Hey there, super Sober Heroes. It's your host, sober Steve, the podcast guy, here with another episode of Gay A the Super Sober Hero Show. I am happy to clock in today with 1,026 days of continuous sobriety, one day at a time. And today I am very thankful that my workshop was approved for the Florida Roundup, and I will get into that in a moment. But first let me just say I am very excited to bring our guest on the show for you today for the interview I'll be playing in a moment. It is Leo S, and he is one of the first ones ever where I was scouting people online to be on the podcast and when I engaged with him about his interests, multiple other people commented below hand saying yes, yes, please, yes. So he has amazing things to say, he has an amazing message and I am very excited to share that with you. So you have a excellent episode another one in store for you today. But, yeah, I am also super psyched that my workshop was approved.
Speaker 1:Many of you who have been around for a while might remember from the summer when I did a Zoom workshop series for Better Sex called Rewriting your Sex Biography Overcoming Shame and Trauma. It was a mouthful of a title, but it was about how we can overcome shame and sex related traumas in a healthy way as a group through some exercises and questions, and I am excited that I get to niche it down further for queer and sober people and bring it to the Florida Roundup. I know that it's one of my favorite topics to talk about on this podcast, oftentimes revisiting it every couple months, and it sounds like people always receive it well when I put it out there. But the topic of sex and recovery is something that a lot of people don't talk about. I mean, in real life, sex isn't something a lot of people talk about. As I'm even posting about the fact that I'm doing a sex workshop, I'm having friends that are pretty liberal out there being like oh sex really, steve. But the thing is, for a lot of us, sex and our addictions kind of went hand in hand. They played into one another, they got complicated together and so when we get sober, whether we're untangling from a drug that's heavily linked to sex, or even if it's just that we were messy, drunk sluts like me, it's hard for you to unpack it all.
Speaker 1:I remember even being married and at the time in a monogamous relationship with my husband. The first time we had sex when I was sober, it was a huge big deal. It was like I had had it without drinking occasionally, but I was always at least a little bit stoned beforehand and so after we had some time in my early sobriety for me to heal and we had our first time sober, it was awesome and awkward and uncomfortable and all the things that like needed work on to make it so that it got to the point that it was really good again and better than it's ever been, in fact. And there's a lot of things that I had to come over internally as well as things that we had to work on as a couple. Most of it revolved around communication and actually talking about things rather than just making guesses and assumptions, which I think that sometimes even the strongest couples or the strongest people together can oftentimes default to if they aren't actively forcing themselves to have difficult, deep, hard conversations from time to time, especially about things like our bodies and what makes us happy and what makes us feel good. And so I am really excited to be able to take this topic of how not only I personally have gone through my journey of untangling sex and alcohol, but talking with other addicts about their experiences untangling sex from their drug and alcohol addictions, to be able to kind of weave all those common threads of all the lessons that we've learned and put it into a workshop that a lot of sober people can benefit from this May.
Speaker 1:So if you've been on the fence or considering coming to the Florida Roundup, or if you've never heard of it and you're like, oh my God, this sounds amazing, you definitely should join me and the hundreds of other people that are going to be there. It's in Fort Lauderdale in May and I will put all the information in the show notes for you on that. But I am beyond thrilled that I get to be a part of it and talk about something that's been really important to me in my sobriety and recovery and with that I'll probably be talking a lot about it coming up over the next couple months leading up to the workshop. So if you have something to say about how you've achieved a great, amazing sober sex, I want to hear from you. My emails and inbox are always open. Steve at soberstevecom or at gay podcast on all the socials.
Speaker 1:But yeah, that was my big highlight news from last Friday that I was very excited to share for you in other updates or news. You're going to hear my day count at the top of the episode, the same day count of 1026 days for a couple of weeks, and that's because I am preparing and recording some episodes in advance as I am getting ready to head over to LA next week for the first time ever. It is the podcast evolutions expo and I'll be going to the ambies where Trixie Mattel will be hosting an award show for podcasting, while I have a week of learning how to become a better podcast or myself, as well as better podcast coach for the clients who I'm helping launch their own podcast right now. It's going to be amazing, but it also means that I'm going to be away for a little bit. So I am trying to get ahead of schedule because I also know from my last podcasting convention that I'm going to come back with so many new amazing, wonderful ways to help improve this podcast and by planning in advance it'll help make the transition a little less jarring than it might have been around that episode 175 to 178 mark last season.
