Organizational Change & Development in Tabatha's Salon Takeover

Bravo has been running a lot of this show lately, and since I've been laid up (or, more accurately, laid out, like a cadaver) with a wrenched back, I've watched a bunch of episodes. And I'm kind of hooked. I was initially sort of reproachful about the show's premise--über-wench Tabatha Coffey (formerly of the first round of Shear Genius) goes into a failing/miserable/grody hair salon, knocks everyone around, and teaches them but good. But you know what? The manager in me really likes this show a lot.

Tabatha does go into salons that are basically on their last curling iron, and yes, she does brusquely put people in their place, and she can be a little terse. But she's also encouraging, fair, professional, and, in the end, she turns the salons into high-functioning team environments focused on customer service.

It's a journey that--well, let's just say it's one I'm familiar with.

Organizational dysfunction is actually so common it has become "function." Workplace environments are chock full of people with issues, people dodging responsibility, people viciously guarding their little fiefdoms, and people hating each other. Even the best teams I've worked on have had these elements to them in some proportion; at worst, it's all there's been. This is why the workplace is such a common setting for sit coms. (And why The Office is funnier if, you know, you work in an office. See also Dilbert.)



There are a few pretty consistent things Tabatha has pointed out in her salons:

1. Clutter is the devil. A lot of the salons are a physical mess, which is often a symptom of emotional and intellectual messes you can't see. Cleaning things up and getting things organized is an important part of the transition, and it puts everyone in the salon in a good mood.

2. Leadership is not optional. Several of the salon owners I saw were reluctant to be real leaders. One was basically an irrational tyrant who felt her job wasn't to "coddle" her employees by giving them pats on the back; the rest were all mousy or immature versions of real leaders who were afraid of being disliked. Tabatha helps them understand the difference between being liked (or feared) and being respected.

3. Dead wood must go. In organizations, people who don't carry their weight are often buffered by the high-performers around them, so they can coast along without putting in much effort for a while. Tabatha roots these low-performers out, gives them a set of standards and expectations, and then gives them a chance to improve. If they don't, she cuts them loose--or, better yet, gives them an opportunity to quit on their own when they realize the salon is evolving beyond their ability to participate.

4. Clients come first. A few of the salons I saw had strong teams in them; it's just that the teams were more focused on having a good time with each other than they were on giving their clients what they want. Tabatha refocuses their work away from that unhealthy dynamic toward perfecting services first, then developing the internal team second. And really, the internal team development is the responsibility of the salon owner and manager, not the team itself--Tabatha reinforces this.

Tabatha, after her week in the salon, comes back about six weeks later to see how things are going. Most of the salons have hit their stride and do much better, even if they've painted over Tabatha's repainting and refurnishing. (But that can be an important "reclaiming" of the territory by the owner.) At least 1 owner completely restored the salon to its' pre-Tabatha operations, including terrorizing her staff and demoting her only functional leader in the team. It was sad to see. But it was clear that owner just wanted out of the business and she was hellbent on making her salon fail.

Whenever people have to work in groups, things get nutty. I think when artists work together in groups, it can get nuttier pretty quickly. Watching this show has reminded me about the importance of remembering what a leader's responsibilities are, and that even when we don't want to, we always have to do the difficult things we are called upon to do.

Dear Diary

Okay, I admit it. The Vampire Diaries is the best new show this fall. (That I've watched. I need to get in touch with Modern Family and Cougar Town, though.)

How do I love The Vampire Diaries? Let me start by saying I did not want to love it. I did not need to watch another show about vampires, feeling it was well-covered territory with Buffy, Angel, True Blood, and Moonlight (plus, yuck). Like zombies, I was sure the vampire Zeitgeist had peaked and jumped the shark, jumped the pufferfish, jumped the minnow, even jumped the plankton.

I was ready to move past vampires. I was ready to move past vampires who go to high school, vampires who have a soul/conscience, vampires who are barely-tamed animals with no soul, vampires who long to be human, and vampires who both love and eat humans. I was over glamours, I was over longing looks through the shadowy afternoon, I was over men who look like they need to eat a cheeseburger instead of a cheerleader.

Plus, there's a witch! It's like, hello, did you crib right from Buffy or what??

And then I watched The Vampire Diaries. And I threw all my rules out the window. Isn't this what love is supposed to do to us? Make us shame ourselves for constructing false expectations and futile boundaries?

Here is my systematic list of why I love this show:

1. It's a killer. A whole bunch of people have died on the show, unlike a lot of vampire predecessors. Among them have been some pretty important main characters, as well as your typical out-for-a-drive-on-the-wrong-road crowd. And then people have become vampires, and they get killed right away, and cool characters get killed right away, and basically there's a lot of "animal attacks" in the town and people getting bloody and dying. That's hot. It means anything can happen on this show.

2. Only the men take their clothes off. This is probably courtesy of Kevin Williamson, who helped create this show, but there's a lot of PG-13 going on here, and it's all boys all the time. Also, most of them are really hot. I say that because it seems like no matter what flavor of boy you prefer, there's a slice of beefcake for you on this show. My favorite is Mike, but Beau prefers that angular looking vampire Sebastian.

