Our upcoming concert, ICONS, celebrates the artistry of LGBTQ+ musicians from past and present. Please join us on June 21 at 7 p.m. at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall as we turn the stage into a grand nightclub showcasing our finest talent.
Every year I make an effort to go down to the Waterfront Park in Portland, Oregon to capture on film the blooming of the trees. Throughout much of my adult life, I’ve made it to the park without fail, but it’s only in the last few years that I decided to photograph the event. And every year, I wonder what would happen if the flowers didn’t bloom.
There’s a very old myth about how the seasons came to be. In Greek mythology, the fertility goddess Persephone was kidnapped by Hades in order that he might make her his bride. There are several variations on this myth, but for the sake of brevity, after eating a pomegranate, Persephone was required to remain in the underworld for a set period of time – usually three months, but sometimes more depending on the the number of seeds eaten and according to who is telling the story. Her return heralded the beginning of spring, at which time her mother Demeter rejoiced at her return. Persephone’s return to the underworld signaled the beginning of winter.
But what would happen if the flowers didn’t bloom?
Each year I watch the trees as the buds start to sprout. What would happen if they didn’t emerge, or the buds remained in stasis rather than fully growing into leaves? How would this affect our outlook if spring never came? It may sound a bit silly at times as many of us take spring for granted, but I often look at this season as my favorite, as well as the most ephemeral. The beauty of spring is offset by its fragility. The cherry blossoms bloom once a year and then vanish. The birdsong begins and continues throughout the summer as they find their mates before flying away in the autumn. And no spring is ever completely the same.
If Persephone chose to maintain her residence in the underworld for a longer period of time, I imagine the spring season would be very brief, and summer would begin sooner. I have no doubt the harvest season would be affected as well. And of course the length of spring changes in different climes anyway, including here in the United States. Our spring here in Oregon is quite different from what you might see in Minnesota. But if Persephone never returned, the flowers wouldn’t bloom, and many of these seasonal changes wouldn’t come to pass. We’d see a much more barren planet than we’d ever want without the advent of spring and the return of the crops we need for our very survival.
I celebrate spring for many reasons. The return of warm weather and the blossoming of the cherry trees are only a very small part of it. I celebrate the return of possibility and growth, even though I’m aware those things have never really left us. I celebrate spring for the renewal of romance or of finding of new love. But mostly, I celebrate it because the alternative is that we remain in stasis, forever immutable and depriving ourselves of new opportunities for changing who we are, even if those changes are necessary or inevitable.
Our joint concert is coming up in less than ten days. The Portland Gay Men’s Chorus, the Portland Lesbian Choir, and the Portland Pride Bands will be performing at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in our spring concert, “Our New World,” on Sunday, March 30 with our special guests, Bridging Voices. Tickets are almost sold out, so if you’re still on the fence about going, don’t delay. There are still some seats left on the upper balcony, so snap them up as soon as possible.
Below is an interview on AM Extra with all three of our conductors: Dr. Braeden Ayres, Mary McCarty, and Joseph Accuardi-Gilliam. Enjoy!
At last, it’s come to this. I have so many video games at home, both physical copies as well as from the various libraries on my systems (Playstation Plus, Nintendo Online, and Game Pass) that I’ve decided to drastically cut down how much I spend on this hobby. I’d already reduced my budget for video games anyway for various reasons, but now that I have a huge backlog, I’m much more likely to simply finish up what’s there. In addition, any “new” games that I want to get can be downloaded from those libraries, meaning that I’ll only spend money on the games I want once every few months.
I’m actually overjoyed with this decision since it’s been obvious for a while that there’s no conceivable way to finish every game in my collection for at least a year unless I have more time freed up. Additionally, with the job hunting, finishing the test for my medical billing and coding certification, and other activities keeping me busy, that’s not going to happen anytime soon. So yes, having more money available due to less spending on my hobbies isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I’m implementing a similar strategy on buying more books as my library has grown substantially, but my book space is at capacity. There’s only one book that I’m currently looking at buying, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition, and it’s big enough that I’d have to clear out more space than I have now. Knowing when to say no to buying more things has been an essential lesson I’ve learned while being unemployed. I’m committed to being more frugal than ever for the next year, even when I eventually obtain a new job.
On March 30, 2025 the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus is partnering with the Portland Lesbian Choir and the Portland Pride Bands with our special guests, Bridging Voices, for our spring concert, “Our New World.” Tickets are selling fast, so please reserve your seats immediately. The discount code is FAFD10 and will end March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day).
The link for the PGMC website is below. I look forward to seeing all of you at our upcoming concert.
How often do you pay attention to statistics when you’re thinking about going out for a specific job or activity? And what do you tell someone who thinks you shouldn’t be able to accomplish something because so few people succeed at it?
Recently, for whatever reason, I started paying attention to statistics, especially pertaining to my own life and how unusually singular my circumstances were. Case in point: I was born with an extremely rare congenital neurological disorder known as Moebius syndrome. This condition is so rare that significantly less than 1% of the human population has it. Furthermore, at the time I was diagnosed, approximately 300 known cases had been correctly diagnosed since 1900.
