “I know men who talk about being an Eagle Scout as being one of their proudest achievements in life,” he’d say. “You’re so close to getting it, How, don’t miss out. I don’t want you to regret it.”

In point of fact, I have never regretted not making Eagle Scout. That is, until now.

I wish I had that symbol of the ultimate achievement, that silver eagle hanging from a tiny banner of red white and blue. Because I would take it, put it in an envelope, and send it back to National Boy Scout Headquarters, in the most concrete rejection of the Boy Scouts that I can imagine. If I was unaware as a youth to the organization’s insensitivity, I can legitimately claim naïveté. But as an adult, I have only contempt for this profoundly blind group which had abdicated any claims to the words I once knew so well. As for learning that the national organization protected criminals? That effort was reprehensible, as was the ongoing coverup.

So I have nothing to throw back at the Boy Scouts of America but my disdain and my words, and that’s hardly enough. I know there are individual troops and councils that ignore the reactionary policies of the Scouts, standing first and foremost for each and every kid. I applaud them, but they must do more than dissent, they must actively reject, lobby against and if need be withdraw, to create a new world of scouting. They should not stand against hate while wearing its uniform. Those of us on the outside, alumnae or not, must act as well.

Scouting should stand for friendship, acceptance, inclusion, protection and support, not knot-tying and bigotry. Only then might I be proud of my history with them. But not a moment before.

Update 4:30 pm 1/9/13: A reader of this post shared with me information about the organization Scouts For Equality. If this essay motivates you to want to effect change in the Boy Scouts, this appears to be the perfect group through which to do so. There may well be others, and I hope to learn about them as well.

Over there, on my bookshelf, sits the biography of my friend Alan. In its index, you can find an entry, “infidelities and romantic liaisons,” which directs you to pages 97-98, as well as page 209. This is, for me, rather disconcerting.

It is perhaps inevitable that if you work in the entertainment field long enough, you will encounter people about whom books have been written, even books that people have written about themselves. Because we tend to know such people at a remove, we are onlookers, and we end up with the clamor of Entertainment Tonight and talk shows, or the ironic whimsy of Celebrity Autobiography, a stage show in which actors and celebrities read with profoundly satiric intent from the fulsome memoirs of other actors and celebrities, although the texts are typically drawn from such eminences as Joan Collins and David Hasselhoff.

But when a book, be it biography, autobiography or memoir, is about someone with whom you have some genuine connection, I can assure you that your reaction and perception of these works, whether ghost-written, scholarly or deeply personal, changes radically.

In the case of Alan’s biography, which was “authorized,” I found it very strange to be reading details about my friend’s (who is 23 years my senior) early marriage, his somewhat unorthodox childhood, and so on.  One the one hand, I suppose I could have just asked him these things, but our time together is usually spent genially discussing theatre and our present lives over meals; while I have interviewed him in formal settings, those occasions have been focused on his creative work, rather than the particulars of his personal life. Reading that biography, I felt as if I was crossing a line, since, even in our Google-saturated age, it’s sort of creepy to research one’s friends.

This is hardly the only time that biographies have held secrets about people I know and work with, and each and every time I dip into such books, I feel I’m going behind their backs. In several cases, the books haven’t been about my friends, but their parents. I learned of one’s early and brief marriage (disapproved of by her hugely famous mother); in another I learned of a sister, institutionalized since birth and never spoken of to me. I’ve never brought these topics up, and I feel that it’s somehow wrong for me to know them. We typically learn about friends’ lives from sharing moments with them, or from conversation where we each choose what to reveal.