Speaker 1:So thank you all, as always, for coming with me on the sober journey, and with that I think it is a perfect opportunity to head on over to Leo, so enjoy the interview. Hey there everyone. It's sober Steve here now with Leo Schwartz. Thanks for coming on the show, leo.
Speaker 2:Great to be here, thank you. Thanks for inviting me.
Speaker 1:Yes, well, I was very appreciative when you commented in the here queer sober Facebook group offering to be on, and you were the first person who's ever publicly offered to be on where people actually got on the comments saying, yes, do it. So people are very excited to hear more from you, leo.
Speaker 2:Well, that's, that's flattering. I'm grateful to be able to be in service.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Now tell us a little bit about who you are and your sobriety and all of that.
Speaker 2:My sobriety journey. Well, let's see. Actually, my anniversary is coming up April 1st, so the first next month I'll be 35 years, sober I will first. So I've been around for a while since 1989, I think and boy am I drinking in my. My performing career kind of go hand in hand.
Speaker 2:I went to the Eastern School of Music, I studied French horn. I became a professional horn player when I was in college, Like so many of us. I discovered, gee, I can kind of drink and smoke weed and not have to worry about my parents or anything like that. And so I started drinking on a fairly regular basis and smoking a lot of weed. And I graduated and things in my drinking got to the point where I didn't really I didn't really like my horn instructor at school. I love playing in the orchestra, but I didn't like my horn instructor. So when it came time to audition for graduate school I was way behind the wall and so I didn't go to grad school.
Speaker 2:I took a year off and went to Houston to live, where I have two brothers, and continued drinking and eventually ended up touring with the Broadway show Aveda for a year and a half, which is a third national tour, which was really a great experience. I got back to Houston, started doing a lot of freelancing there and then I had started developing anxiety around the horn. The horn is a treacherous instrument to play and I started having anxiety around the instrument and it got to a really bad point in 1986 to where the drinking and the anxiety just helped the better of me and I said I've got to quit playing the horn, I've got to go do something else. So I went to arts marketing and arts management to where the company working for a company they sent me to different cities to raise money for arts organizations and still drinking. And I got to Birmingham, Alabama, to run a campaign for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra and I found myself driving around in blackouts.
Speaker 1:Now, I had already had a.
Speaker 2:DWI it's what we called it in Texas. That's where I was doing most of my drinking prior to traveling and I realized, gee, I'm going to end up in the drunk tank again and my brothers are not going to be here to bail me out, so I better do something. Oh, I think those people in AAT teach you how to drink responsibly. So I'll look them up and go to some meetings. And I went to a bunch of meetings and there were new meetings and the people didn't have jobs and I did not have anything in common with them. One of the gentlemen who I still remember to this day, his name was James. He always used to say he'd always start off his comments by saying that my name is James and I'm an alcoholic. And thank God I'm an alcoholic, because if I wasn't an alcoholic I wouldn't have these 12 steps to live by, and that was his shtick. Well, James also told in his story how he had set people's houses on fire and shoot them when they came running out. And I thought I don't have anything in common with James.
Speaker 2:And in 1986, my father had died. So I told myself the reason I was drinking so much was because of grieving. I was grieving my father's death. So I started drinking again. I left meetings. My company transferred me to Chicago, which is where we had played for three weeks in the early 80s with Abida, and I remember thinking about Chicago. If I ever get the opportunity to live in Chicago, I'm going to take it. I was so excited I came to Chicago. The great thing about Chicago is you don't need to drive a car. You can get as drunk as you want to and take the cabs or maybe even the L, the subway if you're feeling brave. And so I just started drinking like crazy and somewhere along the line I missed my music. This is before I bottomed out. I missed my music. If you're a musician, if you're an artist of any sort, and you give it up, it's really hard, particularly if it's been such a part of you, it's inside your soul for so long. So I need you to do something. I know what I'll do. I'll compose and let's see, I'll compose music and I'm gay, so I'll write musical theater, because that's what gay composers do is write musical theater. So I found a workshop that taught how to write musical theater and around about that same time I ended up bottoming out. I woke up one morning, and like it talks about in the big book, I had that incomprehensible moralization, and I saw my life was going one of two ways Either I was going to die or I was going to drink myself into a blip or seek some sort of help. And I called up the, a Central Office. They sent me to meetings, and the rest is where I am now. I discovered, with the music, though the composing seems to be the thing that I've always wanted to do.
