Yet again, I shake my hobo cup out to cyberspace, bow to generosity of friends, fans, family and total strangers as I launch yet another Kickstarter campaign. This time to get my show Going Green the Wong Way up in my first international tour at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer.

This is the the third time in two years I’ve tried crowdsourcing and the first time I’ve tried to raise this much money.  Oh believe me, I don’t take people’s generosity for granted.  And I’m getting a little shy about doing this AGAIN after having just done this less than a year ago.  I don’t like to be known as a cyberbegger, but what choice do I have?   I’ve managed to get turned down for three funding applications in the last few months.  My track record of “getting all the grants” is steering in an odd new direction of rejection letters and deferments.  So it’s Kickstarter or debt.

It certainly is a lot of work to do a fundraising campaign.   I am doing the work of a PBS telethon all by myself, including handsewing my perks. I went back and forth about whether or not I should try to raise this amount, or shoot for something that seemed more attainable.  After a lot of thought, I decided to take a big risk and ask for the full amount of what this project will cost to produce.  The prospect of 16k in credit card debt was motivation enough to get me moving in this direction.  Even doing the math, a $5 contribution from each of my 3500 Facebook friends (some deceased, fake accounts I accidentally approved, and other profiles not in commission) will not yield what I’m attempting to raise.  But I have a lot of faith that I’ve created an enticing campaign filled with perks galore.  My parents have even volunteered to make thank you calls to donors at the $250 level!!

Right now, I need to average $266 in donations to stay on target.   In two days I’ve raised 5% of my goal.   I feel so lucky. And I’m letting that love energy from my supporters take me to the promised land.  I wrote this blog last year about how I made crowdsourcing work for me.  And I plan to document for xoJane what other levels of humiliation I will stoop in my pursuit of this goal.  It’s all part of the plan baby.   If I can do this, anything is possible.

Faith.

It’s my fourth Artist-in-Residence grant award project! And I’m doing something totally different than I’ve ever done before!

Join the Environmental Justice League!
A Community Theater Project Exploring Environmental Racism

Want to develop your writing and performance skills? Want to learn about the impact of pollution and lack of healthy food access on low-income communities?
Learn about collaborative theater making, puppetry, and working social issues into theater. In this innovative eight-week workshop, participants will get an overview of environmental justice issues and craft that knowledge into a fun, informative, and original performance work.

*  Guest workshops include puppeteer Paul Zaloom’s “Theater of Trash Workshop”!
*  Toxic Tours Field Trips!
*  Be a Green Superhero!

*WHEN: We meet and rehearse Saturdays 4/28- 6/9, 1-5pm, Special “Toxic Tour Field Trip” on 5/5/12 at 9am- 4pm (mandatory for participation), Final show for the public on Saturday 6/16 at 2pm!
*WHERE: William Grant Still Art Center, 2520 West View Street Los Angeles, CA 90016 Some additional rehearsals on weekday nights may take place at other rehearsal spaces in District 10.
*COST: FREE!

All experience levels welcome. Open to participants 18+ Translation is available in Korean and Spanish. Participation is by application only. Commitment to sessions and participation in final show is required of all participants.

APPLICATION DEADLINE IS APRIL 18.
You can find the application here: http://kristinawong.com/downloads/ejl_flyer_app.pdf

la aplicación en español

For more information please email k@kristinasherylwong.com

Rest in Peace Oliver Wong  1999-2012

My cat Oliver arrived by hand delivery yesterday in a little cardboard box.  He now exists in a rolled up plastic baggie and weighs less than 3 ounces. Here is the full obituary and dedication to Oliver that was published on xoJane.com this morning.

It was a fast and unexpected and very expensive goodbye. But I think the article does him good.

My newest commentary for Marketplace about Jeremy Lin and the untapped potential everywhere aired on Friday. Click here. Enjoy!  I sorta burnt myself out writing about him.  There might be more commentaries on him though depending how the rest of the season goes or if he responds to my rash of marriage proposals I’ve thrown out on Facebook.

