It’s rare that I get scared before a play. Anymore. It’s weird. Because I used to get that flutter of nervousness before going on stage. The sweaty palms. The shallow breathing. That percolation of unease in my belly. The anxiousness… That darn nagging thought: Will I remember my lines? But I had a break from…
Just got off a Zoom call with the Director and rest of the cast for a show called Burn by John Muggleton. Rehearsals will start at the beginning of April. It was kind of a meet and greet. It’s a small cast. Four actors. And most of us don’t know each other. So, it was…
This week focuses on Recovering a Sense of Compassion. It’s funny. Week 9 of The Artist’s Way has been the longest week for me so far. I “started” this week at the beginning of June last year. And I only moved onto week 10 seven months later. It’s not that I was working so hard…
Item #12 on My Five-Year plan is to put on The Lost Years in Montreal. The Lost Years is a play I wrote telling the story of Deb’s and my journey through parenthood. Deb and I performed it at the Hamilton Fringe in 2017. And we’ve been meaning to remount it ever since. We played…
I’ve embarked on a few 30-Day Challenges before. Mostly to write blog posts. Or other forms of writing. But the 30-Day Challenge is a good format to try out any new habit or routine. To see if you can maintain the activity. And to see if it sticks beyond the 30 days. A few years…
On the weekend, my daughter met up with a few of her friends and they all decided on their 30 by 30 lists. They’re 25 and it’s a list of thirty things that each one of them wants to get done by the time they turn 30. Kind of like a bucket list. But with…
It was the summer of 1981. I was eighteen years old. My dad had got me a job at a French restaurant called Au Cepage. Which was cool because I had been to France the year before and fell in love with French food. My job was a prep chef or cook’s assistant. I chopped…
I went for a cemetery walk today in Grove Cemetery in Dundas. Stan Nowak gave a great tour telling us about some of the residents and the stories of their lives. It was also a great reminder that none of us gets out of here alive. I’m still reading The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman. The…
If you had asked me a year ago if it was easy to lose weight during a pandemic, I would have said, “Heck, yes!” I saw the movie Contagion. A pandemic brought hoarding, looting, scarcity of resources and scavenging. It would be like the Zombie Apocalypse without the zombies. But the reality of a pandemic…
Seventeen years ago, I started training to run a marathon. I was turning 40 and I figured that it was time to start working on some things on my bucket list. Running a marathon had been something I wanted to do since I was a kid. I trained and ran the marathon. And then I…
peter gruner 