Speaker 2:Now, a few years back, not a year or so ago, I was scrolling through TED Talks and I ran across a TED Talk given by a gentleman by the name of Michael Brady Brody Wait. Excuse me, michael Brady Wait. He's a CEO and a recovering drug addict. He's also the CEO of several, a couple of startups, very successful and as I listened to his TED Talk, I thought, well, this guy sounds really programmed. And when he got to the end of his TED Talk, he gave three charges to the audience and I'm having to refer to my notes down here, so please excuse me if I look down but the three charges were practice, regress, authenticity, surrender the outcome, do uncomfortable work. And when he said those, huh, steps one, two and three and steps four through 10, hello, uncomfortable work. I thought this is really cool and I've sort of chewed on those for a while.
Speaker 2:And then, about a month and a half ago, a friend of mine in the program asked me to give a lead at a meeting here in town called Creative Artists in Recovery, or Artists in Recovery.
Speaker 2:I'd heard about this meeting since I first got sober it was 34 years ago but I'd never gone. I can be a bit of a snob and I figured are these going to be the people talking about paint by number? And they can't blend their colors right? This is the stress that they're going through. And Jean-Paul asked me to give a lead and I said, ok, I'm going to do this with all the seriousness that I can. And I went in there and I listened to the comments from the people and there were writers and there were painters, and there were artists and a musician and I thought you know, there's really something here that I can give to people. I can give back something Because I've gone through a huge creative process over the last several years in learning how to write and compose music my day job the job that keeps the beans on the table is.
Speaker 2:I'm a real estate instructor and a curriculum editor. I write coursework for Chicago Association of Realtors and I'm a very popular instructor. I've been doing that for at least 16, 17 years and I've had students come up to me and say you've changed my life, and I'm flattered by that.
Speaker 2:And I learned a long time ago that this 12 step work that I'm doing and teaching is legitimately 12 step work, I'm making a difference in someone's life and I have to be of service to them and I help them change their lives. Because that's the amazing thing about real estate is that the entrance requirements are really not that high, but they're great for people who want to make a change in their life, and particularly folks who can't get their resume past the first step of their name, because people, I mean it's a social justice thing that goes on a lot of times in real estate, because it allows people to be entrepreneurs when they otherwise society
Speaker 2:and the monolithic white paradigm will not allow them to do that. So I'm trying to be as helpful as I possibly can and I listened to these folks in this meeting and I thought there's something here that I can offer. And I went back to Michael Brody Waits' three charges and I thought you know what I should do? A workshop on practicing rigorous authenticity and doing uncomfortable work. My own uncomfortable work as a composer was I've had a show off Broadway. I produced my own show off Broadway. I ran for five and a half months.
Speaker 2:It took me 30 years to get to that point and, as I always tell my students look, when should I have quit? You know, when do you quit trying, you know. And so you can wake up the next morning and go gee, if I'd only tried one more day. You know, I paid a lot of money to this producer in New York to mentor me and the very first session we had he said I want you to produce your musical, the Book of Merman, off-brought. The Book of Merman, not Mormon, the Book of Merman as an Ethel Merman. I want you to produce the Book of Merman off-Broadway. And not knowing any better, I said sure, ok. So I started raising the money and I produced the Book of Merman off-Broadway. Then I wrote a musical. I've written a musical in 2010 about Emmett and Mamie Till and I sent that to the New York musical festival.
Speaker 2:I've had musicals in Wales. I've had my music performed by gay choirs around the country and toured in Europe. So I've got a lot of exposure and it's all pushed Leo up the hill. I mean I wish somebody would come along. I think somebody just recently has come along and said we want to help you get this to the next level, but usually it's me pushing, pushing, pushing up the hill like Sisyphus, and the rock always comes back down, unfortunately. So this practicing excuse me, doing uncomfortable work is really at the sole of what I do as a creative artist.
