Hello again.

Here I am in a beautifully wallpapered hotel room in San Francisco, drinking tea from a mug I brought with me from home. My wife, Jennifer, bought it for me many years ago and it’s one of my favourite objects.

Outside my window and in the surrounding blocks are hundreds of people who are being visibly destroyed by the fentanyl crisis in this city and it’s breaking my heart. They are not being taken care of. And here I am to help put on a show for thousands of well-situated white people at a fancy theater, while many, many lives are falling apart just outside our stage door. I’ve been seeing this dichotomy and feeling this tension in some form or other in every city on tour and have decided to donate a week’s worth of my per diem ($350) to a local organization that works for class justice in each city we play. If you’d like to join me in any amount that you can afford, this week’s per diem is going to GLIDE, one such organization that has been operating in this neighborhood since 1929.

After this tour I think I need to consider doing more in my life to actively and personally be engaged directly in this kind of work, but right now I’m able to help in this way so that’s what I’m doing.

Bad At Art

Here is a sampling of my little t-shirt icon that I’ve been continuing to iterate. I’m loving them and finding them a much better thing to do than doomscrolling (which I am still sometimes doing so no shame there).

I truly want to start a little art club here, especially for those of you who, like me, feel Bad At Art but want to Do It Anyway.

If you want to be Bad At Art together, please CLICK HERE and join in the fun.

Minnehaha

I had a delightful time in Minneapolis for a few days last week. I rode my bike to a chaotic junk/thrift/antique shop and bought a few small things. One is this postcard from who-knows-when, picturing Minnehaha Falls, which I knew was in Minnesota but had no idea where.

The next morning I was gearing up to explore on my bike, when my friend Salwa saw me and said, “Come with us!”, which I did, and several miles later we found ourselves here, at this exact waterfall! What a treat! The beautiful wooden bridge in the postcard has long been replaced by a stone one, but the falls are still there and I shed my shoes and put my feet in the water before being sternly warned by my friend Hannah that there were pieces of glass and sharp metal scraps at the bottom of the creek. But I’m glad I did it because the frigid water felt like an ice-goddess bringing me to life for a few minutes.

My friend Sean took this nice picture of me feeling very good and connected to the earth and the people in it.

Another Jennifer

Ok, one more thing is that I want to tell you about Jennifer Mills. Jennifer Mills lives in Brooklyn and since 2002 has been publishing a thoughtful and quirky (I’m so sorry) news bulletin every Friday. Every Friday since 2002! To me this is a wonderful feat of creativity and borderline obsession and I’m so happy to have discovered her. I read it every week and always experience a range of emotions that remind me that life is fun and not always too serious and that we can all express ourselves with levity and joy whenever we want.

You can read Jennifer’s newsletter HERE on Tumblr. Or if, like me, you have never understood Tumblr and in fact been deeply confused by it for your entire life, you can sign up to have the newsletter come directly to your email and start every Friday off correctly by sending a subscription request to her editor via email at the address you’ll find after 10 minutes of scrolling hopelessly up and down the Tumblr page.

Before I go, I must try to sell you on Jennifer by sharing a poem from a recent issue. I believe this poem should be read aloud 30 times in a row by the 30 greatest actors and artists of our time, on stage at Symphony Space in New York City.