Learning a Few Lessons From Making Yourself Happy

I loved writing this piece for work. Donna Lynne Champlin is an amazing singer and actress and so much fun to sit down and chat with. The lessons she's learned from making herself artistically happy taught me a lot about ways of approaching my own career and structuring my work as a writer.


Recording a solo album on a "Trading Spaces" budget does not sound like a Broadway star's groundbreaking personal project. Yet when Donna Lynne Champlin fractured her ankle in "Billy Elliott," that is exactly what she did. The result—"Old Friends," which dropped Dec. 1—challenges the traditional recording system and makes Champlin almost as happy as the hours spent singing in her bathroom and agonizingly mastering tracks did. She set out to prove that it she could accomplish a professional-sounding labor of love one a budget of $1000. But the experience also served as a lesson in making a profit by making herself happy.


Check out the rest of the story at Back Stage

Acupuncture: Alternative No Longer? A Q&A on This Growing Healthcare Option

Cramps. Night-sweats. Migraines.

These problems have one thing in common for Americans: they are increasingly treated with acupuncture.

Pacific College of Oriental Medicine is one of the largest Chinese medicine programs in the country. The 23-year old school has campuses in New York, Chicago, and San Diego. Campus’ clinics were recognized with the “Traditional Chinese Medicine World” Best in the West award for three years. The college also has off-site clinics in hospitals and treatment centers throughout the New York area. Pacific’s staff and students use acupuncture, herb, and massage to treat patient issues ranging from cancer and AIDS to drug addiction.

In the main office at 915 Broadway, graduate and students clinicians usually see more than 600 patients per week. There are 450 students learning the principles and practice of acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, and massage. Only 50 of these students study massage alone. With enrollment growing, the college is currently expanding and building more classrooms.

After Sept. 11, 2001, students furthered their outreach by performing acupuncture and massage on both rescue workers and rescue dogs. “We gave the dogs acupressure massage,” explains Cynthia Neipris, the Director of Outreach and Community Education. “That kind of environment was incredibly hard on all the rescue workers, but the dogs can’t deal with the stress in many of the ways we can.” We sat down to discuss the college, oriental medicine, and her own involvement with the disciplines taught here.

Have you noticed any changes in your practice during the recession or the current uncertainty with debate over the healthcare reform bill?

In the recession, our patients have actually increased, which is kind of remarkable. We can’t be sure, but we’re guessing people can’t afford other healthcare now. With no insurance, for example, people don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket. We think people also are looking for more natural methods in everything, from cooking to medicine, that are more self-sufficient. In acupuncture, you can learn techniques to use yourself, and the body heals itself with the help of the practitioner.

You mentioned that this can be a lifestyle change—are more people then willing to undertake a dramatic change like that?

I think people are more willing to make those lifestyle changes because these days they’re being forced to in other areas of their lives. Also, the spread of information about alternative medicine helps. Developments in Western medicine too—it’s a time when a lot of things we had before no longer seem to work the way we thought. In medicine, that can mean side effects, or becoming bacterially resistant from taking antibiotics. As information spreads, people are looking for natural alternatives.

I know many use the treatments as supplements, but do treatments here present outright alternatives?

If I have a knee problem, I’d want to try acupuncture before I try expensive surgery or medicine that costs $86 dollars a bottle and that I have to keep taking for the indefinite future. The goal here is to help you not, for example, have migraines anymore. Rather than spend money on Imitrex all the time forever or until your migraines spontaneously go away.

The clinic also offers treatments to help people quite smoking—how does that work?

The acupuncture can help reduce cravings, releases endorphins when you’re going through the pains of withdrawal so you’re less likely to go back to smoking, and it can relax your sympathetic nervous system response. That’s the fight or flight reflex. The body tenses when you take away the smoking, the heart can beat faster or feel strained, too. The treatments help the body relax the body and mind. Plus, the acupuncture helps to detox the body of remaining traces of nicotine, which makes it easier to move on faster.

