A Fran Finale

“Finally.” I found myself internally muttering this word several times, in several tones, over the past few weeks. And, honestly, I hope to be saying it again sooner rather than later; waiting is not a skill I have enjoyed cultivating.

After two years of tense precaution and the struggle to enforce boundaries, I finally caught COVID-19. That pernicious Omicron variant flew through the cast of Nana Does Vegas via a single entry point in one weekend, shutting us down only halfway through the run. It was the weekend of my 28th birthday, no less. At this writing, 8 of the 11 cast members have tested positive, and luckily all are in the recovery stage (thank you, MRNA vaccines). It seems a wryly fitting end to a show already delayed for a year; I had been cast in May of 2019, expecting January 2021 performances… well, we know what happened instead. I am simply grateful we performed at all.

This gratitude and lack of expectation has led me to see this closure/illness with humor; I have to admit an unhinged cackle escaped me when I read the “bad news” email, and I accepted my positive result with positive cheer. Being right, in this instance, is not a pleasant experience, but it is a validating one. Once Omicron began shutting down Broadway venues, I knew it was only a matter of time before it happened to our cast outside of Detroit, MI. I had premonitions even before our first rehearsal, and I was frankly amazed we made it to opening. By the time I got to perform a two-show day on my birthday, I was relishing every minute, having fully accepted I would never know which performance would be our last… and it just so happened to be the very next day, though we wouldn’t know for certain until later that week.

I couldn’t even tell if I really had COVID until my PCR result a week later, confirming my tiny sniffle was in fact not psychosomatic. And as much as I feared catching it, my feelings upon the actual catch are neutral, almost relieved… at least I got it now, at least I’m vaxxed and boosted, at least it’s so mild. I have spent so long anticipating these events I’ve correctly predicted that there is no adjustment period in my mind. I felt no need to grieve for the show closing. I have already accepted that my two-year-avoidance-streak is over. We had a good run. I know I did my best, and didn’t take a second for granted.

That show was everything I hoped it would be. It was a chance to create in a safe space, a chance to get back onstage with people I enjoy and admire, and it was even my first AEA contract. It was fun, and it provided a bridge from the past to now, a way to reconnect with a part of me that has been withering over the course of the pandemic, sustained only by lonely self-tapes and long drives with Channel 77 “On Broadway” on Sirius XM Radio.

…And, simultaneously, this contract has been hanging over my head for two years and seven months, feeling like loose shoelaces slowly fraying against the concrete with every step. I have been longing to tie these loose ends for so long, so that I can finally sprint ahead. There is an ache of impatience that is finally subsiding… perhaps it’s callous of me to be privately glad it’s fading sooner than planned, but so I feel. Our original closing date is still three days away, and I couldn’t be happier to be sitting in my Bronx living room instead, writing this on gifted time.

Now, staring at an open expanse of unplanned possibility, I feel a thrilling, terrifying potential… but even now, my old friend Impatience hovers, invading my personal space. I am trying to enjoy the freedom and clarity, but I also just want to know what happens next. What’s next? It’s suddenly a question that arrived sooner than I expected, forcing me to act, to choose, to do.

I hope to finally know what’s next again, soon.

Revving Engines

My last post was “On Moving:” which is so apt, because we have now moved yet again. I don’t consider it an “excuse” for not writing, but it is a reason; I wanted to write many times, but the language was not forthcoming, nor were the topics. My brain was unsettled, unable to sit on one thought (other than… moving) for long enough to break it in.

We’ve relocated to NYC. It’s been a long time coming, perhaps an inevitability. Ever since I visited the city for the first time—a heady 24 hours or so in 2011—each subsequent stay has gotten longer and more intimate. It’s easy for an actor to express this, of course; NYC functions as a potent gravitational center for the theatre industry as a whole, and even more so for the musical theatre subsect. I am one of many who have made this specific pilgrimage, memorialized succinctly by “The Star” in Annie:

N-Y-C! Just got here this morning!
Three bucks, two bags, one me!
N-Y-C! I give you fair warning:
Up there, in lights, I’ll be!
Annie

Moving to the city hot on the heels of a devastating pandemic, however, is a little unusual.

I like to operate on strategy, and for the last near-two-years the prevailing strategy has been to rest, “hunker down,” and avoid spending energy or money. There were some bursts of action, but they were plodding and measured, usually with an end in sight.

Now, this is the end in sight. The pandemic is far from over, but innovations have ended the necessity for stillness. In tandem with the world’s timing, this NYC move has triggered a hurtling trajectory into the kind of activity we left in the before times. It’s an expected shift, one we anticipated, dreaded, and begged to arrive sooner. And still, it has hit like a swallowing wave… there was no adequately preparing; there is only the surf.

I’m fortunate to have a built-in period of flexibility right now, like wearing a scuba suit in a tsunami. I have a contract set for the winter, which means a month or so of nesting and wrenching my schedule back to daylight hours. I can afford to breathe, allow the waters to take me where they will, and bubble up to the surface later. Meanwhile, I get a unique view into the swirling chaos that is the transition: what will it be like in a few months? Which currents lead to dry land?