Speaker 2:And I hear a lot of other creative artists run through the same process. I mean, we know that the alcoholic is self-centered and self-absorbed. The book tells us this, we know this, our sponsors tell us this. All selfishness is the problem, so forth and so on. Well, and that's not meant as a slight to the creative artist. I mean, we are in the business of taking the world in and filtering it through our experiences and our craft and creating something new or trying to create something new. That's what we do and we can't help but take the work personally, because it is us.
Speaker 2:One of the things I learned at Eastmond was for singers. Singers are their voice. I could say that the piano had a bad day or the French horn had a bad day or it did something, but the voice is inside of you, it's the meat, and so singers are very much who. They are right. And as a composer, I put this work out there and I sit back and wait and see what happens and I do a lot of revision. I have to do a lot of revision, but it's all very personal. So how do I get past?
Speaker 2:That is one of the things that has become really challenging, and I think the first thing that I have to say is that the first answer to getting beyond that incredible sensitivity that we have is by relying on our process. Process is really really important to creating art, and you can only get process by doing it. All right, I can't tell you how many people I know. I know one gentleman a dear friend of mine actually is a very good writer, but he won't write. And I just tell him you have to write on a daily basis, even if you have nothing to write. You have to write on a daily basis because otherwise you cannot develop process, and process becomes the thing that you rely on. It becomes your bread and butter, right? So you have to have. Process gives us confidence.
Speaker 2:Another thing that is really really helpful is craft, and craft you can only learn by doing. Craft manifests itself in different ways for different people, but for me, craft is knowing things like. Right now I'm reworking a lyric for a show that I'm gonna send to theater out on the East Coast, and I know that if I switch my stanzas around, it's much easier to set up the rhyme. If I try to rhyme, it doesn't work. As well as setting up the rhyme, it's like jokes writing a joke the joke is in the setup, not the payoff. It depends on how good the setup is. So craft is knowing things like that. Craft is knowing that going to the subdominant lifts and the score up. Craft is knowing that you need an extra measure at the end of the piece. Craft is knowing that you're good and it's gonna be okay.
Speaker 2:One of the things and I'm kind of jumping all over the place one of the things that I think a lot of creative artists run into at the very start is what is called the internal editor. There's this wonderful book by Natalie Goldberg, who's a writer and a Buddhist. It's called Writing Down the Bones. It's a fantastic book and about every page a page and a half is a lesson in itself, and in one of them she deals with the internal editor. And this is the thing that gets most people away from writing on a daily basis is that internal editor kicks in and says stuff like you're incompetent, you don't know what you're doing, you're a fool, you're a fraud, you're a charlatan all those wonderful little things that we tell ourselves. And her lesson and I do this, excuse me, I've done this, I don't have to do it so much anymore but the lesson that she teaches is when the internal editor starts speaking to you, you turn your entire focus on it and sit down and say what do you have to tell me? Okay, I'm no good, I don't know how to write music, I'm incompetent, I'm a fraud, I'm a charlatan. And I just start typing all this stuff out in Word and tell me more. Come on, you've got more to say. I know you do you bitch? Come on, tell me what you need to know. And we just keep writing it down and eventually the internal editor starts drying up and when it gets to its very end, then it's my turn to turn to the internal editor and say are you done? Are you through? Then shut the fuck up and leave me alone. I've got work to do.
Speaker 2:Doing this enables me to write on a regular basis. Doing this when I'm stuck, it's like I was hitting the internal editor earlier this evening working on this lyric and I didn't think to do it. But now that I'm talking about it I realize then you go back to the lyric and really kind of refinesse it. But it just works so well. And the other thing that we all have to agree on and this is something that I think is not said enough.
Speaker 2:First drafts suck. There is no way that you should gauge your creativity based on a first draft. A first draft is nothing but getting all the manure out on the field, getting it all out on the field so you can spread it around, that's all. First drafts suck. What makes the difference between a first draft and a really good product is the craft and the process that you rely on is going in and finessing it, and the other thing is this is really key, I think too is we have to find somebody to trust to run our work by.
