One of my weaknesses is Instagram. I removed the rest of social media off my phone ages ago and I used to only have a small, very intentionally curated group of friends on Instagram, so how much of a time suck could it be?

Turns out, still a lot. And lately I’ve noticed a bunch of those ‘let me introduce myself’ videos from countless bloggers as I aimlessly scroll.

It got me thinking that I’ve been blogging for 10 years and it’s been a long time since I’ve done a post like that.

So, hi, my name is Mel!

I majored in theatre in college. I accidentally took a class called Theatre Crafts as a literature major and I thought I would be analyzing scripts, but it was actually an introductory theatre class. I was then lazy and just forgot to drop it in time, so I figured, what the heck, it will just be one of my electives.

I nailed that class. And I really loved learning about all the technical elements that bring together a show backstage. However, we had to volunteer for 10 hours in the school scene shop and I was wildly introverted. I kept walking up to the school scene shop door on work days, peering through at all the loud people in there who seemed to already know each other really well and run away.

Those 10 hours were 10% of my grade and coming down the home stretch of the class, the professor pulled me to the side and pretty much was like “what the heck is happening here? Why don’t you have any hours?”

So I told him I kept panicking when I tried to walk into the scene shop and he told me if I worked the running crew for the final show of the year, which would be a commitment of more than 10 hours, that would be fine too.

So I did. I was thrown backstage with two upperclassmen for Charlotte’s Web and the next thing I knew, I was standing on small ladder with one of the upperclassmen holding onto my belt loops so I wouldn’t fall as a webbed contraption rolled offstage at me so I could slap on some giant, glittery letters and the web could be rolled back out at warp speed. I would then leap off the ladder, run to the other side of the stage with the other two stagehands and drop a bazillion baby spider puppets and make them dance.

Sidenote: Do not hold onto people by their belt loops on ladders. Do not roll fast things at people unsecured on ladders. Do not leap off ladders.

It was one of the best things I ever did in my life. I don’t think I had ever felt so alive.

Financially, I was incredibly lucky to be at school half on scholarship and half parent funded. I graduated from undergrad with no debt. However, my dad was not having it when I said I wanted to major in theatre.

So I just quietly double majored in literature and theatre production. I graduated in 3 years. The degree was technically called Studies in the Arts and you couldn’t even see my specialization was Theatre Production unless you looked at my transcripts. He had no idea I double majored until like 10 years after school.

I got paid to stage manage for the first time ever when I was 20. It was a dance production.

After I graduated from school, I went on to get a Masters in theology, because I am a bit of loose cannon with my attention span at times. Oddly enough, I worked part time for a little theatre company that did some really rough ‘don’t do drugs’ skits in schools and prisons. That, combined with some substitute teaching, was enough to save a little. I went to a seminary, which is actually very cheap. Tuition 2005-2008 was something like $3,500 a semester. I remember my first apartment rent, with some roommates was like $250 a month in Virginia.

…I now feel very old writing that. LOL.

This was all fine until the recession in 2008, which hit my dad’s business pretty hard. So I paid for things the last year of school. This actually went ok and I switched to a job working customer service at an insurance agency (to this day my most despised job). I also didn’t have the best handle on credit cards at the time, so while I had some savings, I also graduated with about $7,000 in debt.

My personal life took a bit of a tailspin at the end of that degree and I suddenly realized I had no idea what I would be doing when I graduated. One of my best friends got a job offer in San Francisco, so I wound up moving out there with her on a whim.

Pro Tip: Do not move to San Francisco on a whim. It is a wildly expensive place.

I drove across the country, which was pretty awesome, then landed in San Francisco where my rent had ballooned to $1250 with an extra $150ish a month for utilities. And I couldn’t find a job. I remember going to the Rainforest Café very dejected and applying to be a hostess there because I had been a hostess in one at a mall in NJ for several summers in college and I was told I was underqualified to be a hostess in a restaurant in a location like Fisherman’s Wharf.

It was a swell time.

Leaving that depressing interview, I wandered Fisherman’s Wharf wondering how I had blown up my own life so good when I saw a cruise ship docked there. I thought, cruise ships have theatres. So I went home and applied to every cruise line I could find.

About a week later, I was at a job interview to work at FYE in the airport and just had a terrible feeling in my gut about the job. I was offered it onsite and asked if I could think about it, which was not received well. I headed back towards home and stopped at the library to sign up for a library card and slumped outside the library and called my mom in tears. I hung up from that sad phone call and while I was sitting outside the library, I got a phone call from Holland America Line asking me if I was free to do an emergency fill in for a stage manager and fly to Alaska in approximately 48 hours.

I was definitely free.

I spent the next 5 years at Holland America as a stage manager. I moved back in with my parents at the end of the San Francisco lease since I was only home a few weeks a year. I paid off the credit card and paid my crazy San Francisco rent and then saved for several years.

I the middle of that period, I took a year to go to England and get a Masters degree in Theatre and Performance Studies. It was a good adventure and I had always sort of thought I might get a doctorate someday because two professors had a really strong impact on me during undergrad and I thought they had really cool jobs.

