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've recently gotten into an obsessive habit of trying to clean out my inbox and keep my desk immaculately clean. I blame it on the upcoming holidays: there's never any telling how I will behave in the last two months of the year.

In performing these tasks, I came across an article about Stetson Kennedy in the New York Times from August that I was forwarded and had been meaning to read:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/us/30kennedy.html

It was forwarded from a protege of Mr. Kennedy's to my father-in-law, who then forwarded it on to Stu, my husband (and producer of our film), who then forwarded it on to me. Don't you just love the internet?

Stetson Kennedy, who died August 27 of this year, was a white civil rights leader. Apart from an entire lifetime of civil rights work and collecting folklore, he was particularly well known for infiltrating and exposing the Ku Klux Klan. There is a documentary coming out this month on him that will eventually make its way to PBS. Rumor has it that Tobey Maguire bought the rights to his life, following in the footsteps of Humphrey Bogart. Hopefully, Mr. Maguire will be successful in getting his life onto the big screen for all to see.

As a producer, I have to ask myself and be able to answer the question, "why should anyone care?" I have to be able to answer it because if I don't know the answer, I can't explain it to someone else, and then voila: no money for fun times movie. What's interesting (and what I love) about White Alligator is that the majority of the current crew is not Hispanic. The only Hispanics we can claim right now are me, the writer/actor, and Raquel Almazan, the director. So, I often ask myself, why do these fabulous people that have dedicated their (unpaid for now) time, energy and resources, care?

Well, why did Stetson Kennedy care?

I'd like to think that White Alligator, despite having a main character from Puerto Rico, speaks to all walks of life. It's written and designed to have people across the board say, "yes, that's me, that's happened to me." But playing devil's advocate, which all producers do, let's say for some reason, it doesn't. Let's imagine the worst case scenario where a mixed audience sits in that theater and at the end, some say, "funny stuff, but what's this gotta do with me?"

In my dreams, I like to think that the Least Common Denominator should be able to see my film, have a good time, grab a beer afterwards and go to sleep content. Later in the week, when bringing in candidates for an open position for, say, fund structuring attorney and he/she looks at a pile of resumes and happens to have a Mr. Rodriguez with an excellent resume, I'd like to think that this person would now have the subconscious ability to think, "Oh, maybe this Rodriguez fellow won't come in with nasty crack habit and a fondness for glocks. He did go to Harvard Law School, after all. What the hey, let's bring him in..."

That's the worst case scenario. The next level of people in the audience are the ones that say, "what's this gotta do with me?" And this is the most exciting group of people to encounter. They're the ones that Stetson wrote for, the ones that are on the fence about caring, the ones that haven't yet been converted. They care enough to ask, "why should I care?" And they are the future. They still pass a homeless man on the street without blinking, but maybe later in the day when they're getting soup for lunch, they think about him again and wonder if there's anything anybody can do.

The real answer to the question, "why should I care," should be that we're all interconnected by an invisible string, and when one person falls down, we all come crashing down. It's hard to see this, of course, when you're in the middle of the grit of your own personal day. But some people, such as Stetson Kennedy, Oskar Schindler, Mike Daisey, can see that string linking us all. They see that that homeless man, if given the proper therapy and medication for his schizophrenia, has the potential to someday solve the healthcare crisis. They see the value and worthiness of every living creature placed on Earth.

Those are the beautiful souls that I am fortunate enough to be surrounded by in this project. They do not say, "I'm not Hispanic: what does this project have to do with me?" but rather, "this project has the potential to advance our humanity."

And for that, I am forever grateful.