Upon learning about my condition, the doctors spoke with my parents, earnestly stating that I should be placed into an institution since the chances of me pursuing a normal life were very remote. Thankfully, my parents decided against this course of action and took me home. By the age of three, we discovered I had perfect pitch after I could play the theme song from the movie Patton on the piano note for note. At the age of four, I taught myself to read which facilitated my entry into the talented and gifted (TAG) program. Regarding the prevalence of people with perfect pitch, 1 in 10,000 people have it, while 6% of all children in the United States participate in the TAG program.
When I entered high school in the early to mid 1980s, I discovered my love of acting and musical theater and very much wanted to consider acting as a career. However, there were extremely few actors with disabilities on television and film in those days. It wouldn’t be until 2007 that I finally made the decision to consider acting as a viable career, and even then, I was very wary of the statistics involved. Approximately 2% of all performers can make a living in the industry, and only 3% of all lines read from scripts are given to actors with disabilities.
I made it a point to learn about many performers with disabilities and their contributions to television and film but was not at all surprised to discover that we were not represented very well in the media. I admit to being daunted by those figures, but I nevertheless persisted in performing as a singer and very occasionally as an actor. To continue building on my acting skills, I ended up joining Toastmasters in 2013 to become a better actor and public speaker. I hadn’t even considered becoming a Distinguished Toastmaster until at least several years into my journey as a public speaker, whereupon I’d also learned that less than 1% of all Toastmasters become Distinguished Toastmasters.
Mark Twain is often quoted as saying, “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damn lies, and statistics.” At this point, I think I’m closer to believing him than ever. Or to put this another way: At what point does paying attention to all these statistics become a distraction? Granted, statistics can be a great way of measuring success in a specific field of study, but it also has the negative effect of telling someone, hey, maybe you’re not ready for this profession yet. After all, if only a small percentage of people make a living as a performer, shouldn’t you consider alternatives, or at least have a Plan B?
The truth is that life isn’t all about statistics so much as it is about taking the first steps towards what you need to accomplish. And here’s what I’ve discovered: Statistical improbabilities can be thwarted by creating attainable goals, and no one should really tell you what you’re able to accomplish, even if it’s meant as sound advice. If you want to be an actor, for example, go for it. Maybe you won’t make a living from it, at least at first, but there are a lot of positive benefits from developing acting skills. Learning how to perform onstage can help boost your confidence, enhance your creativity, help you develop empathy for others, and provide a safe space to explore different emotional states. Above all, if it’s something you enjoy, keep at it, and ignore the naysayers who believe it won’t benefit you in the long run.
This year I’m committed to finishing my Distinguished Toastmasters Award, and the end is almost in sight with only a few more exercises to go before completing the process. Never mind the fact that I’ll be in the 1% of all Toastmasters who complete this journey; the main goal is to become an outstanding professional speaker, not to worry about the rarity of the circumstances or whether I can turn this into a full-time career. The point is to turn those chances you take in whatever career you choose into attainable goals that you can follow. I wish you well on your journey.
This isn’t a particularly long post. I just wanted to remind people that most of the time, you’re only as good as the headshots you put out for your auditions. Yes, I know the auditions themselves are important, but creating a great first impression on paper matters just as much as the best performance you give to the casting agent or director for the project you’re trying out for.
The first headshot was taken by my mother, Linda Freedman, over a decade ago. At that time, a bakery was still open next to my apartment building. We took several pictures there, and this is the photo that I continue to use for my professional profile. The second photo, below, was taken through Boly:Welch after I’d completed a job training program two summers ago. They offered free headshots for all of us who participated in their workshop, and naturally I couldn’t say no. This photo can also be found on the Actors in Action website. Interestingly, despite these photos being taken years apart from each other, I don’t look as if I’ve aged that much except for the weight gain and thinning hair. You be the judge.
In 2009 the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus performed “Earthly Harmonies,” a concert featuring a variety of pieces from different countries. This was one of my all-time favorite concerts, and I’d often wished we could perform some of those songs again. Thankfully, our holiday program, entitled “Merry Everything,” evokes the spirit of that concert in that we are singing winter songs from around the world. Furthermore, one of the songs from “Earthly Harmonies” makes a return appearance.
“Zikr,” composed by A.R. Rahman, wrote this piece of music for the soundtrack of the film Bose: The Forgotten Hero. In our first performance of this song, my fellow chorus member Vikram Srinivasan was our soloist. The current version that we’ll perform does not have the same solo part but is still stunning in its beauty. Thank you to A.R. Rahman for this wonderful masterpiece as well as our conductors, Dr. Braeden Ayres and Garrett Bond, for bringing it back for an encore performance. You may follow the link below to see our original performance of “Zikr.” I hope you enjoy it.