Speaker 2:You know, as a not only composing music and write lyrics, but I also write the book sometimes, and in the case of Till, in the case of Book of Merman, I'm the co-writer of the book. I started writing off both all by myself Excuse me and then I brought in my writing partner, dc Cathro, to help me with it, because he's such a brilliant playwright. There are things that I knew that he could do, that I couldn't, and so now it's a joint effort. But we're always throwing our work back and forth to each other to get insight, and then we've got to get it up in front of an audience to see how they respond. I've got to give something that I've written over to someone else to read to see if they get it or not. I'm taking a writing course right now online versus the Economist the business writing course and you really need an editor. Every writer needs an editor. You cannot write in a basement. You can't compose by yourself. It doesn't do any good to do that. Let's see what else do I got.
Speaker 1:I mean I definitely am relating to so much of what you have to say. I know that it was only recently where I really had to embrace that, with creating this podcast and all the social media content that I create and everything like that, that I am an artist in my own way and I definitely have struggled with those feelings of the processes. When you were talking about the process, I was like it's important. That's why I feel like this podcast has lasted as long as it has almost 180 episodes. It's because early on I've developed really good processes to keep it going.
Speaker 2:But yeah.
Speaker 1:I also when you were talking about doing the uncomfortable work some of the most uncomfortable work that you've had to push through or get through.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow. The musical till Till is about a black icon, emmett Till, and his mother, mamie, and it is a work for six black actors. Four of them are playing multiple roles. Emmett and Mamie are singly cast.
Speaker 2:There's a feeling among some in the community that a white man should not be writing and telling the story. I understand that and appreciate it, but I also am a writer and I was very, very attracted to tell the story because I was outraged by what happened. And this is what I do. This is how we respond to the world In New York, and the show has also been produced in New Jersey. We got amazing reviews in New York, by the way, it's just like you know. The New York Times was thrilled with our show. So I know I'm on the right path, but the ending of the show is problematic.
Speaker 2:Now, I'm not always the smartest guy in the room, I'm not always the brightest bulb in the pack and I totally miss the importance of the fact that Emmett was a member of the Church of God and Christ, which is one of the largest denominations Protestant I think the third or second largest Protestant denomination in the United States. I grew up Catholic. In the Catholic Church. All the diocese have their own names, like Our Lady of Sorrow or Our Blessed Mother or this. They have all these names. That's what I thought the words Church of God and Christ were. I thought it was like this individual nomenclature for a building. So I did no research on the Church of God and Christ and we went to the end of the show in New York and I found out that I'd written Emmett's homegoing and I'd totally gotten it wrong, because I had a member of the cast who was a preacher's kid in the Kojic denomination.
Speaker 2:They said oh, this is not how these go at all, it's like. So I got an education right then and there. And that was a little uncomfortable because I was getting some side eye like what are you doing? We went to New Jersey Now the homegoings are celebrations of the individual's life and the fact that they're going back to heaven, to Jesus.
Speaker 2:And we got to New Jersey and one of the actors said I don't like this, it's too celebratory. He goes I live this stuff every day. I don't wanna celebrate it. I said, okay, tell me what needs to be done. So we had a very nice chat about the end of the show and it's uncomfortable I mean, it's really uncomfortable to say educate me yet once again, educate the white guy yet once again, what I need to know about the black community, because I don't know it. And we ended up or I ended up going home that night and totally rewriting the end of the show and it worked really really well. So that's a really uncomfortable situation to have been in and we just got back from London where we presented the show and the reading.
Speaker 2:Now we went to London because I felt that we could probably find a producer there who'd be more interested in producing the show than we have here and we have, which is kind of exciting. But the black actors were still very cautious about how they were dealing with the subject matter as it came through us myself and our director was brilliant. Our director was an OBE and she was just absolutely brilliant. Joseph, michelle Mingo and she it's something that I don't know. I don't know. I have to look it up every time. It's no, that's all right, you're gonna have to cut this out. It's bestowed by the, by the crown. I think the OBE is bestowed by the crown. It's a very high level of achievement.
Speaker 1:Ian McCallan is an OBE, I mean all these, I mean the sir is and stuff.