3. It's moody. The lighting on this show is amazing. Although it takes place in Virginia, it's the darkest version of Virginia you've ever seen. The colors are both richly saturated (the greens and brows of the natural environment) and starkly washed out (buildings, faces, interiors). There are also intense, intense shadows on the show, which seems almost as if it's light by diegetic lighting alone (that would be like using only light from the lamps in a living room shot and not supplementing with traditional film lights off-camera). The characters end up living in this world where their faces and bodies are always partially cloaked in shadows.


Look at how dark & rich & shadowy that shot is!! Yum.

4. It rocks. The soundtrack uses hot music that I love. It's like they plugged into my iPod and either took bands I've liked for a while, or anticipated my tastes as well as or better than Gossip Girl has.

5. It's actually kind of scary and suspenseful. The writers do a really good job of keeping the surprises real and the plot moving forward into new directions. Unlike Buffy, which always felt as if it were snowballing toward an inevitable, inescapable conclusion, I have no idea what's going to happen on this show, and I really appreciate that.

6. It's only a little Dawsony. While the characters have slightly precocious dialogue, it's not as self-referential as Williamson's other show. The characters, instead, seem pretty "now," not too wise beyond their years, but wise enough to speak more eloquently than your average walking gland.

You can catch up with The Vampire Diaries next week on your local CW station when they run a week-long marathon of the season so far. Enjoy!

Like Tiger Woods, I Too Had an Affair

and it was with David Leavitt, and it only recently ended.

But unlike Tiger Woods, I am not sorry.

I spent the last several months reading Leavitt's Collected Stories from cover to cover. I loved it. I hope it's no secret that I love a short story. I do. If I cheat on poetry, it's always with a short story. I love their brevity, like single windows in a hallway, each with a private and discrete view. And now, I love David Leavitt.

I heard him read once, at a conference, and he is foxy. His prose is also foxy. And, sometimes pretty ballsy.

Stories that stand out to me:

"Alien," in which a mother comes to terms with the fact that her young daughter is convinced she is an alien waiting to be reunited with her people.

"Dedicated," in which Celia and Nathan first appear (more later), exploring the complicated dynamic of the queer peer/gay guy relationship.

"The Infection Scene," in which the story of a modern-day bug chaser is compared to a historically fictional account of Oscar Wilde's traitorious lover Lord Douglas.

"The Marble Quilt," in which a linguist is interviewed by Italian police about the murder of his ex-lover, a marble thief.

"My Marriage to Vengeance," in which a woman attends the wedding of her ex-lesbian ex-lover.

"Houses," in which a married man emerges from the wreckage of his marriage to a woman and his affair with a man.

"Black Box," in which a man comes to terms with his lover's death in an airplane crash in a very unusual way.

I could definitely feel the stories come together as stronger and more forceful works in each subsequent collection (there are three collections in this volume). The third collection I read in a weekend and could not stop, the stories were so beautifully written and so compelling.

What I truly loved about this, though, were Nathan, Celia, and Andrew.

Nathan and Celia, really. The three characters are introduced in "Dedicated" and come back again in subsequent stories and collections. Mostly we see the world through Celia's eyes, checking in with her as she slowly but surely becomes her own person, stepping out from behind Nathan's obscuring shadow. It is a joy to spend time with her, to see the world as she sees it. She is level-headed, a little insecure, but good-hearted, warm-hearted, and astute.

It was surprising to me as I first encountered the two of them in "The Wooden Anniversary," a novella from Arkansas, and read first how they ended up in life, then went back and got the back story.

This is a book I'll want to read again.

Audience & Experiment

This weekend Beau and I went to a theatre production--I'll try to keep the details of it as vague as possible, unless otherwise relevant, because the point of my post today isn't about the show's quality, but my response to it.

I was in the theatre less than 30 seconds when I realized what I was witnessing was not theatre as I knew it, but a form of experimental/innovative/strange theatre--if you've seen She's All That, think of Rachel Leigh Cook's little performance art show and you'll get the picture. The staging was minimalist to say the least, the costumes professional but a little strange, the acting bizarre. The lighting, I thought, was fantastic--beautiful, evocative, innovative. But it was the only thing you could say I "enjoyed."

I got nothing out of the performance except confusion and consternation.

But it got me thinking about audiences and experimental poetry. Because I am fairly well indoctrinated into poetry, I understand some of the more consistent elements of it, or rationales, if you will, for creating it. Even when I don't like experimental work, I can usually appreciate the concepts, the effort, the ideas, the risks. But when I was an audience for another art form, my boundaries of participation were much more strict. I not only did not enjoy the play I saw, I actually felt some hostility toward it. I actually thought, "What's the point of doing this like this? Why not just do it in a straightfowardly dramatic way?"

And there's the catch--

--because the way it was produced was part of the point. Sure, I get that the story is a psychological thriller and that two of the characters were crazy inbreds. Sure, I get it's drawn from Gothic literature. I get those aspects of it.

But I did not enjoy the show, and it made me realize that one of my primary goals as an audience member that day was to find enjoyment, to be entertained in the mode in which I had expected. But I actually felt something I often hear people say after encountering poetry:

"I didn't get it."