Biography poses one type of social unease, but the memoir – not a formal autobiography, but recollections of one’s own past – is even thornier. A decade ago, Cynthia Kaplan, my college roommate’s sister, long a surrogate sibling of mine, published a book of personal essays, Why I’m Like This. While to most readers, the people in the book were characters, to me they were all-but-in-blood family; I knew most everyone whose photos adorned the inside covers. I laughed in recognition over the chapter about her father’s eternal quest for the perfect Thermos (I have owned several that he has designated superior); I puzzled over the near invisibility of her brother in her tales (prompting me to say to him, “Gee, I never realized your sister was an only child”). Of course I read the book the moment it appeared; I wanted to support Cindy. But I’m still not sure I should know quite so much about her romantic life as she revealed, just as I still feel it was wrong for me to have seen her naked in a bathtub in an independent film screened at MOMA, even if her grandmother was by my side. But she gave me, and thousand who don’t know her at all, leave to do so.

A just-published memoir, Chanel Bonfire, casts yet another light on my biographical quandary. In this case, it is a book by an actress named Wendy Lawless, who I knew causally for nine weeks in 1988 when she played Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Hartford Stage, where I was the press rep. In her book, she details the somewhat harrowing story of her childhood with her glamorous, erratic, manipulative, alcoholic mother; the book concludes a couple of years before the time I met her. Because her father, who I also met years back, was an actor at The Guthrie Theatre, there are many peripheral characters in the book to whom I am also tangentially connected. There are very few degrees of separation here. On the one hand, as I read the book, my reaction was, “If I’d only known,” but on the other hand, what would I have done? She’d had a difficult life, and at times an exotic one, but would I have interacted with her differently? Would I have cultivated a friendship with Wendy, out of sympathy, instead of mere acquaintance? Did I ever say or do something that could have been construed as insensitive? This book forced a new perspective on a tiny bit of my life.

Perhaps due to the run-up to the book’s publication, Wendy and I became mutual Twitter followers. Unsurprisingly, when I reached out privately, she had not made any connection to our briefly shared past, and perhaps I am still, at best, a vague recollection (I remember every actor who worked at Hartford Stage during my tenure, a by-product of collecting and editing bios and headshots for the show programs).  I imagine we may meet once again, but we are essentially strangers, save for the fact that she has told me, and anyone else who chooses to read her revealing book, intimate details of her first 20 years. All she would know of me, should she care to look, are my biographical details, my opinions on theatre (via blog), and my social media meanderings. The relationship, should one be renewed, is unbalanced, and surely she’ll never solicit stories of my own childhood, which pale next to hers.

Social media has added yet another layer of complication to the issue of privacy and revelation, since we often know a great deal about some people without ever having met them. While I make an effort to meet in real life those with whom I correspond with some frequency, it’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever get to know all of these new friends.

Just last week, I was chatting back and forth with an actress whose name I know from assorted TV credits, and I’m aware we have some friends in common. She seems just like the sort of person I’d like to know; at least on Twitter, she comes across as smart and warm-hearted, as well as committed to theatre. But it was nagging at me whether I’d seen her on stage, so I did stoop to internet snooping. It turns out that my online friend, Christina Haag, published her own memoir, Come to the Edge, almost two years ago. Its focus: her five year relationship with John Kennedy Jr.

If Christina and I meet, that fact is just going to be sitting there in my frontal lobe and, while I have never been transfixed by the saga of the Kennedys, this connection would surely bring me closer to that family’s sad tragedies that we all know about. While I am to young to recall where I was when President Kennedy was shot, I recall precisely where I was when I heard that John Jr.’s plane was lost mid-flight. It’s one thing when memoir follows acquaintance or friendship, but it’s yet another twist when life details precede meeting.

Spending decades among artists, as well as journalists, it’s safe to assume that there will be more biographies and memoirs from which I am only one degree removed (in her second book, Leave The Building Quickly, Cindy Kaplan twice refers to her brother’s best friend, but I remain frustratingly unnamed). Indeed, as our information era makes personal data ever more accessible, perhaps my comparatively singular experiences will become commonplace for everyone, no matter who they are or what they do. If that comes to pass, then the dissonance I feel at having lives of those I know – or may soon meet – so readily available will dissipate. That’s when, to imbue a cliché with new meaning, everyone’s life becomes an open book.

