Huge thanks to Pratibha Parmar for sharing Lexi Alexander‘s brilliant, infuriating, blood-boiling piece that gets it totally right about lack of women, not ‘just’ in Hollywood.
Lack of women in broadsheet lit pages, lack of women theatre directors, lack of women opera directors, lack of women EVERYTHING and EVERYWHERE – when we have all been campaigning for change and the ‘bosses’ have been promising change for DECADES.

As Lexi Alexander says, all of this can only mean one of two things.
1) Those who have promised to bring about change were insincere.
or
2) Those who have promised to bring about change were not very smart.

Yup.

And so – we must give up wanting ‘them’ to make the change (even when ‘they’ have power).
We must take it, make it, do it ourselves.
In all areas of our lives, in every way we can, from the smallest steps to the biggest.

I’ve been head-down, hard-working, barely looking up except to acknowledge another Fun Palace sign-up (yay!) since the year began. Tons to do, little time to do it in, Fun Palaces to make/create, book to finish, and some other more personal stuff too. But I like Lexi Alexander’s piece. Oddly, I don’t find it in the slightest bit depressing.
It has fired me up.

The Fun Palaces are my Make It challenge to myself this year and last.
I have never done anything so big before, so … national, so scary, so all-new-to-me. Or so good, valuable, important, exciting. It feels like everything I’ve done to now has led to this, writing, acting, directing, making, ensemble-ing, mentoring, workshop-leading, facilitating (and absolutely politicking) … like it’s all come together.

If you want to shout yay! (and a yay with trepidation is fine) for whatever your Make It thing is this year – be it making your first (or 8th) feature film, finishing university, directing a play, writing a book, running for politics, learning to swim, proposing to the loved one or ditching the rubbish one, getting more women into parliament, getting more girls into school, changing the world in whatever way you need to – leave a comment here, and we’ll have a look every now and then during the year to see how we’re all getting on, then again this time next year and see how we did (Jan 1st is terrible for resolutions anyway, far too crowded!)

What will you make of 2014?