The NY Consortium

From: "niki naeve
To: "colin young"
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2007 4:46 PM
Subject: Naeve/Young Consortium (A.K.A. "NYC")

BTW Naked Kandles bought the Naeve/Young consortium some items today: like an oven mitt (to replace similar sullied with wax by proprietress of Naked Kandles months ago), a new cheese grater (to replace similar accidentally melted by same proprietress while preparing beeswax for lip balm), and some paper towel (used to clean up previous).

Niki Naeve, Licensed Massage Therapist also bought us some screws and did some maintenance on Colin's old fondue pot, so she can continue using it for hot rocks.

Love,
Niki Naeve, LMT and Naked Kandles


From: "Colin D Young"
LOL - now if we could just get Colin D. Young Photography to pull his weight!

From: "niki naeve"
yeah, wasn't he supposed to pay for half the printer?


From: "Colin D Young"
I thought I did.

What, the 5 almost full ink tanks weren't good enuf for ya?


From: niki naeve
OK, OK, the Naeve subsidiary relents to let you use the printer, based on the precedent that you have been using the printer already for nine months. But Naked Kandles requests the same squatter's rights for the storage of the new roaster.

From: "niki naeve"
Hi-
Also wanted to let you know I just set up auto payments for the Discover card (the loan for our sewer for the rental house, etc) from our joint acct.
I did use part of the$XXXX loan to bring my personal acct up...

From: "Colin D Young"
Right, so the N/Y Consortium owes the Naeve subcorporation $XXXX (plus interest).

Is there anything else on that card? If not, we can just pay off the card once we get $$$ from M-ARK Project and winter rentals and call it square?

From: "niki naeve"
Then we're just behind for october rent, right? So less than one month.

...

I heard some advice once long ago about choosing someone to marry. "Would you run a business with this person? Because that's what you're doing. When you run a family, you run a business, no two ways about it."

In my youngish, idealistic heart, I thought it reasonable advice, but nothing to mull over very long. Love conquers all, right?

I took business sense for granted. After all, I'd never wanted for much of anything. I must have survival in my genes. Being from a family of stock holders, I picked stocks - profitably, apparently - when I was like 10 . Someone asked me how, once, and I said it was like a game, where you keep track of points. Each dollar is a point. That's how I thought about it.

I never thought about points as equalling food, or rent, or health care. It just wasn't that scarce.

When you're part of a couple it starts innocently enough - usually with food. One of you is short on cash at a cash-only restaurant, and the other puts in. The other rents a movie in exchange. A candy bar at a bodega, a cup of hot cider and a muffin at the farmers' market. And soforth.

Pretty soon pennies owed are forgotten, then dollars...then you move in together, and one of you has the TV and the other one has the DVD player. One of you buys the box springs and the other the mattress, so now who owns the bed?

When money's tight, there are two solutions. You track it with the meticulous mind of an accountant, or you just throw up your hands and say, "what's mine's yours and vice versa, so on and soforth. Let's get on with it." Right. And maybe you never really mean it. Maybe small grudges begin to grow. Pretty soon there are thousands of dollars , cash or debt, or both, floating about in the universe and no one knows who they belong to. Or who covets it.

Colin and I have attempted an attitude which falls slightly in between miserly and hippy-esque. We walk a delicate line. Between the two of us we run six or seven careers, (depending how you count - for instance, is Colin d. Young Lighting and Photography two careers, or one?) three small businesses, four websites, a rental house and a not-for-profit theater company. We both sometimes volunteer, sometimes work for money for local political causes.

Taxes (oh add one career - Colin's my accountant) are a veritable nightmare. On the other hand, there is almost nothing in my life which is not tax deductible. I have hanging files for just about every receipt which touches my hands.

Somehow all these businesses must fit in a one-bedroom apartment, a small office in Manhattan (which is shared with yet another theater company) and the garage of the rental house upstate. My refrigerator at home is now filled to the brim with supplies for Reverie productions' 10th Anniversary "TENtacular" celebration and fundraiser tomorrow. The fridge was not intended to store provisions for 100.

So each business has become - somehow - symbiotic with the others. Colin Young - whether acting as lighting Designer, Photographer, Producer or Draftsman, must not occupy the apartment when Niki Naeve, LMT is working there. Naked Kandles often takes over the kitchen for production. Then it is cleaned and Colin Young, Photographer uses it as his dark room. Then Colin Young, Producer uses Naked Kandles' printer to print some scripts, while Colin Young, photographer burns a disk for Niki Naeve, Singer/Actor, because her computer has no disk writer.

Sometimes we get to use these spaces and things for personal use, as well. Like when we sleep. Or write in blogs.

And now we are nearing the end of the year; the reckoning. At the end of it all, the IRS would like to know exactly in what increments each item or service is bought, used and maintained. And we can write part of it off.

But which parts? Well, let's see, I brought my massage sheets to the laundry today, but it so happened that the shirt I wore for the audition last week was a little smelly, so it want in, too. Do I put the receipt (when they will condescend to give me one) in the massage file, the singer/actor file, or rip it in half?

Come to think of it, I was wearing underwear that day, too. Was that for personal use? Or was it business? And the bra, I wore it the day before when I was making candles, and it's dirty, too. I'm so confused.

We are not the only artists in NYC who maintain several faces in order to make ends meet. Having a small business which can be maintained "on the side" increases one's flexibility so that when "real" work comes you can make a quick turnabout mid-stride, and take it. I meet lots of actors who are computer tecchies, organization consultants or interior designers.

We've taken to calling ourselves "The Naeve/Young Consortium" - or "NYC" for short - and have begun to refer to ourselves in the third person. It's a little scary.

And I think what's most disorienting is the question of where your personal life begins and where your professional one(s) begin(s). One creeps into the other almost innocuously, and then suddenly you can't honestly say whether the light from that lamp is more important as an adjunct to business or pleasure, the book you're reading is education or recreation, and that man you're sleeping with is your business partner or your boyfriend.

And as an artist, who in theory does artistic things for pleasure, where does that fit in? Am I really a business, with all this singing and acting stuff?

Have I made money? Yes. Much? No. And is it work? Does it feel like work? Yes and no, no and yes. The lines are blurred.

When I first moved to New York I was most concerned with proving that I could "play at this level" as a singer/actor. I wanted paying gigs which I could live on, and more or less got what I asked for. Now I'm pretty content that I'm competitive. Of late I'm more interested in developing relationships with quality artists - competent directors and musicians and actors who will call me in to collaborate with them when they have an interesting project, and vice versa. This is a thing which takes time. It's a more organic process than the "splatter" technique I used for just getting jobs in the past. It does require that I nurture other ways to make a living. But I find this place ultimately more rewarding.

So we continue to cross-pollinate our businesses and our pleasures. The cheeses and the salami continue to visit in my refrigerator with the marmalade Coin's Dad makes from his own Seville oranges in Florida, my wax lives in the kitchen and costumes from old Reverie shows grow musty in the basement of the rental house.

It's not the life I would have pictured for myself when I was sixteen, but how could I have? I didn't have any career-minded, professional artists in my family, nor my family's family, or in my circle of neighbors and friends, or in my family's circle of family and friends. Not one. I wouldn't have thought of this life. I stumbled into a dream, and now I find myself looking back through the mottled mirror with less regret, and more pleasure in being one in a community of artists of competence and skill.