Glitter & Razz Blog

Allison and I are so excited to announce our recent membership in Cosmic Cowgirls, a woman and girl powered school based in Healdsburg, CA.  Cosmic Cowgirls is a “member owned tribe that teaches and produces educational multi-media events, books and tools that are designed to promote a vision of wellness, compassion and empowerment for women and girls.”

Our journey with Visionary Artist, Shiloh McCloud, the founder of Cosmic Cowgirls, has been one for legend.  Back in 2005, Allison and I took a road trip up the California Coast that ended in our first trip to the magical Mendocino where we stumbled upon an art gallery there and completely fell in love with the spiritual and empowering images of women in the paintings.  We left feeling as inspired by Shiloh’s art as we felt about the misty shore of the coastline.

About a year later, we walked into an Oakland church to find the same paintings gracing their walls.  “Oh my gosh…here is this Shiloh again!  We must be in the right church.”  This time, we were able to meet Shiloh in person as she, at the time, was sharing more than just her paintings with that community.  She also gave guest sermons and led these amazing groups inspiring women to fully embody our visions in the world.

We couldn’t get enough.  We then, in 2007, signed up for her Heart of the Visionary workshop that took place in Healdsburg (it’s now an online course).  This workshop was exactly what we needed at exactly the right time.  She led us through a creative process of turning our visions into business plans.  And the planning wasn’t done with spreadsheets and bar graphs.  It was done with painting and sharing conversation and chocolate cake with other women.  We took this course just a few months before we opened our Glitter & Razz Dramatic Play Space in Oakland and it was key in giving us the confidence and focus to set out on the path of making our dreams come true.

Now, here we are in 2010, 5 years after the first time we experienced the magic of Shiloh for the first time, and it’s come full circle.  We have become members of this innovative cooperative of women and girls from all over the US and Canada who are working together to empower ourselves and other women everywhere.  And, as our first collaborative project with the Cowgirls, we are bringing a week-long Go Girls! Camp up to Cosmic Cowgirls school in Healdsburg in August.

And this still feels like just the beginning.  Stay tuned…

I just received my copy of Christine Carter’s Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps For More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents. And I am excited beyond belief that Glitter & Razz will be hosting Dr. Carter next month for a book reading like none other. In our interactive learning event for whole family, parents will be in one room learning directly from Christine, hearing her read from her book, and asking her questions.

Meanwhile, downstairs in the Glitter & Razz Dramatic Play Space, their kids will be working together to create their own original play that explores what a happy childhood means from their perspective.

Christine’s thesis is that “happiness is a skill that we can teach our children.” And this book breaks down all kinds of ways to do just that. I love everything about this because we share this same idea here at Glitter & Razz – that if we provide safe but challenging spaces for kids to learn the social and emotional skills to improve their lives now, it will serve them for life and ultimately improve the planet.

Christine says it best at the end of her introduction – “When we become better parents, our world improves measurably. In our materially rich but spiritually sparse culture, we often forget that this work we do as parents is important, essential. It matters - for our children’s well-being and for the greater good of the world.”

I am reading the book now in preparation for the event.  Get your copy now or at the event from Diesel, A Bookstore right here on College Avenue.  And please read along with me.  I will be posting stuff I find interesting as I read.  I’d love to hear your comments.

I am so proud to be part of this event.  The Make Something Party sponsored by Project Peace is all about “spending less and giving more.”

From their blog...Instead of participating in the mass buying frenzy that precedes Christmas, we’ll be providing stations where you can hand-make quality gifts for your loved ones. Give a small donation towards the cost of materials, and leave with gifts that are all the more special for the effort you’ve put into them.

I’m going to be there.  Join me.

How many of you did something as a kid that you no longer do anymore?  You wish you could get back to it but you “don’t have time” or “don’t have money” or “don’t have the energy.”

For me, it’s dance.  I danced consistently from the time I was 4 or 5 years old all the way through high school.  In my life studying and doing theater in college and then as a professional actor in my 20’s, all of that movement training proved quite useful in all of the productions I was cast in.

Now, I am not studying dance nor am I performing in plays where I can use my dance training.  I am not even going to clubs anymore (not that I did all that much anyway).  My dancing life consists mainly of the 2 times of year when I get to go to someone’s wedding and I rock hard to The Commodores or Earth, Wind, and Fire.

But now something is shifting.  I don’t know if it’s the hundreds of hours I have spent watching So, You Think You Can Dance or it’s my approaching birthday bringing me into my late 30’s but I feel like I need to dance again.  Get back to my roots and feel good in my body again.

