When I was in the seventh grade, my mother took my sister to the mall to pick out my birthday present from her.  For reasons that remain more or less a mystery, she settled on a football, passed it to my sister, and told her “teach your brother how to have fun.”

Both my sister and I found the gift preposterous.  For a few years I dutifully kept track of the football, until it eventually deflated into the recesses of my memory.

For the last few months, I’ve been taking a martial arts class under Sifu Marcus Lovemore, and today my development as a martial artist, and ultimately as a person, came to an impasse.  I have to learn how to play.  From now on, I need to make my life fun.  Sifu seems to think this is an easy task – he used Nintendo as an example.  We don’t stress out over Nintendo, right?  It’s just something we do.

Little does Sifu know that I quit Super Mario Bros. because I was always doing it wrong.  Nintendo caused me so much anxiety that playing it for longer than ten minutes made me sick.  On my twelfth birthday my Mom observed that play was missing from my daily regimen, but none of us took the problem too seriously.  After all, one doesn’t play around with success, right?  For the most part, we were in agreement: fun is overrated. 

What I’m learning in my class is that when you’re worked up about doing something right, the second-guessing detracts from the focus.  Playing is more efficient than work.

None of this background is terribly useful to consider, it’s just something I have to do.  All the same, it got me thinking about making movies.  Don’t I create a space for play in my screenplays?  Isn’t there play on my sets?

Funny enough, there is – but maybe not for me.  I think I live vicariously through my actors.  I think my love of actors is a bit co-dependent.  I think they play for me.  I’m like the host who never gets a chance to eat.

Suddenly I find myself up against that age-old dilemma.  Will healing make me a crappy artist?  Is my hunger for playtime what drives me to make good art, or will learning to play give me a deeper level of creative power?

Smart money is on the latter.  To my actors and fellow filmmakers, I apologize for not being as present as I might have been in the past.  I can do better.

Or, wait…  Hang on a second…