So, while it is an energetic shock, we get a buffer against the most difficult parts. And still, we’ll use that leeway to unpack, to meet our new neighborhood, to negotiate ourselves into new habits. We are revving our engines, much like the traffic on our street, to test what driving will feel like again.

Recently, I’ve been trying to be less “precious” about using my hoard of art supplies. I don’t really have much squirreled away, but what I do have includes some interesting fossils from previous eras: stained watercolor paper from college, a stockpile of fractured drawing utensils of all kinds, even a few sparsely filled sketchbooks dating back to high school.

There was a moment in July—after spending painstaking hours on the details of a meticulous, perfectly-composed painting—when I was looking through my stash, wondering what to create next… and the thought struck me: all these supplies do me no good on a shelf. I don’t need to plan something perfect; creating anything will be better than letting these tools (and myself) languish, unused.

I know why I’ve let them accumulate. Like many kids who grew up with money anxieties, art supplies were like rare jewels. I’ve long held an obsession with the inherent potential in blank pages, new notebooks, and empty canvas; for almost as long, I’ve feared this potential, holding an iron grip on my self-control, knowing that $10 here and there really does add up, and thinking that I needed a “good enough reason” to use what I had. I was afraid of “waste,” and so I unconsciously wasted time and the opportunity to gain experience instead. (Why yes, I am a recovering perfectionist.)

But, these days, art is part of my living. It isn’t a luxury; it’s a life. Not only does it allow me to express myself, but it also allows me to eat. Everything I put into art has an official name now: investment. Moreover, the one who determines the return on my investment is… me! Through using the tools I have given myself!

Doing nothing is the worst thing I could do. So, why hesitate?

This thought process led to a burst of creation. I painted abstracts. I painted figures. I painted terrible works, mediocre works, commercial works, avant-garde works, and maybe even a good work or two. I often had three or four in simultaneous rotation, so I would never be stuck waiting for paint to dry, because I could pick up something else. It felt wonderful.

This post’s image is perhaps my favorite of these creations, and certainly the most personal. It is watercolor and colored pencil, only about 6” by 7”, and is based on a photo I took of myself in summer of 2017; this was when I had just started taking commissions, a year after being gifted my first oil painting supplies. Now, four years later, I look almost the same, but nearly every other aspect of my life has changed.

I had no aspirations for this as I was creating it. It was free to be another bit of bad art, but I kept liking where my hand led the brush. What began as a modest sketch kept growing until, hours later, I glowed with pride and recognition. With this painting, I reach back through the years between my current self and who I was, and give her a glimpse of what’s to come. Painting is an apt metaphor for the passage of time; layer after layer, we build ourselves up—highlighting this and obscuring that, refining details and smoothing edges—until we decide that, for the moment, this is who I think I am.

Self-Portrait, 2017/2021

To All my Unfinished Projects: a Love Letter

I miss you.

Not enough to visit, though. For me, distance is to love as wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, and enkindles the great.

Please understand why I’ve chosen to stay away all this time… the attraction is too strong. Were we to pick back up where we left off… well… I don’t know if I could put you down again. And I simply cannot balance that with everything else I’ve committed to, at this point. I’m a different person now.

Despite all that, despite everything standing in our way, I can’t help but think about you. I toss and turn in the dark, thoughts of you keeping me awake long after midnight. I keep thinking, “what if?” What could we have made together, if I’d stayed? What could have been different?

I remember our immediate spark, right from the beginning. You fell into my life like fate waving hello, and it all felt so natural, easy. You bent to my fingertips like you had no other wish than to obey my desire. I remember a feverish frenzy, as if each moment wasn’t enough, as if any choice we could make wouldn’t be enough to release our potential. I remember a sleepless hyperfocus, an intensity I couldn’t describe, a flow of energy unlike anything else in the world.

Ultimately it was our potential, our inability to choose one path or the other, that failed us. Passion cannot replace compatibility, and I suppose we always knew we were mismatched. Maybe it was timing… or interests… or maybe it was because I was already promised to another.

Still, you haunt my dreams. I can’t forget the hours I spent with you, cultivating our connection, persuading myself it would work out. After all that has happened, I can’t regret that precious time; I learned so much about you, about myself.

I’m not sure why I chose to write to you today. Perhaps I like to think that you’re still there for me. Perhaps I want your forgiveness for leaving you behind. I won’t apologize for doing what I needed, but I still wish we had more time… time to finish everything we started.

To my Unfinished Projects:
unwritten play drafts,
half-baked businesses,
10-page novels,
one-poem poetry collections,
abandoned fibercrafts,
half-full notebooks and sketchbooks,
dropped classes,
unused craft supplies,
sparse Pinterest collections,
unbuilt websites,
empty social media profiles,
unbudgeted travel plans,
and every lost idea I’ve ever sacrificed to the golden idol named “I don’t need to write it down, I’ll remember,“

I love you still.

Dress Rehearsal Attendee

Today, I get to sit in on a dress rehearsal for the first time in over 18 months.

