Untitled Adjunct Project
How did you use your time in the Midwives?
I spent most of my time in the Midwives developing an original solo show on the state of higher education in America - which I will write and perform - and finding ways to prioritize art-making in my life.
What is a discovery you made about yourself or your process?
I discovered how vital it is for me to have collaborators in my process, even when creating a solo show. I discovered it takes more than just setting aside time in my Google Calendar to actually devote time and energy to the creative process. And I discovered I just might have to turn off that part of my brain that mocks the "woo-woo" "hippy-dippy" spirituality stuff that enables many people to open themselves up to make truly authentic personal art. (I haven't figured out how to do that yet, but I'm optimistic.)
Can you describe your piece / process for us?
Are you an aspiring adjunct professor in America? Register now for my 1-hour participatory seminar on how to stay flexible in an industry that treats learners like customers, embraces AI technology over human ingenuity, and drives its workers to new and completely unrelated professions. Free OnlyFans tutorial to the first 5 registrants.
UNTITLED ADJUNCT PROJECT
Last revised May 2024
This monologue will come towards the end of the piece, after I have introduced a few different lessons about breaking into a career in higher ed. The final lesson will involve educating the audience on the important of “up-skilling” or diversifying one’s marketable skills to pursue other income streams in the future. I will invite an audience member to film me spreading food on my semi-clothed body to create online content for people with food fetishes. At some point during the “filming,” I will have a “what the hell am I doing?” type realization and deliver this fairly rapid monologue, perhaps while cleaning myself off with a tissue from the one Kleenex travel pack that I’ve brought with me.
Is this what my career has come to?
Which is more demeaning? Live-streaming myself rubbing ketchup all over my naked torso so that someone else can watch and get off on it? Or adjuncting?
Do you know what being an adjunct is really like? Has anyone ever described to you a “typical” day in the life of someone who is holding down enough adjunct gigs to equal a full-time job?
I wake up, shower, quick breakfast, and pack two meals, that I pre-made to save money, in my insulated lunch bag, so they don’t spoil over the course of the day, because I’m not going to have time to stop home again.
I kiss my husband goodbye and leave my South Philadelphia apartment to catch the bus that brings me to my 20-minute subway ride to North Philadelphia. I hop out and hustle to my classroom, which lucky for me, isn’t occupied in the hour before my class, so I can get in early and set up the projector with the slide deck I’ve prepared for the day. Then I spend 50 minutes trying to make 30-35 undergraduate theatre majors see the relevance of theatre history.
After that, assuming no student needs to talk to me about something, heaven forbid, I shut everything down, pack up my stuff, and book it, because I have another class in 10 minutes, and it’s a 5-minute walk to my next class in another building, where I have to set up the projector again, so I’m hoping that the professor who’s in there before me isn’t taking their time talking to students and preventing me from setting up my materials. If all goes according to plan, I teach a 50-minute class to non theatre majors, who are often more interested in the material than the majors are, about the intersection of contemporary theatre with race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Once that class is over, I REALLY book it to the subway, so I can catch a very specific train on the main subway line that will let me transfer to a much less frequent subway line that cuts diagonally across part of central Philadelphia and saves me some time, so I can hop on the 6-minute train that will carry me across the Ben Franklin Bridge to Camden, New Jersey, so I can hurry to my second university’s satellite campus, where I can breathe for a few seconds and scarf down one of the meals in my insulated bag, because I can’t eat on the university-provided shuttle bus I’m about to board (nor would I want to).
The bus, which feels like a metal box held together by the same bolts that were supposed to keep the door plug in that Alaska Airlines Boeing 737, is being driven by someone who regularly steers the bus over towards the rumble strips, because they are responding to every text message they get while the ride is happening, because let’s be real, their job isn’t great either, so why should they care? Oh. Wait a minute. Perhaps they should care about all the lives they’re responsible for on this 25-minute commute across 3 different highways to Glassboro, New Jersey. And it’s not like I can distract myself from the danger, because this bus has no shock absorbers, so I can’t write or read anything, not even on my phone.
Assuming I make it to Glassboro in one piece, and traffic wasn’t terrible, I hop out, scurry into my building, wait for the class ahead of mine to let out, and teach two back-to-back writing-intensive classes about contemporary world theatre to 18 students each. Notice that this is the first time I am teaching a REPEAT class, so I have had to prep 3 different lessons for the day. Once that’s done, I hop on - you guessed it - that same shuttle bus back to Camden, which THIS time is full of students, all saying and listening to questionable things, as the driver attempts to navigate rush hour traffic.
THEN I hop off in Camden, run to catch that over-the-bridge train again, so I can catch the SUBURBAN regional rail train that will take me for my 30-minute long commute to my third university in Glenside, Pennsylvania, where I have an evening rehearsal. I cannot eat my dinner during this commute, because food is not allowed on the train, so I have to wait until I get to the station, make the 25-minute long walk up a hill to campus, and find a spot to scarf down the remaining food in my bag before leading a 3-hour rehearsal with a bunch of tired but mostly attentive undergraduates.
When I leave rehearsal, it’s late, and it’s dark, and I have to walk back down that hill to catch the LAST train out of Glenside. I arrive at the regional rail station so late that they’ve opened the turnstiles, because none of the unhoused persons hanging out in the station will even be able to get on a train at this point. I run to catch the last subway train to South Philly, I walk the 25 minutes back to my apartment, and crash at home, where my husband has probably already gotten ready for bed and/or fallen asleep by this point.
And somehow in the midst of all this, on my “days off” perhaps, because I don’t have time during all that commuting, I’m expected to plan lessons, grade student work and give them decent feedback, find opportunities to see other plays, network with artistic directors and other artists who might be able to get me professional work, and possibly write something that could be published by an academic journal or online publication and read by all of the 19 people who find it on Google Scholar, so that ultimately I can get hired into a tenure-track position, hopefully at one of the places I’m already working at (no guarantees though), so that I can do the thing that fulfills me the most, the thing I think I’m pretty good at. But that part doesn’t really matter, because focusing on teaching at the undergraduate level isn’t the point, because we’re supposed to be working professionals who happen to be teaching classes, and who the fuck cares whether we’re actually good at THAT part of the job as long as we have clout that the university can use to boost its image or connections that the students can take advantage of once they’ve graduated.
That’s what a typical day of being an adjunct is like. And that wasn’t the semester I had to incur the expense of renting a car, because the university I directed at was too far away to work with the public transit schedules.
It’s still unclear what will come after this monologue, though I do like the idea of asking the audience to stand up in their chairs and say “O captain, my captain!” a la Dead Poets Society before I leave the room, still semi-clothed, with my belongings.