"My Resume Doesn't Make Sense and That's the Point"
Someone asked me once to walk them through my career trajectory. This was at a party, which was already a mistake — production people do not give short answers about anything — but I took a breath and I started: Americorps in Brooklyn, theater in New England, campaign trail in Florida, rigging apprenticeship in LA under Icarus Rigging, clown training under Cirque du Soleil's former head clown, the Oscars, the Golden Globes, CSI, SWAT, Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Burning Man lead rigger for a full circus aerial opera, festival circuit up and down the west coast, Cowboy Carter Tour build, Do Lab's transport team, full time van life, and now this blog.
By the time I got to the part about the bearded lady character with Crash Alchemy at SXSW, the person I was talking to had the look of someone trying to determine if I was making the whole thing up. I was not making any of it up. This is just what a production career looks like if you follow it honestly rather than trying to make it look like something that fits in a LinkedIn headline.
Here's the thing nobody tells you when you're coming up: there is no ladder. There's a jungle gym, and about half the handholds are missing, and the whole structure is slightly on fire, and you will absolutely love it once you stop expecting it to make sense.
A traditional career has a shape. You start somewhere, you move up, you accrue titles and salary bands and a 401k contribution that someone will explain to you at an orientation that you're too tired to absorb. That's not this. In production, what you accrue is skill, reputation, and a truly staggering number of phone numbers. The trajectory is lateral as often as it is vertical. Some years I've made great money doing television work on Hollywood union calls. Some years I've been the weirdo in a wig doing performance at a festival for a percentage of the gate and a wristband. Both of those years taught me things the other couldn't.
The work is not one thing. It is never one thing. It is rigging in the morning and scenic carpentry in the afternoon and performing at night and driving through the desert at 3am because load-out went long and you've got another call in a different state in eleven hours. It is knowing how to read a load rating and also how to read a room. It is understanding the union rules on a television set and also understanding that there are no union rules at a festival and knowing which set of instincts to apply where.
What holds all of it together is not a job title. It's a set of skills that transfer, and a reputation for showing up and figuring it out, and knowing enough people who will answer the phone when you call. That's the whole career. That's what twenty years of it looks like.
I'm writing this blog partly because I think there are people out there who are doing this work or trying to get into it and they're confused about why nobody seems to have a clean story about how they got here. And the answer is that the clean story is a lie. The real story looks like mine — weird, sprawling, occasionally baffling from the outside, completely legible if you understand the logic of a life that follows the work.
The logic, if it helps, is this: do the thing you're good at and curious about. Do it somewhere slightly bigger and slightly harder than what you did before. Do it with people who are better than you so you can figure out what better looks like. Do not say no to a gig because you don't know exactly what you're doing yet — figure it out and be honest about what you know and don't know, and most of the time that will be enough. Take care of your body, because this industry will use it up if you let it. And never, under any circumstances, complain about the catering within earshot of the catering coordinator.
The resume doesn't make sense because it was never meant to. It was meant to describe a life that moved toward the work, every time, without apology. That's all it is. That's enough.
— Dots