Equal parts raunchy, serious, awkward, and inspirational, her routine opened doors for the LGBTQQ community here on campus and opened the eyes of everyone less aware…it was an introduction to the life of Heather Gold, an extraordinary person.

[for the] people who stayed… to talk to Heather Gold—not even listen to or laugh at, but engage in authentic conversation with—her direct approach, her humor, and her interest in every individual was a welcome reprieve from an otherwise generally repressive atmosphere….Heather Gold is someone who deserves the chance to speak to more than just an audience of people seeking acceptance: she needs to speak to those who deny it, because if anyone can raise awareness and support for the  LGBTQQ (which stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning, in case you didn’t know) among us, she can.

 Audra Foster- The Gettysburg Forum

I perform and speak at college campus' regularly, usually about LGBT and diversity issues. For me this comes from the same heart as all my speaking in the Net and business world as well: creating spaces in which pretense can subside and people can be connected as their more authentic selves. Jokes help.

I'm becoming as well known for talking about and teaching how I do this tummeling as for performing.

But I am feeling really proud, and not just because I'm now entitled to a whole lot of toasters. I got serious about this goal of connecting the "audience" in my shows over a decade ago because of my San Francisco peers, mostly early web creators who all often asked "how can I add value." Many performers give people a public example of something, or publicly advocate for rights as comics Kathy Griffin and Margaret Cho do for LGBT rights. I do that too, but since I began doing solo shows (for me these are monologues with lots of dialogue in them), I began asking "what if the show were not about something over there but were focussed on making something really happen right here, right now."

What kind of difference can you really make in an hour or so? You can change how someone feels about themselves in public.You can change an environment.

To be fair this Gettysburg show did go over the hour I'd prepared to do because I was obsessed with bringing the room together and tipping the public balance in the room there so that people could come out. The students were individually telling me about their frustrations. And who were all these people showing up to have abstract discussions about civil rights, yet had real concrete social and personal difficulties? They didn't feel safe. They felt isolated even in a room together. And sadly, many of these students were in their young twenties and had already made it through adolesence without getting to openly feel ok about the feelings and actions straight kids take when they are 8 or 9 "I have a crush on him. Which boy do you like best?" and so on. They were in a small isolated college. Were they going to have to go through 4 more years not honestly connected to themselves or dating or sexuality?

I deal in the unspoken. Now the only student I physically brought onstage is definitely straight. But she has a version of the same stuff to deal with as everyone. Could she say no to me? Could she tell her truth? Not being able to talk about what you're really feeling or what's really going on isn't an issue limited to queer kids coming out. It's at the heart of the breeding ground for everything from unsafe sex to bad bad corporate meetings to dictatorships. It's one of the main obstacles to our being able to be #WITH (an ongoing project of mine) each other, which I believe is our main collective need right now.

So I stayed on stage until it became easier to be out than in. Till these students had someone else they could talk to in the open, or maybe even ask out. I did my best to use what was about me in the show was used to make things helpful for everyone there.

The awkwardness, the seriousness, the conversations, the discomfort, the comic relief was all done consiously in order to achieve something socially. As I teach in workshops and my keynotes, there's an informational flow (or a narrative or theatrical flow and there's a social flow. I wanted both.

It was a funny show. In comedy terms I killed. 

But in life terms, I did something much more important. I connnected. 

We all want to meet more people and feel more ourselves and more connected. This experience inspired me to want to accomplish more every time I perform. I'm a performing aiming for, as Umair Haque would say, thick value. Artists: ask yourself, how can I help? Directly.

Video to come.

To bring me to your campus or event, contact my lovely agents at Speak Out.

Posted via email from subvert with heather gold

Equal parts raunchy, serious, awkward, and inspirational, her routine opened doors for the LGBTQQ community here on campus and opened the eyes of everyone less aware…it was an introduction to the life of Heather Gold, an extraordinary person.