Love, Kristina (who has the untapped potential to be a concert pianist/model/US President/fashion designer)

I could go on and on in an unpaid fashion about how as of last week I’m a cat-less cat lady, or how I changed my last name on facebook to reflect my mental marriage to Jeremy Lin…  Or I can link you to  blogs on other websites about the same subjects.

Enjoy my first blog for xoJane about how I’m sexually harassing Jeremy Lin.

I’m a working blogger!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here are the outtakes!  Enjoy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

I finally finished this acting reel that I had been sitting on for over a year.  Yay!  Time to work in LA!  I’ve been a member of both SAG and AFTRA for years.  Now they are merging.  Wish they’d refund us dinosaurs since new members of the merged SAG/AFTRA will pay less than I did to join both unions back in the day!

Click here to view the embedded video.

What Greg Sestero finds sexy in a woman.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Greg’s first crush.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Greg doing lines from THE ROOM.

Did you know that the human colon holds 6-7 pounds of waste in the crevices and nooks?

(Maybe you didn’t want to know that.)

Last year I threw down a lot of shows, including the world premiere and short 3-city tour of CAT LADY.  I did a run of Going Green the Wong Way in San Francisco.  I raised almost 10k for the development and touring of those shows through my fan base.  Thanks to crowdfunding, I realized that despite the isolation I live in as a self-employed artist working from home, there are people (some I’ve never met) who like what I do enough to support it (THANK YOU).

Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest toured into it’s FIFTH year EVERYWHERE including Virginia Tech and a medical conference at Stanford.  I finally got to live my dream and travel for weeks and weeks alone through Southeast Asia and fell in love with life and myself again.  I put another year of home ownership under my belt– I still can’t believe I’m a performance artist and homeowner!   Thanks to Groupon, I learned to breathe via four months of yoga at four different yoga studios in Downtown LA. (Yep, I’m a Groupon Hussy.)  I inadvertently learned that when working at home, sanity really does come from daily fitness and leaving the house for a few hours while the sun is out.   Best of all, my dream job came true when American Public Media’s Marketplace show invited me to be a regular guest commentator!

It was a year packed tighter than a sausage.  And I’m glad it’s over.

On the love front, in 2011, I was in a great but brief relationship that really reminded me that there was such a thing as respectful people who have their lives together.  And that it is possible to be in a partnership where someone doesn’t yell and put you down to get their point across.   I just about gave up hope that there was such thing as good people. It didn’t help that I had been working on a play about pick-up artists for the last three years which brought with it, all sorts of wanky energy in my love life.  Last year’s brief brush with healthy love got me  in a great mindset about relationships again.  I feel protective of my heart and energy.  Most importantly, I love myself. For the first time ever after a break-up, I thanked my partner for the time we shared.  And when all my friends were sending knee jerk girl sympathy emails of “Fuck him. You deserve better”– I didn’t give into the bashing.  I replied, “He was a great person.  We just didn’t work out.  I’m just grateful that I got to experience that relationship.  I learned so much.”

That’s some adult shit right?!

What kept bugging me all last year though? My home.  I bought this place in March 2010 and still had yet to get some art on the walls and really claim the space as my own.  I got so use to leaving home, I damn near forgot what a home was.

I had pictures and paintings from past lives stacked against the wall.  I enjoyed the potential of virgin white walls, but also felt overwhelmed at defining who I was through my surroundings.  I was so used to waking up in different hotel beds every week, that deciding on consistent things to look at was an impossible task.  My performances are so specific and articulated, yet paradoxically, in my private life, I couldn’t make a decision on how to define my life in my very own home.  I didn’t expect to buy a loft, and the cathedral walls here seemed to eclipse all the tiny post-college art pieces I had in my possession.  So I left the walls blank for almost two years!

