Hazardous Material

Divination. What’s your favorite? Like donuts, they are all so beautiful in different ways. Tarot is the major contender, of course, because it has stood the test of time as a stronghold of reliability and depth. Also people like a book with pictures and The Book “T” has that in spades, I mean disks. There are also a wide variety of spreads for using tarot cards which make it adaptable for your personality. Unfortunately, I have a chronic habit of losing one card, just one card, from every tarot deck I have ever owned. (My current deck has to be sealed in a bag immediately after using.) But everyone knows I don’t play with a full deck! As Tigger the Tarot reader used to sing while attending a tarot convention with Winnie the Seer, “The wonderful thing about tarot, tarot are wonderful things. There tops are spun out of DE-signs. There bottoms are made out of dreams.” You can use a deck of tarot cards to work the paths of the Tree of Life or to do dream invocation work, attracting the in...

Two days away from the big fundraiser for Variety.org and I’m still polishing material. No surprise there! You don’t hire a creative director who uses improvisational methods and expect any less. Variety provides modified bicycles and other equipment to developmentally challenged kids to help them stay mobile and live normal lives. Every year they have an annual fundraiser to get money to help the children and this year they brought me on as event designer to help pull of the largest fundraiser they have attempted yet. Variety is an international charity and the Pittsburgh office is the original of a now global organization. This year’s event is scheduled for July 14th which falls on “Bastille Day”. The event organizer, Marilyn Caye, decided to pull out all the stops and make it a full on French themed extravaganza. The fundraiser takes place in a spacious mansion over looking the famous three rivers of Pittsburgh, high above, from atop the hill of Mt. Washington. The event is presente...

The unedited Joe Gaiter interview! HE contacted me for an interview knowing my work in "Sister Act 2". What is your view on life right now? If you want to create the dream that you see for yourself you need to block out all other distracting or disempowering influences. You will not make it unless you are vigilantly self-confident and keep one leg in the real world and the other leg in your dreams. Even constructive criticism can chip away at your belief in yourself and lessen your ability to affect the change you see possible in the world. Where did you grow up? Tell me about your childhood. I was born in Bar Harbor, Maine, but I grew up in Santa Clara, California. I was the only comedian in the microchip generation out of the Silicon Valley. All of my friends and family were computer programmers and I.T people and I was the class clown. I started entertaining at the age of six performing for family and friends of the family. I would dress up in a suit with glasses and a can...

"...on bad days I have only dead words, and they are so corpse-heavy that I cannot write with them, not even a letter. Is that bad, weak? And yet God wills it so with me..."- Rilke

"...all emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you. Everything that you can think in the face of your childhood, is right. Everything that makes more of you than you have heretofore been in your best hours, is right. Every heightening is good if it is in your whole blood, if it is not intoxication, not turbidity, but joy which one can see clear to the bottom. Do you understand what I mean?" -Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letters to a Young Poet"