Confidence is a Drug

Holy shamoly: It’s predicted to be sunny and 25° for a week starting tomorrow!

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I figured out what’s going on — why I’m working so hard.

My friend Beth is writing a memoire and I’m reading it. Yesterday she wrote to me expressing frustration over her inability to assess it. I know the feeling! I was pissed that Boca solicited my script, read it and then rejected it without saying a single word about it. Their response left me, like Beth, totally in the dark about its worthiness.

Then Rachel, an experienced dramaturge, liked it — the concept and the dresses; not the script. She called my concept, “brilliant.” I say so not to brag, but to draw attention to the power of a single word.

Every day since receiving her email, I wake up to on a brilliant idea. Until I got that email, I was working, as Beth is, on a project in which I lacked confidence.

I’ve told her how much I like it but I am a friend. I know, and she knows, that I am not impartial. It’s Rachel’s professional status, power and objectivity that made her assessment so transformative. Now I’m working like a madman.

Sigh.

Dwight is a soul mate. He is also fabulously smart about people and art in my opinion, and brutally frank with his assessments. He works professionally in the visual arts.

There are nine finished dresses in my dining area; he likes one. But when I told him about the defiant dress I could tell from all he said and how he said it that I’d impressed him.

Again: This is not to brag. His assessment of my defiant dress matched mine. I knew I was doing something that had merit. I worked professionally in the visual arts for years too. I needed a “real” art piece — just one — for my show. This is the title dress of the show and the only one made my Charlotte, my protagonist, and it has to serve as proof of her capacity in the script.

But my success in making it, Rachel’s praise of my concept and the sale of my screenplay is making me realize I could probably have made a success of my life as an artist. I was just too scared of being poor.

But at least I know now: “I cudda bin a contender.”

I’m experiencing confidence and it’s a wonderful drug. That’s why I am working so hard.