If you are an artist or a regular person waiting on someone else to do something for you (i.e, some kind of agent/manager/best friend/baby mama/baby daddy/girlfriend/protege), please know this:

Those people are not your employment agency. You are your own employment agency.

I had that revelation a few weeks ago and since then have been calling production companies about my script, “Smoke and Mirrors.” Me and my friend Tracie Thoms have been on the hustle for this vehicle for her. It’s a script about a girl who finally grows up at the age 28 after she loses everything that made her comfortably immature.

Guess what?

Folks are actually okay with me sending my stuff to them. Okay, so it took this long for me to get here but I got here and I got here in a way that makes perfect sense to me.

(Insert Charlie Brown chorus here)

So if you are waiting for people to do something for you, I hope you are sitting in a very comfortable seat and not one of those DMV plastic chairs.

And in reference to my “Notes to Self”, there’s this new craze running around since it’s been on Oprah called “The Secret.” Now, I’ve not seen this DVD but I have been to Dr. Michael Beckwith’s place of peace called Agape. There is nothing new in the world, by the way. But I believe in this: gratitude is the way to move yourself. If you are not grateful for EVERYTHING that happens to you, then you are not doing a service to yourself at all.

I was hard on myself in “Notes to Myself” by using the word failiure, which I’m not (yes, I know this! I am the most successful T. Tara Turk I know!). But I don’t mind that. I also am aware that I’m working on my second novel, my fourth screenplay, looking at a short story coming out in another anthology in late March (more to come on that), and learning how to file away all the ideas I have.

By the way, I forgot to also mention that seeing my old theater professor/mentor Kevin Confoy on his trip to the Left Coast and I want to thank him for bringing some awesome theaterical intelluct to my brain. I had a great idea for a play (I hope I remember it when it comes time to write it) while he spoke on the various joys of love in plays from John Patrick Shanley (read awesomely by Ben Provo - super talented actor who is not acting because it is not only what he is and I support him…sigh - and SLC parent Caryn Mandabach - who opened her lovely home to us) to Shakespeare (alums from the 50s to last year reading different scenes!). Kevin and Christine Farrell are bomb lovers of theater who can actually articulate it. That’s hard business.

My last mention is for Dr. Barbara Emerson. There isn’t really enough space on this page to show gratitude to her for being an amazing supporter, believer, funder and mother to what me and Ka’ramuu Kush did at The New School in our time there. We did the first black theater festival at The New School because of her. We brought Jessica Care Moore, T’Kalla, Jasiri, Nathan Trice, Dyron Holmes, Lawrence Holder and many more folks into the fold at The New School, showing that place some shades of brown they’d never seen before. So there. And the whole time, this lovely Dr. Emerson steered the way for us. I am eternally grateful for her.

Keep your revelations coming….