[for the] people who stayed… to talk to Heather Gold—not even listen to or laugh at, but engage in authentic conversation with—her direct approach, her humor, and her interest in every individual was a welcome reprieve from an otherwise generally repressive atmosphere….Heather Gold is someone who deserves the chance to speak to more than just an audience of people seeking acceptance: she needs to speak to those who deny it, because if anyone can raise awareness and support for the  LGBTQQ (which stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning, in case you didn’t know) among us, she can.

Audra Foster- The Gettysburg Forum

I perform and speak at college campus' regularly, usually about LGBT and diversity issues. For me this comes from the same heart as all my speaking in the Net and business world as well: creating spaces in which pretense can subside and people can be connected as their more authentic selves. Jokes help.

I'm becoming as well known for talking about and teaching how I do this tummeling as for performing.

But I am feeling really proud, and not just because I'm now entitled to a whole lot of toasters. I got serious about this goal of connecting the "audience" in my shows over a decade ago because of my San Francisco peers, mostly early web creators who all often asked "how can I add value." Many performers give people a public example of something, or publicly advocate for rights as comics Kathy Griffin and Margaret Cho do for LGBT rights. I do that too, but since I began doing solo shows (for me these are monologues with lots of dialogue in them), I began asking "what if the show were not about something over there but were focussed on making something really happen right here, right now."

What kind of difference can you really make in an hour or so? You can change how someone feels about themselves in public.You can change an environment.

To be fair this Gettysburg show did go over the hour I'd prepared to do because I was obsessed with bringing the room together and tipping the public balance in the room there so that people could come out. The students were individually telling me about their frustrations. And who were all these people showing up to have abstract discussions about civil rights, yet had real concrete social and personal difficulties? They didn't feel safe. They felt isolated even in a room together. And sadly, many of these students were in their young twenties and had already made it through adolesence without getting to openly feel ok about the feelings and actions straight kids take when they are 8 or 9 "I have a crush on him. Which boy do you like best?" and so on. They were in a small isolated college. Were they going to have to go through 4 more years not honestly connected to themselves or dating or sexuality?

I deal in the unspoken. Now the only student I physically brought onstage is definitely straight. But she has a version of the same stuff to deal with as everyone. Could she say no to me? Could she tell her truth? Not being able to talk about what you're really feeling or what's really going on isn't an issue limited to queer kids coming out. It's at the heart of the breeding ground for everything from unsafe sex to bad bad corporate meetings to dictatorships. It's one of the main obstacles to our being able to be #WITH (an ongoing project of mine) each other, which I believe is our main collective need right now.

So I stayed on stage until it became easier to be out than in. Till these students had someone else they could talk to in the open, or maybe even ask out. I did my best to use what was about me in the show was used to make things helpful for everyone there.

The awkwardness, the seriousness, the conversations, the discomfort, the comic relief was all done consiously in order to achieve something socially. As I teach in workshops and my keynotes, there's an informational flow (or a narrative or theatrical flow and there's a social flow. I wanted both.

It was a funny show. In comedy terms I killed. 

But in life terms, I did something much more important. I connnected. 

We all want to meet more people and feel more ourselves and more connected. This experience inspired me to want to accomplish more every time I perform. I'm a performing aiming for, as Umair Haque would say, thick value. Artists: ask yourself, how can I help? Directly.

Video to come.

To bring me to your campus or event, contact my lovely agents at Speak Out.

Posted via email from subvert with heather gold

Posted via email from subvert with heather gold

70s SNL clip. Madeleine does a baby eating ice cream for the first time. Gilda does a parrot.

People often ask me about who i like comedically and what influenced me. I'm going to occasionally post favourite comedy bits. Here's two of my all-time favourites together. Both brilliant. Both "heart over head" as I've read Judy Toll liked to say about comedy she liked and the brilliant comedy she did. Judy was the closest thing I've seen to Gilda and Madeleine and cancer took them all. Fuck you cancer. You're not as big as this what they did.

I think every artist has to deal with business. But we tend to do it the way Gruber quotes Disney (me I'm not so sure Disney meant it): we make money in order to make work not the other way round.