Speaker 2:They become. Yeah, being a sir or a dame like Dame Judy Jensen is one step above being an OBE. Oh wow, and she was an OBE for her work in Lion King, because she was Rafiki in Lion King in the West End.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So those were her credentials, which we were really pleased with. But she's also on the board of the National Black Theater of Sweden, yes, and she told everybody. We're gonna have a very uncomfortable conversation about race and we're going to say what's in the room and we're going to talk about it and we're not going to ignore the fact that two white gentlemen wrote this show and we're not gonna hold back on anything that we're working on. And I thought, okay, we're off, that's good, that's good in the races. Let's talk about these things, let's talk about this uncomfortable work that we're doing here, because this is how we grow, this is how we learn, this is how we get better. And I guess if the powers it be, if higher power doesn't want this show to be seen any more than it has been, it won't go any further. I'm hopeful that it will go further. We got a lot of interesting and very exciting responses back from the reading in London in November, so we'll see what happens.
Speaker 2:But other bits of uncomfortable work is I don't like to write things that I don't know are going to be performed. So, in other words, steve, if you told me that you played the trumpet, and I would say well, steve, if I wrote something for you, would you play it? And if you'd said, yes, I would write a piece for trumpet. So I'm very much a free market composer. It's just like I won't go to wherever the work is. But people ask me why don't you write opera, why don't you write symphonies? It's like I have enough collecting dust in my house. I don't need anything else just sitting around. So that's kind of uncomfortable work.
Speaker 2:But I think that the main part of uncomfortable work for me is just the regular struggle of it. I am a junkie. I love adrenaline. I love the hit of an email from somebody saying we want your show. And when I go through a period of time where I'm not hearing from anybody, or somebody says we want to do this with your show and I don't hear from them for a little bit of time, I get really down in a funk. That's sort of where I've been most of the day is going. Nobody's reaching back out to me and I'm a pest. I will constantly push, I push, push, push, push my work out there, constantly bothering people about it. But that's the only way I know it's done. That's the only way I know I can get my work seen by people, get my work done, so I'm constantly pushing it out there and that's uncomfortable. I would like at some point I'd like someone to pick me up and just carry me for a while, you know, rather than the other way around. I'm sure you experienced that with your podcast. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I've recently been getting much more loud with it. You know it was just on audio and I recently added video, so I'm trying to get louder with the message and just running with it. But even the people that I coach about making their podcast they're the biggest thing with. Like social media, you have to kind of reframe it that you're not pushing it out there onto people but you're giving people the chance to see it that are just waiting to see it and it's so much of an easy mindset to tell people to have. It's a lot different to actually feel it in your every day when you're actually putting that social media practice or marketing yourself Cause if you're creating content or anything, a lot of it's the time unless you have somewhere where you can throw money at someone else to do it for you. You're having to put yourself out there in uncomfortable ways and that's something that even if you're not a creative person in sobriety, you can relate. I mean, what are some uncomfortable work that you've had to do in your sobriety?
Speaker 2:Oh, I just, I just recently had to admit that I have, I have. I have three huge resentments that keep popping up on, sometimes even a daily basis. One is against my mother, who's passed away, had a very difficult relationship with her. One is with my ex-husband who divorced me after 27 years, and one is with the director that I had to deal with in New York for two and, of course, in program we hear you got to pray for him. He's just shut up. I've been around long enough that I hear this all the time. I say, oh, shut up, I don't want to pray for anybody. I finally have given in. All right, I finally said I finally got.
Speaker 2:I got the message in two meetings and one therapy appointment that said forgiveness is the answer. You're going to have to pray for forgiveness and I thought, okay, the writing's on the wall, let's see if this works. And oh, my gosh, it does. My, I've been doing it and my, my, my burden is lightened, but it's like it's just so good. So what do we have here? Who would you put it?
Speaker 2:It was so challenging to get to this point. It was so challenging to get to this point because I had a wonderful sponsor who recently passed away and he said and I probably took this to heart too much he said his job was not to die with all his issues resolved. His job was to die sober. He said when they nail that coffin shut, I should be sober, but I don't have to get all my issues resolved before I die. So I said, okay, fine, there's no rush for me to make amends to my mother, there's no rush for me to forgive my mother. It's like, oh yes, there is, because she's taken up space, right, and I'm a little bit more compassionate with her and towards my memory of her and my, you know, whatever extra, extra, extra life connection.