My mother was trained as an elementary school teacher. She got her degree in the 1950s, at New Haven Teacher’s College. When she graduated, she taught in the New Haven school system. When she had the first of her three children, in 1960, she stopped teaching to raise us, returning to teaching in the mid-70s, once again in New Haven.

A lot had happened to New Haven in the interim, as white flight had shifted the student demographic radically. Even my family had moved out to the suburbs, precisely because of the decline and perceived danger of junior and senior high schools in the city. But my mom commuted in daily, because to her, all eight year olds were the same, and they needed her. I didn’t understand why she didn’t teach in a suburban school, but no doubt she still had friends in the New Haven system, and maybe she regained some seniority and benefits despite her hiatus.

As a small child, it was not unusual for me to be with my mother as a stranger approached her, tentatively asking, “Excuse me, are you Miss Gerard?” This was her maiden name, and when she said she was, these strangers would effusively tell her how wonderful she had been to them, and how much she meant to them. These were her former students. It was not like being the child of a celebrity, but it was evidence that my mom had a life before she’d had children, and it was a pretty significant one, too.

Her second round of teaching lasted  perhaps another 10 years. She left ostensibly to be closer to my dad, who retired early due to multiple medical issues, and she worked perhaps another two decades, up until her death in 2004, as a medical office assistant. She worked in the very office that tended to my father’s various and often serious issues.

But I know the real reason my mom stopped teaching these kids she loved; “her kids,” in the language I imagine every elementary school teacher uses. My mom burnt out. She was constantly buying classroom materials out of her own pocket. She would come home at night and tell us the sad stories of children who had slept alone in their cold apartments the night before, because their parents, or parent, never came home.

She would bake for them several times a week. “Don’t touch those,” she would say as I approached a warm tray of brownies, “They’re for my kids.” She would take every bit of our old clothing to school for her kids, or older ones, who might need it. Perhaps there was actual danger that she confronted, but my mother would have never told us about that.

I had been blessed to have teachers like my mom, and I believe that the vast majority of our school teachers are exactly like this. Dedicated, loving, talented people who want to help children succeed, at any age, of any race. They’re not the money-grubbing hacks that politicians now portray; if that was true, they wouldn’t have gone into teaching. Sure, some weren’t so great, but every profession has its lesser practitioners. I think teachers are pretty marvelous, and they’ve been getting a terrible rap of late.

The tragedy in Newtown may quell some of that rhetoric for the time being, as we’ve learned about teachers who were explicitly heroic in terms everyone can understand. Unfortunately, that very commitment in the face of absolute terror has given rise to a vocal contingent who are now advocating arming teachers and school administrators in order to prevent or quickly end such future tragedies. And only yesterday did I think of what this premise would have meant to my mother.

If you had told my mother, who I believe would have laid down her life to protect any child, to carry and learn how to use a gun as part of her teaching duties, she would have walked out the door and never come back. She had not attended Teacher’s College and Shooting Academy. When my mother was deeply angry, her response was to write long, guilt-inducing letters. She would not ever use a gun. In fact, when she and my dad married, she insisted he give up his job, as a bail bondsman, because she wouldn’t have a gun in the house and didn’t want him carrying one.

Of all the responses to the unspeakable horror of Newtown, the idea that it might give rise to armed teachers is the most wrong-headed, preposterous, impractical, dangerous thing I’ve ever heard. If it should come to pass, it would devastate teaching throughout the country more than any other initiative thrown at a beleaguered but essential and admirable profession. As my mom would have done, many teachers would just walk away from such a new requirement. America would never recover from the loss of their talent, and successive generations would suffer.

My mom was, I know, a very good, caring teacher. She was but one of thousands upon thousands, all special. If schools must be protected, then do so. But don’t do it by turning teachers into weapons. Do it by turning the weapons into plowshares, or memories.

The holodeck: a future threat to theatre, or just another contender that will fall by the wayside?

I have said one more than one occasion, only half in jest, that until the holodeck, as portrayed on the later Star Trek series, is perfected, theatre’s unique live aspects will sustain it through challenges. Now I’m growing less worried about even the holodeck because, if the current pace of technology holds true, continual upgrades will be constantly rendering that still-imaginary invention obsolete.

