Ruining Stuff

They say if you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life.

As I develop experience that is kinda sorta turning into wisdom, I think I have a caveat to this sage old advice - if you do things you love for work, eventually they will become as much work as they are fun.

Tonight, I was part of what I'd call a wild success. The Grand Island International Film Festival (http://www.gifilmfest.org/) showed Casablanca at the Grand Theater and on a Tuesday night we pulled just under 200 people. It was a great showing and it will allow us to fight another day, financially. It was a great movie in a great theater for a great audience. Great night, right?

Well, yeah, but it was also a night where I didn't sit down to watch Casablanca. I was helping in the booth and with concessions, I was taking tickets and co-MCing the proceedings before the movie, and I was running around chatting with folks. All in all I saw about 20 minutes of the flick that I consider to have the best screenplay ever written. It's a movie that's pure romance and intregue, a fantastic film that I love to sit down and watch and I didn't sit down and watch it. I was working, more or less.

I've done this my whole life. I like ice cream, but working at a Dairy Queen aint that sweet. I worked in TV for half an hour before I realized the guts of that are not pleasant. I like movies and wrote about them for 7 years before realizing I wasn't terribly good at it, comparably. I tend to do things I love and after a while they sorta turn into work and aren't strictly in the domain of fun anymore.

I don't think that's completely a bad thing - I could be doing things I didn't give a hoot about and probably suffer for it. Still, it's curious and I would have loved to watch Casablanca tonight.