I believed I had to work in business and not make creative work for many years because I grew up in a family where business was seen as reality. I question for years, "Can you succeed at business and be a good person?"

I asked Sara Little Turnbull this question once (and why the hell doesn't this pioneer of industrial design have a wikipedia entry? Among other things she invented Corningware). She lives for human values and it took her a while to answer.

She told me a story about turning down a job for Charles Revson who wanted her to put his lipstick in every drugstore in the world and sell it for some high price. She walked out of the meeting but turned around and walked back and told him: only if I can make it worth what you're charging.

Now I think we have a moral imperative to make the necessities of life available to people. But to the degree to which business is the way in which human being exchange things to meet their wants and needs (tougher question about business' ability to meet all needs) well being honest, having real choice and providing real value seems to be a better place to but your focus.This was the most helpful response I've had so far to my question. Focus on the value of what you're creating. Make the exchange as fair as possible.

Do you want to feel you've out one over on people or that your stuff is really worth it?  

And of course you can liberate yourself more from a money focus and business the more you minimize your needs and wants. The more you appreciate what you and and value what you do and make, perhaps the less you need.

I'm not sure I have the perfect answer. But I do know that you receive and live by whatever you focus on. If you spend all your time convince people and putting one over on them, well then that's what your business, or "art," is.

What do you think?

We live /
We take the step /
That the religious call faith/
That writers call arc /
That scientists measure as tendency/
That we all call living /

And the weight is held/
By all of them
And then we know Love

I wrote this for Dr. Leonard Schlain a physician, writer and father of my friend Tiffany when she emailed me along with many colleagues and friends to ask for help visualizing healing for Dr Schlain during his surgery for brain cancer.

 I was just reading a Fritjof Capra book this summer about Capra's Journey writing the Tao of Physics.  Dr Schlain played a significant part in Capra's coming together with a group of people at Esalen to work on the ideas, including the physicians who created mind body visualization work with cancer.

I was watching a bit of Sarah Palin's speech tonight and thought, "Wow. This chick is as uninformed as W. but way, way tougher and hungrier. And smarter. Those old dudes might think they can ride her the way they rode him but they are fooling themselves."

The Republicans have been using their new Christianist base without delivering much that's really, really important to them. They've been all about the ends justifying the means. But what if they have to actually make core decisions as the Christianist base demands?

Palin may be the first to really do this. I sense a spectacular 3rd act for her. She will go all the way. Whether that means following through on legislating Christian evangelism and thereby walking that walk, or finding she enjoys the taste of the life of "cosmopolitan elites" that it will be in her interests to mock (until it's not), whomever thought they could use this woman for their own purposes has another thing coming.

Eve Harrington: I will regard this great honor not so much as an award for what I have achieved, but a standard to hold against what I have yet to accomplish.

Lloyd Richards: I shall never understand the weird process by which a body with a voice suddenly fancies itself as a mind. Just when exactly does an actress decide they're HER words she's speaking and HER thoughts she's expressing?
Margo Channing: Usually at the point where she has to rewrite and rethink them, to keep the audience from leaving the theatre!

Eve Harrington: I'll never forget this night as long as I live, and I'll never forget you for making it possible.
Karen Richards: A part in a play. You'd do all that just for a part in a play?
Eve Harrington: I'd do much more for a part that good.

All About Eve – Joseph L. Mankiewicz

He died at 81. This is very sad news. I loved Harvey Korman. He was brilliant comedic performer with a pitch perfect sense of camp.

My favourite memory of him is as the (Jewish) Fairy Godmother in a Carol Burnett sketch asking the knight in white armor, "You vanta blintz prince?" As one of the only Jewish kids in a small town, this scene would send me into its of giggles anytime anyone in our family quoted it. It was a fast love affair with the ridiculous, camp, comedic large life that felt right to me and that I saw almost nowhere else.

His passing has prompted me to watch a whole lotta video clips of him on the Carol Burnett Show and in Mel Brooks movies. Mel Brooksis one of my few heroes (I pour a kiddish cup for him at Seder).