I’m thrilled, of course, to see live performance; I’m even more thrilled, arguably, to see bustling technicians finishing up the final details of a changeover and hear a grating drill securing loose screws. Eavesdropping on the preparations is almost like a tacit invitation to pretend I also belong in this space today. Almost.

I’m sitting in the balcony, front row center. I am alone in the section, and I’ve chosen one of the best seats in the house. The minutes tick by as I wait, through flickered lights and muttered checklists, for the show to begin. It’s a working rehearsal, so of course it won’t be perfect–but that’s exactly why I came to see this one, to compare the changes I’ll notice when opening night comes in a few days. The process is more magical–to my biased view–than the end result alone.

Sitting here, I find I can’t quite muster appropriate excitement for the performance… instead, I can only think about how dearly I want to be more than just a spectator.

I think about sitting in the house to observe shows I’ve designed, shows I’ve understudied—hours and hours of observing, marking scripts, laughing to give the actors just a hint of audible encouragement. Then, afterwards, popping backstage for notes, or to gather some props for tweaking. How I’d love just to do that.

Then I think, oh, but to be backstage, that would be enough. Wearing black clothes, strapped with tie line and gaff tape and hairpins, invisible except when backlit by electric blue lights… it would be a step toward enough, it would be way more enough than sitting here, an outsider.

Clarity hits: no, I don’t want to be backstage… I want to be backstage, and then onstage, traversing the carefully crafted barriers between real and myth, living two lives and two stories simultaneously, emerging from a glow-taped labyrinth into the blinding stage lights only to whirl around and exit through a forest of curtains and drops once more. I want to be that chameleonite whose hide changes based on her surroundings: one character in the spotlight, and another in the blackout. I want to be an agent of transition, hopping the stepping stones of a story, reaching out my hand for an audience to grasp, calling “come with me!”

Today, however, all I can do is sit, and watch, and try to enjoy the show. It’s more enough than not being here at all. It’s a step toward enough.

And I’ll be sure to applaud, loudly.

The Franifesto: A Phoenix

Long ago, I had a personal blog of the same name, albeit with “.wordpress.com” attached to the url instead of the sleek, sexy “.com.” Luckily, my funding has improved somewhat in the decade since I last wrote under this title.

I don’t have any remaining materials from that blog. In the time since, I have created several new websites of varying kinds; some were for marketing purposes, some for selling my art, some for flopped projects, and some for secret ruminations now long deleted.

All I remember from that original blog, The Franifesto number 0–like the tarot’s Fool–is that I felt totally free to publish my thoughts, poems, doodles, essays, quips. It was a space all my own, uncurated by algorithms, unrestrained by the trappings of form and function required to “post” anywhere else. It was mine alone to build, destroy, and rebuild as I saw fit. At 4:15 this morning (during yet another night of poor sleep), I realized that I dearly miss it.

Or, missed it. A tandem realization: the revival, like the deletion, was entirely in my hands.

A quick internet search told me that no one else had yet claimed this specific moniker; the only hit to my search was my own ancient Tumblr relic of the same name, lately conquered by unbelievably cheap advertisements for RayBans. The name wasn’t taken on Twitter, so I snapped it up there first. The dopamine whoosh from claiming one corner of the internet led to another, and now I’m the established purveyor of several @TheFranifesto profiles, culminating in this, the blog–this, the first post, tapping out on my little phone screen at 4:57 AM, even before I’ve started to design the actual site.

You see, lately I’ve felt a sort of expressive frustration. I’m sure it’s borne of a heady brew of factors… a viral hiatus on my performing work, extreme eco-anxiety, disquieting behaviors encouraged by social media, a year-plus of isolation… to name only a few. I’ve had so much to say and nowhere that served me to say it. I’m a wordy person… Instagram stories just weren’t doing it for me anymore. Time & character limits are just that: limits.

I had been thinking of doing a theatre blog attached to my actor site. I had been thinking of doing an art process blog attached to my artist site. But in late-stage capitalism, I’ve come to reflect that my career selections cannot make up all of who I am, and I cannot therefore be satisfied only expressing myself within a professional context. It felt like all of my life was a professional illusion… and as a professional illusionist, a pretender and creator, that’s actually swell. But, who am I when I am not making magic? Does she get to be seen, too? It got to the point where I couldn’t even bring myself to share photos of my home life because it all felt like fraud–a mithril veil I’d woven between myself and everyone else, light and shiny and practically unbreakable. I craved vulnerability and authenticity, but saw only chrome-plated avenues toward a sterile vision of my life, mountanous moments polished down to picturesque pebbles.

So… what to do?

Create a platform, of course. The idea struck and stuck and, fuck it, I’m doing it. Just an hour after conception, the idea is born.

I don’t know what will come of this. I can’t plan ahead much, because my whole desire is authentic expression, which requires a certain spontaneity. I do fully expect, however: poetry, essays, lists, diagrams, doodles, experiences, musings, puns, jokes, pitches, stories.

Overwhelmingly, stories.

In gratitude and hope,

Franny