I’m prompted to this musing by a recent article from The Atlantic, which chronicles the challenges faced by vintage, though not necessarily classic, movies. In a medium a bit more than 100 years old, the pace of technology may well serve to make it impossible for some older films to ever be seen again. The conversion to digital projection eliminates access to 35 mm projectors, and the economics of conversion from film to digital means that only films deemed most worthwhile will make that leap. We’ve gone from worrying about early silver nitrate films going up in flames to being unable to view movies on stable stock in a relatively few years. And just as the Edison cylinder gave way to the acetate (and later vinyl) record, which in turn fell to the CD which has now been supplanted by the mp3, progress may well leave a significant portion of film history abandoned in its wake.

The new impending crisis in film preservation worries me, because while I have made my career in theatre, I am an avid filmgoer. Indeed, I am a movie Luddite to many, because I do my best to see any film I’ve not seen before in a theatre, not on my 42 inch flat-screen with home theatre sound. Movies (we’re really going to have to stop calling them films in a film-less era) are, or at least were, made to be shown at a grand scale, and watching them in my living room diminishes the experience.

At the same time, the movie conundrum reinforces my unwavering belief that theatre will survive perpetual technological advances. Even though new innovations may well have their own opportunities for wonder (elements of science fiction films from my childhood are now everyday items), the theatre benefits – as does music, dance, and other live performing arts – from the fact that any electronic duplication diminishes the experience. While we can make a record of what happened on a stage, watching it on a screen, even in the finest 3-D imaginable, inevitably distances the viewer from the immediacy of “being there.” When we watch an image, we do not share space with it; our responses cannot influence it in the slightest.

Even when stories were passed from generation to generation orally, and certainly from the time they began to be written down, theatre set an important artistic pattern that is unchanged today. The initial act of creating for the theatre, the invention of the text, was rooted in the establishment of a template, a script, rather than the crafting of a competed object, be it cave painting or sculpture or movie. Even though an artist such as Sol LeWitt created “kits” that would allow for the replication of his work without his direct involvement, they were exacting; museums replicating LeWitt works still were required to obtain his approval.

Because of the practice of script (and score) as template, to which actors, directors, designs are added in ever-changing sets of interpreters, there is nothing fixed but the roadmap. Efforts to dictate a singular, “proper” way to mount a play or musical usually prove detrimental; prior magic cannot be recaptured – even within long-running shows, carefully maintained, there are shifts in style and emphasis; we saw the life return to Gilbert & Sullivan’s works only when they were loosed from the stifling museum of the D’Oyly Carte straitjacket. Even the strictest of authors’ estates, seeking to preserve what they believe to be the original “intent,” can’t entirely quash new visions; theatre’s most importantly innovations aren’t technological, they’re human, each and every time. And even though theatre’s human element may prevent it from being “cost-effective,” there will always be those willing to pay for the live event (though our challenge is to keep it accessible for more than just the wealthy).

As with movies, we tend to be most familiar with the “greatest hits,” the works that have proven most popular or respected over time. But for at least the past few hundred years, even when they go unproduced, plays aren’t necessarily lost forever; they’re just hidden on some back shelf, gathering dust, awaiting rediscovery. They won’t disintegrate, or become utterly inaccessible, or be maintained in some diminished or altered form, as many films likely will be. A theatre script will just wait, patiently, for some group of people to pick it up and breathe life into it once again.

What if there were more commandments, but only beyond a paywall?

I have lost the Globe and Mail, and it hasn’t simply been buried under a stack of old magazines. Next week, I lose The Chicago Tribune. I have already begun to mourn.

My losses are not because these newspapers are going out of business. It is because they are moving behind paywalls, as many other papers have done to insure their online content isn’t being read for free, as these companies struggle to remain solvent. Having spent a certain amount of time every morning for the past few years seeking out theatre and arts stories to share on Twitter, I know that the loss of these two outlets will shrink the pool of intelligent coverage from which I can draw. Still, I am sympathetic to the papers, because as I have said before, if we want quality journalism – and I believe we need it – we have to be prepared to pay for it.