Roger Dillahunty shared the panel with me at last Saturday’s Teaching Artist Organized session.  Roger is a dancer and teaching artist and Executive Director of The BEAT: Berkeley Performing Arts.  He has danced all over the world, has a contagious spirit, and a strong vision for building a non-profit dance studio that serves individual dancers as well as the community.

At the end of the session, he handed me a class schedule, looked me right in the eye, and said “Please come by the studio.  I really hope to see you there!”

Maybe this is just what I need to bring myself back to life.

This post is one of the 37 I have challenged myself to post in one week (in celebration of my 37th birthday).  Join me in the challenge.

One of favorite parts of being on the Teaching Artists Organized panel this past Saturday was meeting and working with Rebecca Stees, artist entrepreneur, camp director, and owner of Art Yowza!, an Alameda-based business that leads visual arts camps, classes, and parties dedicated to “Bold Creative Fun!”

As you may or may not know, the life of the entrepreneur is quite lonely.  You spend most of your time working on your business or thinking about your business or talking to others about your business.  Most people in your life don’t get it.  So, when Rebecca called me a couple of weeks ago to introduce herself, we each knew that we had found a kindred spirit when we talked on the phone for over an hour about stuff like:

• What did you do to prepare and educate yourself when you first started your business?
• How are you using social media?
• How is it working for you?
• What are your boundaries in sharing personal information about your life when you have a business that works with kids and parents (I clearly don’t mind sharing…sorry if I have shared too much)?
• What do teaching artists just starting out need to know before entering this crazy lifestyle of the artist entrepreneur?

As a creative entrepreneur, I totally look up to Rebecca. She has a great blog that you have to follow for information and inspiration.  And, if you know how lonely it is out here, this will really help.

This post is one of the 37 I have challenged myself to post in one week (in celebration of my 37th birthday).  Join me in the challenge.

Teaching Artists Organized

This past Saturday, Oct 3rd, about 18 or so teaching artists came together at California Shakespeare Theater to discuss the business of teaching artists.  I was one of 3 on the panel who were invited to share our visions, our story of becoming artists entrepreneurs, our marketing strategies, and the professional paths that have led us to the place we are now.

Can I tell you, this was quite a cool event!  Teaching Artists Organized, led by the mighty Sabrina Klein (a friend, mentor, and supporter of mine for years), has a real passion for promoting and uplifting the field of teaching artistry with the expertise to back it up.  Much of their work is focused on the skill building and professional development of the teaching artist as teacher.  However, in this session, we examined the big picture and the nitty gritty of making a living off of this work that we all care so much about.

As the introduction to the day, Sabrina led the group through a reflective activity that was designed to illicit the underlying values that provide the foundation for why we do this work.  You may want to ask yourself these questions:

1) Describe the time in your life when you realized this would be your life’s work.

2) What is the change you are aiming to make in the world?

3) What has been your biggest surprise or discovery along your path to making this change?

4) What is your biggest joy in the work?

In a pre-session planning meeting, Sabrina, a fellow panelist, Rebecca Stees, and I talked about the difference between a self-employed teaching artist and an entrepreneur teaching artist.  The former is supporting himself to find a variety of projects that uses his expertise and fits his lifestyle.  The latter sees her business in the big picture as an entity beyond herself that makes a contribution in the community/the world.  Neither is better than the other.  The point is that, regardless how you identify, it is important to take the time and reflect of why it is you are doing this work. Create a mission statement for yourself that reflects your core values and that inspires the people you want to hire you.

Ask yourself: What is the unique contribution that you can make in the live of kids, families, and communities?

And check out this resource | The Right-Brain Business Plan

This post is one of the 37 I have challenged myself to post in one week (in celebration of my 37th birthday).  Join me in the challenge.

Gillian Laub from the New York Times

We have met and welcomed back some amazing kids this week as our Fall Afterschool Classes began.  I am very pleased by the way things went this week.  In our Itty Bitty Theater Workshops (for kids 3 1/2 – 5 years old), I showed kids that theater is about “doing stories.”  Not reading them.  Not telling them.  But, DOING them as a gift to other people.  So, we did a lot of, what I consider to be “Doing Games,” “Yes, Let’s” and “What Are You Doing” being 2 classic theater games we love for younger kids as they teach pantomime skills as well as group agreement and ensemble building.