I’ve been an artist for a long time. Specifically, my main areas of focus over the course of my life have been writing, singing, acting, and public speaking. Interestingly, however, I’ve very seldom thought about my “why” for each of these creative endeavors. With writing, I’ve always felt the need to write. It truly is my calling and can keep me up late at night or wake me early in the morning with a sentence or story tugging insistently at my consciousness. My desire to sing is almost as persistent as my calling to write. I don’t try to assign a reason for my singing beyond the fact that I truly love doing it. My public speaking experience came about as a result of my wanting to become a better actor. As a public speaker, my “why” is to be a better communicator and eventually educate people on a variety of different subjects.
Acting, however, has been a different beast altogether, and for a long time I’ve been very conflicted on where to go with it. I knew since I was a teenager that I wanted to create an acting career, but the reality is, my bilateral facial paralysis was always going to be problematic in terms of finding work as an actor. Even when I make the effort to speak more clearly, the lack of facial expression at best relegates me to being a specific type of character actor and at worst being treated as not much more than a stereotype. In some ways, this caused me even more headaches and sleepless nights than the stories that would flit through my head. I would often wonder, how do I create a career for myself as an actor when the odds are seemingly stacked against me because of my disability?
I’ve mentioned this next point in prior posts, but I’ll briefly restate it here. In 2007 I was inspired to go back into acting after reading an article about the successful career of another actor with a disability named Robert David Hall. Almost immediately after finishing that article, I sought out a teacher in television and film acting who in due course became my agent. In addition, I also began researching other performers with disabilities in order to discover how they succeeded in an industry where people with disabilities can often be overlooked or treated as a joke. Not surprisingly, if you do enough research, you’ll find that there are plenty of performers with disabilities in the entertainment industry. However, if you asked most people on the street to name five performers with disabilities, you’d probably get a few blank stares and maybe, just maybe, one or two responses to that question. And I guarantee you that very few of those performers with disabilities are working in any given year compared to their non-disabled counterparts. So while I was encouraged to find successfully working performers with disabilities in show business, it was disheartening to realize that we weren’t well-represented, let alone acknowledged for our accomplishments very often.
With all this in mind, even after getting an agent, I was justifiably terrified of going to auditions. I made some progress and scored a couple of projects very early on, but my fear eventually took over. There were times when I’d receive a notice from a casting agency, whereupon I’d look at the project and think, “Why would they think I’m perfect for this?” I would then blow it off and miss an audition thanks to my fears of how I’d be perceived as a person with a disability rather than realizing that the people who sent me the project notice already had access to my profile and realized I might be a good fit for them. In other words, I was a victim of my own self-sabotage, and I hated myself for it.
The inciting incident that turned things around for me was the pandemic as well as the realization during that time that I needed a hard reset with how I was doing things. My writing received a boost when I agreed to create a column for Voices! Magazine in 2021. My singing had never stopped, even during our isolation during the pandemic, as the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus created virtual concerts to supplement our season, ensuring that our audiences would still be able to see us. I kept active in Toastmasters as well, becoming an Area Director for a third time and attending all of my meetings virtually. But what was I to do about acting?
To this day, I’m still not completely sure how my acting career will work out, but figuring out my “why” was of paramount importance so I could create a more secure space for myself. Ironically, my “why” isn’t about security at all but instead its exact opposite: I act in order to face my fears as a person with a disability and to work past my concerns about how people perceive me. I act because I know there aren’t a lot of other people out there like me with facial paralyses who are working performers, and if I can be successful in my field, then maybe it will make room for other performers with disabilities to do the same. And I act because, frankly, it beats working at a desk in a crappy job that I hate. Yes, I know I could still go down that road, particularly since I’ve almost finished up my certification process as a medical biller and coder. But I’ll leave some grace for myself in that regard since I need a day job like everyone else to foot the bills to support myself as a writer and performer. I act because it matters to me, and maybe it will matter to other people who need to see positive representation in the disability community as well as in the larger society as a whole.
I don’t claim to have all the answers when it comes to finding or maintaining work as an actor. The one bit of reassurance I can give myself is that I’m not alone in facing my fears when I go out for a part. I see the nervousness in every person’s face when they go up on stage, and I know that nine times out of ten most of us will be rejected. But at least now I know why I perform as an actor, and maybe that’s enough to help me take the next few steps forward in creating a successful acting career for myself.
Hi folks. One of the things I’ll be working on is adding new video links to my website. These will be focused on acting, singing, and public speaking projects that I’ve been involved with over the years. A few things might be taken out as well, including some older singing videos that were adequate to view then but don’t represent some of my best work now.
One video I’m proud to include is fairly recent. During the pandemic, I had the privilege of running a breakout session at one of our Toastmaster Leadership Institute events. The breakout session, entitled “How to Create Better Stage Presence on Zoom,” allowed me to explain to other public speakers and leaders how to create a space that works best on visual media. Of course, at the time we were all cooped up and couldn’t communicate in person as much as we would have liked. I have a feeling that a lot of these tips still work well today. Please feel free to share this video with whomever you feel would make the best use of it. Cheers!
Freedman on the Go 