You used to have your own practice in Santa Monica—how do you feel working at the clinic and college here instead of your former practice in Southern California?

New York has a lot of stressed out people. And that’s what we do here. I think it’s even more rewarding to treat people here and bring them that sense of being calm and centered.

Do you take the herbs yourself?

Oh, yeah! I love them. They work.

For what?

That’s like asking what prescriptions are for: everything. Chinese herbal treatments tend to be known for the problems that Western medicine can’t or doesn’t effectively work on. Like pain, for example, or syndromes for which Western doctors have no names. You can treat it anyway. We look at patterns in the body and name that instead, treating the patient holistically, not just for the symptoms. But we can treat lots of things that Western medicine treats all the time, too. PMS and cramps, for example. People love those treatments. And menopause! I think I only had night sweats for one night.

You mentioned that your clinicians often try to teach skills that patients can use at home, like looking at your tongue. What does my tongue say?

Overall, it’s rather red. That’s good. Do you run warm a lot? There’s a darker red tip too. You have trouble sleeping, right? With the warmth, you should try to cool yourself to help you sleep better. We don’t sleep when hot. Not the reason for yours, but it can be a factor. So, as you do cooling activities, you could look in the mirror and see if it’s getting less red overall. Also, there’s scalloping around the edges, from your teeth. As we worry, the body closes up. You stress and worry too much. You’ll see it get better as you relax—say, on vacation.

The Reporting Life: One-on-Ones and One-on-Many

I've recently been covering David Mamet's new play "Race" for my job. Given the opportunity to attend the first press event in late October, I dashed over to Playwrights Horizons to meet and interview the four person cast in brief one-on-ones (or one-on-a few...s when I had to share celebrities with another reporter or three).

The cast is remarkably talented and--more impressive to me, personally--smart. Mamet slipped away as we (the motley group of reporters for various entertainment publications, websites, and stations) entered the room--wiley, horn-rimmed man. Not much of a surprise, though. He isn't a often big fan of the press, and especially not with this show. In fact, he's demanded everyone associated, from the actors to the PR team, maintain a strict veil of virtual silence about the plot. This only made the event more interesting: watching seasoned reporters try to grasp and adapt to the challenge is both amusing and insightful. They can't quite intimidate information out of David Alan Grier, Kerry Washington, James Spader, or Richard Thomas as easily as they might with some other sources... At least, not without notable consequences.

While I could write volumes about the experience itself or the information I got for my piece, the story will be up elsewhere. Part of what really got to me, though, was how I felt not as a fan or the youngest reporter there. It's that I was the only strictly-print person there for most of the afternoon!

Being the only print reporter in a room full of photographers and videographers at a press event is like being the smart kid with no friends at a new school. It's awkward, it's kind of lonely, and it's a bit depressing! It's fascinating, though, that such a scenario could happen. Other print reporters showed up later, though many were joining the photographers already present. Graphics are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. I took heart in being joined in my role of parking it at a table waiting for the talent to free up from the photos and video interviews, but not just because I felt out of place. It was also that I was reassured I wasn't one of a breed bordering on extinction.

As a bonus, I'm including an exclusive picture of the cast here. I got a bit bored waiting for all the photos. What the hell? I thought. So I took one on my BlackBerry, reaching above the line of photographers' heads for a slightly blurry memento. And a reminder for the smart kids who find themselves in the same position.

The World Trade Center--Exploring the Site, and Myself

Ever since Sept.11, 2001, American flags have everywhere. We find them on cars, suit lapels, and innumerable ouvenirs that tourists buy when they visit New York City. But the flag seldom rarely affects me. I consider it an overused and sometimes exploited icon. Growing up in D.C., it was a cheap patriotic symbol exploited by politicians and lobbyists. Then I went on a tour of Ground Zero. And I have to say, I now see the flag has the potential to mean more to me.

