Would you like fries with that?

I was talking with a fellow member of Grinder Productions the other night, and we got to talking about all the Grinder people that we knew who had gone on to "bigger and better things" - be it careers in film, modelling, Broadway, etc - Grinder has been the starting place for people who have wound up in these and other places. We then lamented our own lack of advancement "in the biz," but then quickly recanted, realizing how much satisfaction we had both taken from the years of working on shows in our simple journeyman's existence. We are the cottage industry of theatre, the grass-roots of a creative force that ends, not begins, on the stages of New York, Stratford and the West End, to say nothing of Hollywood.

I told my fellow member that there weren't a lot of people who would do what I do - many producers would leave what we're doing to community theatre and high school drama departments, choosing instead to pursue more lucrative endeavours. I remarked that I could easily earn a better living flipping burgers than I could doing what I do now.

She turned to me and said, "I'm glad you don't."

Words that taste like a glass of cool clear water to a man dying of thirst if ever I've heard them.