There has been a rather clever ad campaign courtesy the New York Lottery recently. I see them every time I ride the subway and they have the funny effect of not making me think about the lotto, but rather about life. It's the slogan: What will you think about when you don't have to think about money?

I guess I've been thinking a lot about money recently because I left my job in August after three years. It was a really great job with amazing benefits and incredible people. But I had gotten to the point where I couldn't get out of bed in the morning, and more importantly, I was no longer producing artistically. I was consumed with how much I hated my days. My depression blocked my focus and inspiration. So I left.

Now I'm artistically blocked because I haven't yet found a steady job and my thoughts are consumed by lack of money. I was speaking to a writer friend about this very same thing a few weeks back. We were pondering the amount of effort we expend on just trying to make ends meet and the potential of that effort put towards a better purpose. In a creative city whose constantly increasing cost makes it difficult for creatives to survive, we've been seeing a lot of friends bite the dust and move back home, wherever that is. Or enroll in law school. Or become a stay-at-home parent. Or finally take over that family business. And I wake up every day and continue to fight the good fight with no promise that I will make it another day.

Maybe this has always been New York's story: every day hundreds of people arrive to pursue their dreams and there's only so much room. But what if it's a national epidemic? What if artists are biting the dust in Seattle, and L.A., and Miami? What if life is getting so expensive and the middle class is disappearing so quickly, that the United States is basically losing its artists?

I know some people might think, But you just said hundreds arrive in New York everyday! The thing is, though, that those are usually younger people, brand new to the city, brand new to their art form. You know how you get better at practicing medicine the longer you're a doctor? Yeah, well, same goes for practicing your art. What I see happening is that we're potentially losing our artists when they're just hitting their stride. You struggle in a studio with a crazy roommate for a few years living off ramen and occasionally sleeping in the bathtub. You go to coffee shops and absorb the scene and get a pulse on what's going on while you continue to take classes and practice. And after several years of this, you get tired - the rent has gone up steadily, but your wages haven't. You remember when soap used to cost a couple of dollars less...just last year. And you've finally come up with the idea that's going to be your break, that truly conveys the human spirit: an idea for that novel/landscape/film script. But then you lose your lease, your bartending shifts get cut down, you have unpaid doctor's bills because of that bad back from sleeping in the bathtub and you have no idea how you're going to get to the next day. All that energy and passion that you had for that great creative work...that you didn't have when your intestinal tract wasn't yet eroded by too much ramen...is now spent trying to survive.

That's our art these days: survival. What message could Rent have conveyed if they'd actually been able to pay the rent? Would Jonathan Larson have encouraged us instead to feed the hungry and be kind to one another if there was room in his brain, if he weren't consumed with making ends meet? Food for thought: An interesting article about the effect on compromised brain activity when in a state of poverty. It's not just artists that bite the dust.

And I'm certainly not the only person using precious brain activity to think about what could be were it not for worries and obligations. A Tokyo artist and psychologist, Naho Iguchi, is spending a year in Berlin to experiment with making decisions not tied to worries about money or social obligations. In order to do so, she had to get funding from 22 different donors.

The haunting question remains every time I ride the subway: What would I be capable of producing if money weren't on my mind constantly? I have every intention of finding out. But others may not be so lucky.

I realize I've been away for a while, and I do apologize.

I've been busy since the beginning of the year preparing for our shoot that now happens on Monday!  Just three days.  I've taken myself out of the producer role for a few days now as I try to adjust to the actor mentality.  Naturally, drama is going to float downstream and I will catch wind of some of it (especially when the one producer left is my husband).  And as we gain and lose crew...gain and lose cast...gain and lose our sanity like the flowing tides, I have to reflect on how far we've come and what we've been able to do.

We set out two and a half years ago as a small group of intelligent and incredibly capable actors who wanted a little bit more control over their careers.  I had written this script for fun (writing having been a hobby of mine for the past ten years--though now I think it's taken a turn for the more serious), and I suggested we make it on the fly.  I really should have known that with a group of type A personalities, nothing 'on the fly' is going to fly.

The script was about my personal struggle with being a white-skinned actor who was born in Puerto Rico, but had lived in the United States since I was 5.  It was only after college when I became an actor that I began to face obstacles due to my ethnicity because well-intentioned people in the entertainment industry assumed I could only play Hispanic roles. 

Why do I say 'well-intentioned'?  Well, I had agents trying to find where I would best fit in.  They were trying to get me work and saw a burgeoning Latin market.  I had casting directors who were honestly very nice people trying to give a young actor a shot and felt that a Puerto Rican would stand a better shot of being cast in a Hispanic role.  When a manager asked me if I could wear darker foundation, she was sincerely trying to sell me as best she knew how.

Unfortunately, these circumstances caused a deep well of anger to build every time walked into a waiting room for an audition and saw a sea of dark-skinned actors (most of whom weren't even Hispanic) lined up to audition for the latest thug/hooker/maid-of-the-week.  It was anger at the world for what it still is, anger at the circumstances of these actors who had no power over how they're seen, anger at all the people I've ever met who have so thoughtlessly questioned me over the color of my skin because some movie told them exactly what a Hispanic person is supposed to look and act like.

So I went to a coffee shop (mostly Joe's on Columbus and 86th--I was between jobs probably) and wrote down all the ridiculous stories that I had collected having to do with my ethnicity.  I wove them together into a narrative and White Alligator was born.

Fastforward nearly three years and this has now become a torch that we all carry and so many people have been recruited to carry that.  It is no longer a fun project that a bunch of actors are putting together, but rather a Great Hope that if this movie hits mainstream, we can change the world.  We can encourage other projects to do race-blind casting, and we can encourage a lot of people to open their horizons and see that ethnicity really is only skin-deep.  And underneath this silly little layer of epidermis, everybody has the same hopes and dreams and desires.

And all the original players that are still involved and have come with us such a long way on this project now have those same dreams that this will be the project that will open the door so that they can make more significant projects that might change the world in other ways.  And all of this might make us the artists that we were born to be instead of meager players with no say over the course of our lives.

But I guess that's what happens when you put a bunch of type A personalities together and give them a story.  It is now a collective hope.  And I am personally thrilled and inspired to be working with such brilliant, artistic and dedicated warriors.

May we someday (soon) be toasting these very words at Cannes (or some such--like the White House).