On Oct. 28, 2009, I took the World Trade Center Tribute Center’s audio tour of the World Trade Center site. I went with 14 other students in my NYU journalism class. During our visit, I surveyed the ruins. There's no more debris. It's a huge constructive site filled cranes and workers in hard hats. At the same time, I was listening through my headset to the stories of survivors, officials, and the loved ones of some of the thousands lost piped into my ears.

After experiencing the fear and uncertainty of living in DC on Sept. 11, I often find myself resenting the invocation of that tragic day while I now live in New York. In classes, when a professor mentions the unique experiences of that day, they focus solely on New York, asking if anyone was in the city and what that was like. I feel a sense of almost as though my experience and the experience of my fellow DC residents is undermined and belittled in those conversations. A plane crashed there, too, I say to myself. And if passengers had not revolted and thwarted the plans of hijackers resulting in the Pennsylvania crash of Flight 93, there would have been more. Indeed, I remember the panic of attending school at a national religious landmark, the uncertain fear of what would be next. Because we all felt as though there was going to be a “next” and we knew it would be in the city where we lived—it would be in the Nation’s Capital.

I was not looking forward to it. With my perhaps unique perspective about discussing those events in Manhattan and with the fatigue many of my classmates feel for such discussion, I was not enthused. I was even less disposed to feel much.

On a red bridge overpass, looking down upon the massive pit where the towers once stood, the emptiness did not faze me. The size of the gaping construction site was notable, but not really memorable. It was the flag I spied on a forklift, flapping in the damp breeze and drizzle, standing out against the cool glass of the new tower that brought a chill over me. Flags adorned each crane, each forklift, each bulldozer, and the sight, on this grim day, over a spot of such suffering and bravery, made me gasp.

Traipsing through the marble halls of the World Financial Center, walking past Ann Taylor stores and various eateries along with the complex’s daily workers seemed wrong. The worlds of the past and the present merged as I spied men pacing and talking on BlackBerries while fighting my emotions at hearing Kate, a fireman’s widow, explain, “September 12th remains the worst day in my mind—on September 11th, I still had hope.”

These elements of the experience seemed to violate the sanctity of this living memorial of an audio tour. But it also seemed to fit in a strange, perhaps unintended way. From the form to the content of the tour, one message is abundantly clear: life goes on. It is never about forgetting. It is impossible to forget the voice of Lee Ielpi recounting the story of carrying his son Jonathan’s body out of the debris with fellow firefighters. I can't block out the emotion of volunteer docent Tracy Gazzani when she recalls the last morning she saw her son Terry, 24, an employee at Cantor Fitzgerald, whose remains have yet to be found.

“We are so blessed to live here,” reflected one neighborhood resident in the audio program. “We have experienced the most beautiful part of America.”

The flags here are not rested for the rain. They do not stay in on days like this. They keep upright, weathering the rain and wind. They go on.

I don’t recall ever crying on Sept. 11. After my parents arrived and ended the waiting game of being picked up from the school on lock-down, we went home and watched the news. Unable to take it for long, I baked cookies. I couldn’t tell you what kind if you put a gun to my head, but I know that I took to my kitchen and turned on the oven. I got choked up. I got scared. I rued the uncertainty. But I never cried.

Walking away from my two hours touring the site, listening to painfully real experiences, and speaking with Tracy, I understood what this mother meant, after she shared stories about her only child tragically torn away. “It gets different,” she said. “It doesn’t get better, it gets different.” Trekking through the Financial District in the cold, wind, and rain, I entered the subway weighing the morning’s events, turning Tracy’s words over in my mind. As soon as I arrived at the subway platform, I saw a homeless man asleep against the wall, clutching a backpack with a small American flag patch, and I silently shed tears as I waited for the train.

The Death of the Sniper: DC's Quest for Closure?

I support the death penalty.

Much to my profoundly liberal father’s chagrin, that’s one of the few places I diverge from the general party line.

I remember writing my first position paper on the issue in Mr. Sahr’s American Government class in eighth grade. That same year and that same school were the setting for my own experiences with John Allen Muhammad, the DC Sniper, pronounced dead from lethal injection at 9:11 p.m. today.

