At the End of the Day

If the blog has felt lackluster of late, gentle readers, please know it is due to a crisis of faith in the President of IMS.  Seeing the sitemeter ratings go down each week, knowing that my posts about racial diversity in the media are turning my readers off, has certainly added to my malaise, but the truth is that it has been a long and hard winter for this President.  In spite of finding that there is more shirtlessness on Broadway than ever before, sometimes the work of a leader seems useless and ineffective.  Perhaps everyone goes through these moments of self-doubt.  I find myself turning to the J Lo "I'm Into You" video for solace these days, imagining that hunky William Levy is running, running, running towards me in all his shirtless glory and that I am wearing a dress made out of coins and designer shades looking amazing at 43.  This is my fantasy.  Because today I wrote an application for a playwriting fellowship in which I answered the question as to how I was pushing the boundaries of the American theater with the sentence "I have multiple people of color on stage at the same time speaking."  How this has become boundary pushing in 2013 is beyond me, and yet I am reminded of how revolutionary it is two or three times a week when I actually sit in the American theater.  I feel discouraged, gentle IMS members, when I find that I have to push in order to be seen for a role as an Indian woman.  I feel disappointed when even the companies formed to combat racial prejudice practice their own prejudices.  And then I have to cradle my iPad and watch the JLo video over and over to make myself feel better.  But then I think about how this blog started in 2007, inspired by one scene in one movie, and how now shirtlessness abounds in movies and stage appearances.  Maybe this is just a bump in the road.  Maybe things can change.  I don't know.  I just have to work on one torso at a time.  And so I continue...

Yours in shirtlessness,
Nandita
President
IMS