It turns out that theater and dramatic play are also making these kids smarter.  Did you all see the article in the New York Times last week?  This article connects experience with facilitated, structured dramatic play to a young student’s ability to control their emotions, social interactions and cognitive abilities.  Here’s the quote that legitimizes everything we are doing at Glitter & Razz in the world of academe…“that the key to developing self-regulation is play, and lots of it. But not just any play. The necessary ingredient is,,, ‘mature dramatic play’: complex, extended make-believe scenarios, involving multiple children and lasting for hours, even days. If you want to succeed in school and in life…spend hour after hour dressing up in firefighter hats and wedding gowns, cooking make-believe hamburgers and pouring nonexistent tea, doing the hard, serious work of playing pretend.”

We also premiered our first ever Go Girls! Afterschool Club yesterday afternoon.  It was awesome.  7 girls between the ages of 7 and 10 came together to start learning more about themselves, each other, and the magic and power of being a girl.  We created “What Brings Us Joy” solo dances and collaged the outside of the journals we will be using during the 10-week session.  We started to talk a little about the play we will be creating together.  I explained to them that, I didn’t know what our play would be about but that it would be something “important.”

My plan is for the session to be an experience in project-based learning where the girls will create a play in response to a problem that is important to them.  Our brainstorming of problems ranged from friends getting other friends in trouble to tsunamis to smoking and drug use.  Next week, we will determine the focus of our examination and then we will do some research and engage people and resources in the community to actually use our girl power to help towards the solution of our problem.

See how we are helping make your kids smarter and more engaged in their communities?  And you thought we just did plays.

A dream is coming true here at Glitter & Razz.  Beginning this month, we are beginning a whole series of programming for adopted and foster care kids and families.  This is something we have thought about doing for quite some time and now we have found the perfect partnership.   Starting Sept 28, we will be offering a 10-week afterschool class for 6-10 year olds called Living Lifebook: Celebrating Adoption through the Power of Theater.  The class is taught by Jill Eickmann, our latest addition to the Glitter & Razz family.

Here’s what happened.  It’s quite serendipitous, actually.  Claire and I took an Advanced Finance Class at the Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center back in July.  Our incredible teacher was Melinda Phillips Zumski.  We loved the class.  We learned a lot.  But, the fortunate by-product of taking the class was that Melinda turned out to be a theater person in bookkeepers clothing who, just so happens, is going through the process of adopting a child through the foster care system with the help of the agency, Adopt A Special Kid.  Her social work is Jill Eickmann.  Melinda thought that Glitter & Razz ’s methodolgy would be a perfect match for families like hers.  She hooked us up with Jill and here we are.

Jill is the Artistic Director of Lila Theatre, a San Francisco/Bay Area theatre company committed to truthful, artistic play. Jill performs around the Bay Area in the improv duo, Shades of Grey.  She holds a B.F.A. in acting from the University of Florida and a Masters in Counseling Psychology with a concentration in Drama Therapy from California Institute of Integral Studies. She has taught and directed improvisation and children’s theatre with Rising Stars, San Francisco Day School, Kids Take the Stage, and Children’s Fairyland.

Jill has worked for many years within the foster care system and passionately believes in the healing power of theater with this and all populations of people.  We are psyched as this is just the beginning of this series.  We are also talking about offering programs for parents, special events for the whole family, and original performances.  Keep up with us and we’ll make sure you know all about it.

Oh, and many thanks to Melinda!

"Please use nice words about your art because art has feelings too." -Martin to a 6 year old boy

I am delighted and honored to introduce you to our new visual art teacher, Martin Brecht.  Martin is an experienced educator, artist, and soccer fanatic originating from Pittsburgh, PA.  He began working with us for our summer camps 2009 after relocating from Brooklyn, NY.  He completed a New York City Teaching Fellowship in 2006, earning a master’s degree in Urban Education while teaching art at Public School 94 in the Lower East Side to students with autism and emotional disabilities. Currently, Martin works at Malcolm X Elementary School in Berkeley and volunteers any spare time coaching soccer at Oakland International High School with Soccer Without Borders.

Martin is a priceless addition to our Glitter & Razz family!   He will be teaching our first ever Magic Messes classes (for ages 4-10) on Saturday mornings at Glitter & Razz starting Oct 3.  He will also be leading a special 2-day workshop called Living Murals where elementary school-aged kids will tell their own visual stories of the Bay Area on the back wall of the Glitter & Razz stage!

What does Martin have to say for himself?

What made you want to become an artist?
In college I had to choose a major and my favorite class was art history. The next semester I signed up for Studio Art 101, declared my major, and committed to living the life of an artist. Additionally, my father was an art major in college but couldn’t finish and in some ways I felt like I was picking up where he left off.