On a perhaps fittingly red background, stark white words pronounce “CNN Justice” when I open an article on one of my most beloved news websites. Having lived through the public panic and paranoia that surrounded the sniper shootings in DC, the story calls to me, following me to my CNN-watching at the gym and through my news browsing in the depths of my BlackBerry.

In October 2002, the DC area was seized by panic and uncertainty. Individuals of different races, ages, and classes were being shot from afar, no pattern in people or place, no idea who was behind the scope of the rifle ending lives around the Beltway. Some schools closed. My school was far too demanding to willingly give us time off for the indeterminate shooting spree. We adapted.

The ability to adapt is one of the lessons with which I walked away from National Cathedral School, both in my school and professional life as well as my personal one. With a sniper on the loose, we adapted, but we kept going to class. We went to sports practices, but we were not allowed to walk there, we were bussed. We could not walk across the street to lunch every day—being totally exposed repeatedly was potentially inviting tragedy. We ate lunch in one of the gyms that was attached—through a complex network of hallways and varyingly sized sets of stairs—to the lower and middle school buildings. I remember eating the packaged lunches, brought over from the cafeteria every day, in the dim lighting of our oldest gym, and wondering how long it would last. I remember the sense of nervousness when getting out of the car each morning and rushing up the brick stairs and through the courtyard to get into school, subconsciously hunching away from the sunny open air.

I support the death penalty as the ultimate consequence for some of the ultimate crimes in our society. One of the other reasons I support the death penalty is the sense of closure and justice many victims and their families cite as a result of capital punishment.

Seven years after that fateful October in the metropolitan DC area, John Allen Muhammad’s execution fails to give me a sense of closure. I certainly moved on long ago. But I don’t think I will ever forget the experience. I’m not sure if those feelings and that mental and physical place will ever fully close for me.

I will still tell anecdotes about shuttle buses to sports and shuffling along circuitous hallway routes to eat lunch on the floor of the gym. But I moved on long ago. I can only hope that this latest development will help those even more intimately touched by the tragic shootings move on too.

Red Sea Fish: A Play That Drowned

On assignment for work, I went to review a show shipped straight from England as part of an annual special engagement, Brits Off Broadway. I've been reviewing a number of shows over the last month or so and finally getting a "plus one" for this show was an exciting development--until the guilt set in quickly at signing my friend up for two hours seeing this show in a truly claustrophobic theater. One of the hardest things to do is write a good review that doesn't sound dumb. Fortunately, they saved me that concern. Harsh reviews can also be quite hard to write, though, when there's little to point to as being "good" about a show. Not to mention, reliving the pain is pretty rough.

Here's my attempt to be fair, also available in its published form online.


Matt Wilkinson's new play is a complex exploration of family relationships and the imagination of the human mind, and it's been shipped here straight from Brighton. The show's British cast has kept the original staging intact, and the script paints a realistic portrait of a complex father-son relationship punctuated by moments of insight. Ultimately, though, "Red Sea Fish" fails to tell a coherent, meaningful story.

The play takes place in the apartment of Ray and his devoted caretaker and son, Terry, on the south coast of England. Over the course of 48 hours, the pair's relationship and their perceptions of reality and the power of imagination fundamentally change, thanks to the introduction of a third party. As Ray suffers from a rare skin condition, father and son live largely confined to their home. Thus, when Terry invites Karen, a young runaway and the object of his budding affections, into the apartment, she provokes both men and brings out long-buried truths about their respective notions of past, present, and future.

Tim Blissett shows skill and versatility in his portrayal of Ray, an aging invalid who largely lives in the world of his own stories, content to be sealed off from the world below his apartment. His routines and mannerisms come across clearly, painting the picture of a realistic and endearing character. Matt Houghton's Terry feels genuinely connected to his father, sealed in the role of a dutiful son locked away to see to his father's needs.