At the time I bought my home two years ago, I had been a few months out of the world’s worst relationship with a filthy broken verbally abusive man who refused to let me to hang my art because he didn’t want more holes in the walls.  He said it would prevent him from getting his security deposit back from our landlord despite the fact that he intended to live there indefinitely, had painted the walls different colors, and already lived there for years.  Crazy right?

I unfortunately think the fear of breaking the walls and lowering my property value followed me for the last two years.  But last week, I took the hammer, fearlessly threw nails through the walls and claimed my rightful home.  I have a few “woodpecker holes” from pictures I didn’t quite hang straight and had to do a few tries to get right… I don’t care.  That’s why god made spackle.

I must have cleared at least two carloads of crap out of the house.  I gave away a seven year old cat pee stained  futon mattress (thanks Oliver) to someone on Craigslist.  I’m even slowly selling off my yarn collection.  Yep, the yarn obsessed Kristina is being replaced with a whole something exciting else.

I thought it would take me two or three days to clean out the house.  Nope.  Turns out a project like my home and art archives takes TEN DAYS to clear through.  But now!  I have my dream home. I have an office where you can see the desk!  I have visual points of focus in the home.  I have my Cambodian glamour shots up in the living room!  I have ADULT FURNITURE!   There’s a lot more work to be done too. I feel a bit guilty like I’m late for the race of 2012.  I didn’t do much of any work these last ten days.  I’ve just been cleaning, clearing, re-arranging.  But it’s the necessary foundation for this new transition in my life.

I’ve actually hired home organizers and assistants to help me with my home in the past.  But something about just being home and being home for the first time for months that has really kicked my own ass to get this done on my own.

I’m learning that the biggest transition to an adult home office is eliminating plastic and cardboard storage units. I had so many files inside milk crates which were clumsy and collected dust.  I replaced brown cardboard boxes, with the “classy” IKEA cardboard storage boxes with metal corners.  I am finally learning how to “display” things rather than cram them into a bookshelf.

It doesn’t sound like a big deal to some, but this is huge to me.  I finally have an adult home! And it’s mine!  And I don’t care if I don’t get my security deposit back because I own this house!  So take that stupid ex boyfriend from three years ago! I am no longer a casting candidate for Hoarders! I am the best version of myself that I could ever share with the world!

So this is a whole energy shift. The direction of my new creative work has to change.  I’m no longer interested in mining my interior and fileting my history.  I’m bored with identity politics– I’ve been for years.  I’m interested in the rest of the world and turning over as many new ideas as possible. I want to make truly innovative ideas come to life– faster than ever.

I will always love theater, but the timeline for making theater can be hellishly long. Proposals, grant deadlines, readings, presentations dates, courting theaters, production details– it’s all necessary to make great theater, but holding onto ideas (especially show ideas on suicide and depression) for that long was also holding my life hostage.  After last year’s James Franco debacle, the invitations to be a blogger and commentary from some big magazines and websites couldn’t pour in fast enough.  And I couldn’t jump on any of the offers because I was on tour, mired in production, or just passed out.

While you won’t see me touring as many different cities and shows this year, I’ll still be touring and making new work.  I do my first international run this year when Going Green the Wong Way goes to the Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland!  I will also be doing a three week run of the same show in Los Angeles!  Exciting!  So I’m choosing projects more selectively.   I used to be scared that if I didn’t take EVERY opportunity offered that people would forget that I was alive.  I’m now focused on learning as much as possible and making some really strategic decisions.

2012 is the “flip the script” year for me.  I live in Los Angeles, and it’s time to let people know that I’m actually here and can work here.  Hollywood baby.

I’ve also decided to quit drinking for year. Goodbye Wong Island Iced Teas!   I realized after too many drunken nights of volunteering to be random gay couples’ surrogate mother, maybe I needed to change my interior as well.

My mother’s reaction when I told her I was going sober?  “Good.  Save Money.”