I had two, no three feelings (these may seem like thoughts, but I assure you I felt em :-):

1) Damn, Harvey Korman was brilliant and why didn't I get to see him in much these last 30 years?
2) There were so many more women that these guys performed with (Carol Burnet, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman) and so much more togetherness in that supposedly more sexist time than i see now
(insert avg. TV sitcom or summer Ferrell/Sandler/Stiller movie here)
3) Wow our comedy (the comedy of MSM) seems less silly, good-hearted and campy than the Mel Brooks/Burnett/Korman era. It's really distant and snarky-guy based or childish without being childlike.
The stuff of the Harvey Korman era is why I wanted to do comedy in the first place. Time for more fun and comedy with heart!

Yesterday Time Warner announced that New Line would stop operating as a stand-along unit within the company and that lots of people would be leaving, including the company founder Bob Shaye.

My first full-time job (beyond summers) was at New Line. It was an experience that changed my life.

I learned an enormous amount about the film and media business and myself. I was a first year law student who wasn't sure about what I'd do with the law degree, but cared most about telling stories that weren't getting heard

I chose NL for my summer internship over Warnes Bros. because it was small, I'd get to see and do more and it was much closer to my heart. NL made and distributed, besides the horror movies and mutant turtles movies that mattered to me: stories from people who I was longing to hearing from: films with gay characters in them, like Swoon; films that were campy, like everything by John Waters; films made by and for black folks like House Party and Menace to Society, (unheard of from almost any other distributor of the time); films that were smart just plain good, like Robert Altman's The Player.

At that point in my life, though I'd just started to perform comedy in law school in order to tolerate it, I didn't think I was allowed to live a more creative life.

I thought I had to be practical, so I was strongly drawn to the entertainment business where lawyers seemed involved in decision-making and running the film studios. Michael Lynne, the COO (and my boss' boss) was a lawyer but Shaye was not.

Bob Shaye was an entrepreneur who started the company out of his apartment, began mostly with free films in the public domain like Reefer Madness (see the whole story of the company here.)

I was there just before the company was bought by Turner and at that point it had been independent and profitable for 25 years in a row.

I got more than the equivalent of an MBA in my year there. I had what was probably the best entry level job in Hollywood, working with every division of the small company, and for a (then) tough-as-nails, heart-of-gold boss Michele.

I learned things that have stayed with me and affected my understanding of how to democratize media and storytelling.
I learned about business and fame and myself and relationships and I learned about life. Among other things I learned (but do not necessarily follow):

• always run a low, medium and high case scenario on your Profit and Loss statement
• you can lie as easily with numbers as you can with words
• don't be afraid of a spreadsheet and look at the assumptions first
• just because someone calls someone a friend, it doesn't mean that they are
• explosions are just really, really fun to make
• you don't have to ever wear pantyhose to work
• actors are all shorter than you think they are
• keep budgets small and stay focussed on who you're talking to
• "always trade credit for compensation"
• there are only 5 guys (then it was guys) who really decide if a movie gets made
• you can learn the story of a company from its contracts
• there is opportunity in valuing what others' dismiss

(There's a lot more detail in my work memoir in progress An Honest Living)

New Line's end is a significant moment, in that it is an important signal in the evolving death of creativity within corporate media.

It makes complete sense that TW would absorb NL if you look at it from the corporate logic that must run TW. It's a cost savings. And the film business is not a growth business. Not like biotech and technology. Not even like cleantech. it's not a business you should go into if your main goal is to make money without caring how you make it.

And money on its own? Well, I remember the day before the Turner acquisition closed. Bob Shaye was about to make $100 million from a company he began in his apartment. And he didn't look very happy.

Today I'm creating The Heather Gold Show from my apartment. Now I know I can write and perform to my heart's content *and* reach people. Now there is no need for separate divisions like there were at NL for marketing, Distribution, International, Development, Production. There is the Net.

Now there is not only telling of stories on a screen so we feel connected and heard, there is actual live connection and hearing of each other.

And I am happy as can be.