“Attention must be paid.”

-Title Excerpted from “Death of a Salesman”
by Arthur Miller
American Playwright
  (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005)

“Pay Attention!” You hear it from Childhood.

“Look at me when I talk to you!”

The phrases don’t do the concept justice.

Attention is a little bit like money.  It comes in

“I’m having a conversation with my audience, and we’ll both be dead by the time we’re done.”

The title quote from Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen “The Boss”
American Songwriter, Performer, Rock & Roll Star
(September 23, 1949 – )

“Speeches” are a bit more declarative.  Plays more dominated by the script.  Presentations more work and outcome focused.  But all are at their best when

“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”

The Inquisition – 1799. Anonymous tribunals were determining guilt and issuing death sentences against people harboring unacceptable beliefs. Reason slept. Goya, the King’s painter,

Baby Steps

Lost in Rugby, England, Dwight Morrow and his wife, the parents of Anne Lindbergh, wandered through the streets for hours. He stopped a little Rugby lad of about 12 years. “Could you tell us the way to the station?” he asked.

“Well,” the boy answered, “You turn to the right there by the grocer’s shop and then take the second street to the left. 

The “Discipline of Improvisation”

“Improvisation is too good to leave to chance.”
– Paul Simon
American Singer and Songwriter
(1941 – )

It’s an oxymoron of course, because everyone who’s seen Improv on stage knows there’s no earthly form of discipline in that uncontrolled, free-form