Describe your art.
My paintings, printmaking, drawings, and murals are inspired by my work in arts education. I had little training before college so in many ways I learned about art by teaching it. After four years of teaching children with autism and emotional disabilities in one of New York City’s “persistently dangerous schools”, my art became chaotic, abstract, and colorfully obsessive. I feel I am at my best when I creatively combine a variety of mediums with the help of collage or digital technology.

Why is it important to you to work with children doing art?
I am lost as an artist without an art teaching gig. Most of my inspiration comes from working with children. Their experience of art is so raw and uncorrupted. Giving up on their dreams hasn’t even occurred to them yet and I make it habit to surround myself with people like this, no matter the age!

What made you want to work for Glitter & Razz?
I am learning to design and paint murals so making set designs for plays seemed like good practice. I also never went to summer camp as a child because my mom is a teacher and my sisters, brother, and I spent the summer with her at home. Part of me thought it would be fun to finally go!

Why do you like working as a teaching artist at Glitter & Razz?
I enjoy the endless creativity that comes with each group of campers. I also value the supportive, collaborative work environment that exists at Glitter & Razz. I am thrilled to be around such positive energy on a daily basis.

What’s next on your journey as a teaching artist?
First, I plan on formalizing our individual Magic Messes projects into more of a comprehensive curriculum for Glitter & Razz- oh and did I mention- I plan on teaching it! Next, I am coordinating a trip to Guatemala for the Spring to teach art and soccer to an indigenous Mayan community through a non-profit I volunteer with, Soccer Without Borders.

Anything else we should know?
Believe me (I am a teacher), I could go on and on….

Sign your kid up now>>>

This week at Seriously Fun Theater Camp has been absolutely magical.  It’s our first official week of the summer and we are off to a great start.  The camp is small in enrollment – just 10 kids.  At first, from my perspective as the business owner, I was pretty bummed at the low number.  But, as I have been here this week with these kids and this new team of teachers, it has been an absolute joy to be working in this environment.  The kids are truly delightful people.  Each of them is incredibly kind and creative and smart.  They are in the process – rehearsing now as I type – of creating what I predict is going to be the play of the summer.

The theme of this week is Earth, Wind & Fire.  No.  We are not paying homage to the 70’s mega-pop-disco-soul band.  We are paying homage to the earth.  To nature and our place in it.  Let me give you a sneak peek into what we have been doing:

Monday | “What is your favorite thing to do in nature?”
“Building forts with logs” – Kayla
“Lying down in the grass” – Mitra
“Hiking in the rain with mom, step-mom, and dog” – Adrienne

Elements of Nature Brainstorm

Tuesday | “What does nature have to do with us?”
“I know about a lot of plants.” -Milo
“The environment is where everyone lives.” -Sofia
“We are animals.  All animals are nature, so we are nature.” -Emmett

Wednesday | “How do humans harm nature?”
“We pollute the world with cars and factories and other stuff.” -Eli
“We kill chickens and eat them.” -Ajna
“Using plastic bags.” -Olivia
“Making animals extinct, like the Dodo Bird.” -Sydney

And today, we had the deepest conversation of them all.  We talked about the crazy concept that, since we harm nature and since we ARE nature then, we are actually harming ourselves.  Then, we enter into this cycle of harm – we harm nature which harms us back and then we harm nature again – over and over.  We asked the kids, “How do we stop this cycle of harm?”

Sydney’s first response was “This is the hardest question I have ever had!”  Totally sympathizing with her, I encouraged them all to bring out their biggest imaginations to solve a problem this big.  Emmett posed the question, “How did it even start?”  And we got into a conversation where Ajna explained to us that people have to make factories  in order to make things quicker and that makes much more pollution.  I asked her why people want to make things quicker. “To make lots of money and get rich.”

Then, it was revealed.  Greed is a big cause of all of this.  So, what do we do about this greed?  “You just stop!” said Milo.  Kayla said that “factories should find different ways that don’t harm the forest” and Sydney suggests making signs and “making a promise for people to stop littering.”

Creating the Jungle Set for our play

And finally, in the same spirit with which these 10 amazing kids, their teachers, and 3 youth interns are all working together to create their own play where a jelly bean factory gets a little out of control and harms the jungle in which it is located, we talked about the importance of coming together to stop this cycle of harm.  Eli suggested that we “get lots of friends to help” and Ajna, in all of her 8 year old wisdom said, “It might not seem like you’ll make a difference if it’s just you, but if lots of people do it together, you can.”

Our play, Jelly Beans in the Jungle, is this Saturday at 10:30am at Glitter & Razz.  Join us. Maybe you’ll pick up some saving the Earth tips from these kids.  Check back here for photos from the show itself.