To Day Job or Not to Day Job?

How Limiting is the Inevitable?

DENNIS: "I'm thinking that I'm going to quit my day job."
ME: "Yeah - why?"
DENNIS: "Before I came to Chicago, I found myself working all day and improvising at night. I'm here now and I'm working all day and improvising at night. I'm going to go the temp route to open up my schedule."
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Paul was a very talented actor/improviser who was involved in the early days of WNEP Theater. He was married but his wife was forgiving of the huge amounts of time he spent rehearsing and performing in the backs of bars and tiny storefront theaters. When his wife got pregnant with twins, enough became enough and he quit the scene stating that unless it paid, he couldn't perform anymore.

He doesn't perform anymore.
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Of the many, many actors, writers, and directors I know, only a handful have health insurance and any sense of financial security beyond the hand-to-mouth, check-to-check existence. That handful have day jobs that, in return for the benefits of health insurance and financial security, take between 40 - 60 hours a week to accomplish.

Some bitch about this. Others make due and perform when they can.
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Tony posts a nice article about his personal struggle with making money vs. making art ad the disparity between the two:

I wear many hats: husband, father, scenic/lighting/sound designer, director, writer, actor--though there are two that come into conflict the most often. Money vs. the Artist. Working freelance in theatre at the same time as running a small company increasingly felt like a Jekyll and Hyde puppet show.

When my wife became pregnant with our first child, I stopped freelancing and took a full time salaried (non-theatre) job. I have not been happier as an artist. I don't do as many shows as I once did. (25-30 a year was taking its toll.) However, I can be much more selective in the shows I take on and I can see my kid.

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For the first time in 41 years (and I've been working for my own money and performing for 28 of that) I have a cubicle job. The only 'steady' gig (read: insurance, annual salary worth mentioning, sense of financial security and a pension of sorts) I've had in my life was the seven year stint as a Chicago Public School Seventh/Eighth Grade Music Teacher and I quit that for idealistic reasons.*

*In a nutshell, I had become the kind of teacher so impressed with his popularity among his students and his righteous battles with the Board of Ed that actually teaching kids became secondary to reputation. I decided I'd rather not be a teacher than be a bad one.

As I look back on my artistic successes and failures, it is pretty easy to see that not one show I've worked in, worked on, written, directed, or produced was hindered by any day job that I had at the time. In fact, to the contrary, each job I've had (bookstore, tobacco shop, horse ranch, video store manager, pizza delivery, overnight janitor, roofing, storm window installation, minister, facilities manager at a massage school, et al) has given me knowledge and skills that I would have never had had I simply been a theater cat full time. These gigs provided perspective on the world that being insulated by the sometimes rosey, sometimes tawdry, world of the empty space would have gone missing.

Sure, the dream is to spend every waking hour engaged in artistic activity, constantly creating new and exciting art and being paid well enough to survive to do it. The thing to consider when dreaming that dream is the pragmatic truth that the artistic engine needs grist for the mill, ideas and material and skills outside the idyllic lifestyle of a full time artist - why do you think Hollywood directors often put their actors through extensive boot camps to train them for certain films?

Don - you fucking hypocrite. If someone offered you the opportunity to be a full time artist and pay you a living wage to do it, you'd take it in a New York minute.

It's true. Who, realistically, wouldn't? I can say that at 41 I have some life experience and I have something to say with my art. If the offer you suggest had been made when I was 20, I would've snapped it up but would've suffered for the choice - when I was 20 I was a Born Again Christian doing Equity tours of old Broadway musicals - if that had been my path there would be no Soiree DADAs, no Armageddon Radio Hour, no Postmortem, no My Grandma's a Fat Whore in Jersey.

I'm certainly not advocating the 'starving artist' model, but Sting was a better songwriter before he got comfortable, wasn't he? Perhaps the limitations of a day job (and the financial need for one) is a necessary component for art to have a sense of urgency, a sense of danger. Perhaps, as Apollo Creed advises Rocky in Rocky III, you gotta be hungry - have that 'Eye of the Tiger' - in order to truly be a force in the world.