However, I left that adventure with about $30,000 in debt. Which brings us to brokeGIRLrich. It was the first time I really had to start figuring out my finances. I funnelled most of my paycheck once I was back on the ship into paying off that debt.

I also left that job and joined the circus. Probably the biggest name gig on my resume, but also the hardest work and the lowest pay. I actually made about $3,000 more a year but I went from having about 3 months off a year to 2 weeks. And I actually had a fairly decent work/life balance on ships most of the time whereas the circus was just insane and full and constant and I kind of hated it very quickly.

But I couldn’t leave because I had these debt payments to make.

I quit a month after making the last payment, having paid off those debts in 2.5 years. I also had a very sick family member, so I moved to New York and worked part of the production management team in a large Off-Broadway house, which gave me more flexibility to go home (I’m from New Jersey). Turns out, New York is expensive and I really don’t like production management.

And I kept blogging. The vast majority of my early posts are me as a guinea pig, looking for side hustles that work for nomadic people in the arts, talking about my adventures and mis-adventures in credit card churning, tips for saving money on the road, etc. I was essentially trying to build a resource journal that answered how much does this stage manager make and how do I survive on it? Because I had Googled those questions many times at the beginning of my career to no avail.

So after a year of that, I went back to stage managing. I toured with a children’s theatre company, worked some smaller regional gigs, did a larger non-Equity national tour, and eventually wound up back at a circus, in a different position that I enjoyed a lot more.

And because of all that touring and moving, I just kept living with my parents between things, because they are incredible and I would not be where I am financially without their help.

The few times I have paid rent, it has been in crazy expensive places like San Francisco, New York and London, definitely a wake up call compared to those early days Virginia rent. I’ve also prioritized maxing out my IRA since my mid-20s and these days I try to the IRA and HSA, though that doesn’t always pan out. In some really fortunate years, I’ve also been able to contribute to a SEP 401k and a brokerage account.

During the pandemic, I was teaching stage management and theatre studies at a university, so I was incredibly lucky that contract didn’t end until several months into the pandemic, giving me some time to plan a pivot. I went pretty smoothly into working for a digital event company, that I still work with.

I currently live in London and working on a doctorate degree in theatre and am studying how stage and house managers might improve audience risk mitigation in immersive and participatory theatre, particularly gray area risks that could be classified as psychological or social. I’m also interested in how applying care ethics to risk mitigation might benefit this process.

I work part time doing random gigs around London, ushering, picking up the occasional digitial event when it’s available, and once in a blue moon stage managing a quick, larger event back in the States.

I am self-funded and the brunt of my tuition is paid. Financial administration at my university has been an abject nightmare every step of the way, but I believe next year is just half tuition , followed by a small writing up year fee in February. So I think the worst of the tuition payments are over.

I have a savings account for a new car that’s about half funded, an emergency savings account that is a little over $10,000 and I’m hopeful to get it closer to $30,000 one day. I also have a savings account that is tuition/down payment for a house, that I suspect will be quite depleted when I finish my current degree, but as I have no idea what I want to do once I finish here, I think that’s ok.

My financial goal when I started my degree was to finish with the same net worth I started with. Year 1 this seemed very doable because there were still tons of digital events, and my income only took a tiny dip by going back to school. With the recession this year and the closing of the show I work at one weekends, my income has halved. We’ll see what Year 3 brings, so fingers crossed there. Also fingers crossed I actually successfully finish this degree because whoa Nelly the whole doctorate thing is genuinely the weirdest project I’ve ever tackled.

Also if you or a friend run an immersive theatre company and you would consider being one of my case studies, please let me know. The roadblocks to doing case studies, my word, it was not what I expected to be the biggest obstacle in this process.

So that’s me in a nutshell, a nearing 40 stage manager, just trying to make sure I don’t starve in retirement, which is slightly closer than it was when I started blogging but still a long way off.

I like:

• Theatre
• Circuses
• Immersive Experiences
• School (most of the time)
• Roadside Attractions
• Traveling
• Board Games
• Candles
• Bhodi

I am a wild time.

I also made a stage management bucket list early in my career of types of shows and specific shows I wanted to work on and I’m excited to say it’s only got two things left on it. I want to work on:

• A Cirque du Soleil show
• BatBoy: The Musical

Then I’ll retire. J/K

If you’re just joining the journey, that’s a bit about me. The first Wednesday of every month, I do an accountability update, which goes over how much I made and how I budgeted it. I’ve been doing those for 10 years, so while it’s hard to say how much a stage manager makes, if you’re one and wondering the same thing, you can at least get a super clear picture of what one stage manager has made across a variety of jobs in the industry.

These days I write a lot of posts moaning about how unpleasant it is financially to go from being a fully employed stable individual to a grad student, though, honestly, things could be much worse. And a lot of that is due to the skills I’ve learned from writing this blog and learning personal finance.

Leave a comment and let me know a little more about you!