Janna Fox's emotions as Karen, however, are as absent as her distractingly missing eyebrows. In fact, both were so lacking that numerous audible comments were whispered among the small audience, drawing a few laughs that had nothing to do with the attempts at dark humor in the script. At times Karen's lack of depth appears to imply either a hint of mental illness or perhaps an aloof response to the confusing conditions within the apartment. Neither seems to be the intention, however, so the role—which poses the plot's turning point and is responsible for the script's evolutionary drive—falls utterly flat. What's more, in the small theater, the actors' sincere attempts to make the show work are evident in compensatory overacting, with Fox and Houghton visibly struggling to convey emotion and depth.

While Wilkinson's work aims high and attempts to address interesting ideas, its execution fails to thrive like fish in the titular sea; rather, it feels as if we're watching laborious attempts to keep from drowning.

NYU Tragedy and the Politics of the Unknown

As a student at NYU, suicide is not a foreign occurrence. Some joke about the “Bobst Diving Team,” while others simply cannot discuss dorm windows without explaining that the school restricts access to air because officials fear students will all kill themselves.

I have never experienced the tragedy of knowing a student who committed suicide at NYU. I can only hope, from the depths of my heart, that I will never have to face that news. I am, however, a member of the University’s community, and I believe that the school as a whole feels each loss in various ways.

As a reporter, tackling death is one of the greatest hardships one can face, and covering suicide is even more difficult for the questions one must ask because the list of victims is not only the name echoed throughout your article, but each subject you interview. During my freshman year, I had to face this reality when contributing an article to an investigative series on the NYU Wellness Exchange, the mainstay of mental health services on campus. In 2007, the school community witnessed multiple suicides and at one point I was tasked with investigating whether students had reached out for help. I had to call and email Allan Oakley Hunter’s father in the wake of his son taking his own life.

I do not remember the content of my various contact with Mr. Hunter. What stands out most in my memory is sitting at my desk in an under-populated newsroom during my afternoon staff shift, rocking in an old rolling chair, and hating myself for the questions I had not even asked yet. My editor gave me a phone number and other contact information, and I dawdled and ultimately just idled in that chair, unsure how to do my job and, moreover, how to handle what doing my job meant.

I hate when people write about losses to which they are unconnected—it feels fake, self-gratifying, and self-important. I have no intention of writing such a piece. I cannot presume to know what the friends, family, or acquaintances of Andrew Williamson-Noble feel. According to Facebook, this latest student to end his life on campus lived in my residence hall. He wears a suit nicely in his profile picture. Yet while his features seem plausibly familiar in the abstract, I know little about him on a personal, immediate level.

Over the last two and a half years I have received emails from New York University president John Sexton regarding four suicides on campus. What I had failed to truly recognize until today’s notice, entitled “The Death of an NYU Student,” was the sense of panic and despair that results not from the news, but from the withholding of substantive information. I know the Wellness Center’s phone number—it’s emblazoned on innumerable items the school has thrust upon me at events since my orientation before school even started, they send me emails, and it is on campus phones all over downtown Manhattan. What I want—what I need desperately—to know in the wake of news of another student death is a name.

In the Bible, God grants Adam the power to name all the creatures of the Earth, giving him power over all other inhabitants of Eden. A name is power. In the wake of tragedy, a name makes the difference between an abstract sense of sorrow and the abject devastation of personal loss. In the hours between receiving confirmed news of a suicide at Bobst library this morning and the release of a name this afternoon, the anxiety and torment of not knowing which group you will fall into is terrible and, I think, wrong.

Upon hearing the news, I mentally ran through people I know well, scanning mental images of recent interactions for signs of depression or desperation. I ran through when I had seen them last, what I had heard of them most recently, trying to piece together the possibilities while incorporating what little I knew of the timeline. Without a name, you exist in a state of emotional freefall, able to sense that hollowness in the pit of your stomach that you feel on a rollercoaster, when you are out of control and have no idea what will happen next. But I like roller coasters. I have dragged friends and family members on roller coasters. This sensation and this painful, anxious uncertainty should not be imposed on others.

We should get a name.