And up until that afternoon, I had assumed that an audience member's failure to "get" something was really a failure of the artist to communicate it. But after this show, I felt like I, as an audience member, was underprepared to appreciate the art I just experience, and it made me feel--frankly--weird and embarrassed, partly because I do consider myself somewhat "cultured," whatever that means.

Now, if someone told me prior to the show, "It's a little experimental and avant garde, so you'll have to be patient," I might have come out of it better. But the fact that I had no preparation for that, that I went in expecting one thing and got another, really had me flummoxed.

In terms of poetry, this raises some questions for me:

a. How can we, as poets, prepare our audiences to experience our work (on page or in voice)? What tools do they need that they might not already have? This would be a key question to understanding how to get new audiences involved in poetry.

b. How can we, as artists, contextualize our work for an underprepared audience? What's the responsibility? I feel like some audiences will seek out their own education in this regard, but because audiences are notoriously lazy and prefer to be handed the tools they need, what else can we do, or how can we inspire them to seek more information?

To some degree, I think great art can transcend its form, meaning that even the most experimental work, when most effective, will appeal to and speak to an "under-indoctrinated" audience. Like how, as an eager film student, I was very put off by David Lynch's Eraserhead but loved Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, even Mulholland Falls. I was moved by some of Maya Deren's short films and loved Bruce Conner's A Movie. But there again, I was in a specific audience context, there to learn and discover, not just to enjoy.

I feel like I'm getting lost in this maze of logic and discussion.

Happy Yam Sham!

Willow: What a load of horse hooey.

Buffy: We have a counterpoint?

Willow: Yeah. Thanksgiving isn't about blending of 2 cultures. It's about one culture wiping out another. And then they make animated specials about the part where, with the maize and the big, big belt buckles. They don't show you the next scene, where all the bison die and Squanto takes a musket ball in the stomach.

Buffy: Ok. Now, for some of that, you were channeling your mother?

Willow: Well, yeah, sort of. That's why she doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving or Columbus Day--you know, the destruction of the indigenous peoples. I know it sounds a little overwrought, but really, she's...She's right.

Buffy: Yeah. I guess I never really thought about it that way. With mom at Aunt Darlene's this year, I'm not getting a Thanksgiving. Maybe it's just as well.

Anya: Well, I think that's a shame. I love a ritual sacrifice.

Buffy: It's not really a one of those.

Anya: To commemorate a past event, you kill and eat an animal. It's a ritual sacrifice, with pie.

[And later...]

Willow: Buffy, earlier you agreed with me about Thanksgiving. It's a sham. It's all about death.

Buffy: It is a sham, but it's a sham with yams. It's a yam sham.

The Four Seasons

Maryland style:

SPRING:
Monday: Cold and cloudy
Tuesday: Sunny and warm
Wednesday: Rain
Thursday: Rain
Friday: Cloudy and humid
Saturday: Cold and cloudy
Sunday: Rain

SUMMER
Monday: Hot and superhumid
Tuesday: Hot and superhumid
Wednesday: Rain
Thursday: Hot and superhumid
Friday: Hot and superhumid
Saturday: Rain
Sunday: Rain

AUTUMN
Monday: Rain
Tuesday: Cold and rainy
Wednesday: Cold and rainy
Thursday: Cold and rainy
Friday: Cold and sun--er, nope, that's a streetlamp because it's so dark outside; Rain
Saturday: Cold and rainy
Sunday: Rain

WINTER
Monday: Cold, dark
Tuesday: Cold, dark
Wednesday: Cold, dark, rain
Thursday: Cold, dark, rain turning to snow
Friday: Cold, dark, and everything is covered in ice
Saturday: Icy, cold, dark, rain
Sunday: Slushy, cold, dark, rainy

Angels in America

I caught part II of Angels in America at Forum Theatre this weekend, and collectively, the two parts of the show represent the best theatre I've seen so far in DC. The acting was really, really phenomenal almost without exception, and the set and costume work was spare, interesting, innovative.

I think it's such an interesting piece of theatre. What I love about what Kushner did--and what I strive to do in my own work when appropriate--is that he doesn't shy away from the complexity of the issues in the play. Of course, Roy Cohn is as close to an Iago as you'll get this side of Shakespeare and he seems to have few if any redeeming qualities (witness his duping of Ethel Rosenberg just before he dies, and then his delight at duping her). But Roy Cohn is also a character with a clear and consistent moral compass.

It would have been easy to write Joe, Harper, and Hannah Pitt off as fruity Mormon stereotypes, but I think he really gets into the struggle in Joe's coming out. But Hannah Pitt is a tougher character. Becaue Kushner was pushing an agenda in the show, and because Hannah really stood outside of the agenda, he could have written her as a real unfeeling villain. But he gets inside her skin, understands what her values are and why she believes what she does (without judging the beliefs, as she so sternly reminds Prior Walter not to do when he criticizes her).

It's a really long show. But I'll tell you, it moves so quickly and doesn't have 1 extra word in it, 1 extra gesture. It needs to be six hours long. It's doing something. And it does it perfectly.