But…

Over the past 20 years, long before my Twitter curation, I’ve found the online access to arts coverage from around the country, and the world, to be an enormous asset in my continuing professional education. Indeed, where my only sources for arts news outside of my local paper (wherever I was living) were The New York Times and USA Today (and occasionally The Wall Street Journal), the advent of online newspapers and magazines enabled me to read features and reviews as never before. Yes, Variety had reviews from around the country and a handful of weekly feature stories, the accelerating decline of that publication sapped it of its once essential nature. I suspect I am hardly alone.

Arts coverage on the web eliminated the inefficient need to ask for, or send, coverage around by fax, a highly inefficient samizdat network of like-minded individuals who already knew one another. More importantly, with the rise of social media, it enabled the broad-based sharing of coverage, helping to bring arts aficionados closer with the opportunity to discover and discuss subjects raised in the press regardless of geography and without skipping from website to website in hope of finding worthwhile material.

So how do I reconcile this cognitive dissonance, this belief in paying for good journalism and a passion for access to arts coverage from wherever it may be found?

I’d like to suggest that arts coverage remain free online, unlike the rest of a newspaper’s content. Even as such coverage has diminished and remains under threat (one of the country’s largest cities, Philadelphia, no longer has a full-time theatre critic at any daily paper in the market), newspapers are the last bastion of mainstream arts coverage, long ignored by television locally or nationally.

Precisely because the media has demonstrated or declared time and again that arts coverage does not drive their revenues, I think it should remain free for all, whether to support the groups in its local market or facilitate a national conversation. The Wall Street Journal, despite its trendsetting paywall success, maintains its arts blog, “Speakeasy,” outside of access restrictions, and while I would like more of its arts content readily accessible, they’ve at least set a precedent, with no apparent financial harm.

Even as a die-hard consumer of arts coverage, I’m not about to pay $10 or $15 per month to read about what’s happening in Chicago or Toronto in these paywalled publications, especially if I can’t share it. I’ll find at least some of that news through other sites. But as someone living hundreds of miles from these cities, if outlets are fundamentally opposed to any free access, I can’t help but wonder whether something equivalent to sports broadcast blackouts could apply; you pay if your IP address is located within 90 miles of the publication’s base, but those outside that circle have vastly less expensive access.

There’s a double-edged sword to hiding arts coverage behind paywalls. On the one hand, the publication may be securing its revenue base (although it may be forcing people to unprotected news resources elsewhere in the market). But in the case of arts coverage, it may well drive the growth of new online-only resources, creating a viable market for arts-specific sites – thereby advancing the irrelevancy of what the paper is providing for a steadily diminishing audience. That will then serve as the excuse to further cut arts coverage.

Am I anti-blog or online magazine? Hardly. But outside of a handful of online publications that do include arts and culture coverage (Slate, Salon and Grantland come first to mind), the majority of what is out there isn’t economically viable, and therefore relies on unpaid (read volunteer or self-produced) coverage, limiting its long-term prospects. Are there superb blogs? Absolutely. But when they write about anything beyond their own immediate vicinity, they’re predominantly relying on other outlets for the news upon which they then re-report or opine.

It’s ironic that I write this while living in New York City, which offers more variety of daily and weekly arts coverage than most cities. But as I hope I’ve shown in my writing, I don’t consider New York as the be-all and end-all of the arts; there’s superb work worth seeing, or at least knowing about, everywhere. Yet with each paywall announcement, I feel my world narrowing, headed backwards to the pre-internet era, and it troubles me greatly.

I urge those who have or would have paywalls to continue to treat the arts as a loss leader and maintain that coverage online for free or almost free, outside of local and national news, business coverage and sports. You’ll keep America’s arts healthy by providing the raw material of national conversation and you’ll make sure that we’re talking about you, too. Because you want to remain part of the conversation too, don’t you?