Speaker 2:I've been watching a lot about near death experiences and I'm getting a little wiggie about that these days. But so that's a challenge in sobriety. I'm challenged right now because I don't like being single. That's a challenge that I'm having to deal with. But what can you say? I can whine, and for all it's good, just whine and feel sorry for myself and for me, for me, for me. You know the dream, so I just keep walking through that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, you also have a ton of other exciting, amazing things going on in your life right now that you were saying how you're looking forward to things as well, what is something you're looking forward to in your recovery? I'm?
Speaker 2:really looking forward to hopefully being able to put this this topic of conversation of doing uncomfortable work, the creative artists in recovery, putting it together into a workshop. I want to do a workshop of it and it'll be much more focused on what I've been talking about here, but I want to do a workshop of it in the Chicago roundup. It's just coming up. I just, while we've been sitting here, I just saw an email flash from Miami, the Miami roundup, saying that, reaching out to me about it.
Speaker 2:So I want to be able to do this because I think it'd be. I think it'd be really helpful to people.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, it's Jordan. I know that you know the idea of doing uncomfortable work for creative artists. A lot of the people that I've talked to in early recovery that do creative work almost one of their obstacles or barriers from entering recovery was that they wouldn't be able to be creative. And even in their early recovery one of the biggest struggles is getting in touch with their creative side again. So I mean especially with people early in recovery what kind of?
Speaker 1:advice would you have with them and how to rekindle or get familiar with their creative side? I guess?
Speaker 2:Well, I think that I mean, first of all, you're not alone, because even in Bill's story, bill says that men of genius created their best ideas and when they're intoxicated, that's what he's trying to convince Lois of the fact that he's drinking so much. I think the first thing I would encourage them to do is you have to sit down and try to give them the exercise of working with the internal editor, because you're really working with that critic in your head, and sometimes a critic can be very helpful, but the case of it being as dismissive as it usually is, it's not. But the first thing is just to do it. You've got to get on the bike and ride it. That's the only way to do it. And I'm always amazed to see people in recovery who had had a skill like.
Speaker 2:There's a guy in my home group who studied piano and he mentioned this finally in a meeting. He said I'm starting to take piano lessons again. He's in like month six or seven of sobriety of the program and I went up to him after the meeting and I said so what are you working on? And he says well, I'm working on the Beto and C minor variations and I'm working on this piece by Chopin, this piece by Debussy, and I looked at him and I said so, you got chops. If you're doing the 32 variations on C minor, you got some chops. He says, oh yeah, I've got chops, I just let them get out of my control. So I think it's just getting back on the bike and doing it and I think having a support group probably helps. There's somebody to talk to about it.
Speaker 2:When I first started composing, people knew me as a real estate agent. They didn't know me as a composer and I got this intense sense. When I would talk about this to people after meetings and before meetings they'd go oh, isn't it cute, leo has a hobby. It's like no, this is me, this is who I am, this is my soul here. This is not something that's cute and precious and something I can walk away in the garage on the weekends. This is something that's very serious, that I approach on a daily basis and I think finding somebody who will listen to you with the gravity that you need that. Yeah, you indeed are trying to be an artist and what that means and I've known a few, and it's just one of those things.
Speaker 1:I think you just got to get on your bike and do it.
Speaker 2:You got to get the right support network around you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that that's excellent advice, and do you have any other advice you'd like to give now on uncomfortable work for creative artists, or are you going to save it for some of the workshops let's see?
Speaker 2:Let me check once through. Yeah, I'm actually going to. Let me share this with you. Stephen Sondheim wrote a musical called Sunday in the Park and lots of people know that show. It's a terrific exploration of artistic angst. And just how do you break through? And once you break through, how do you continue to break through? How do you keep producing? And it's really a show that's near and dear to my heart and the ending always brings me to tears. But the very last song is called Move On, and there are a couple of lyric stanzas in there that I think are really important. I want to share them. I'll quit talking. Stop worrying.
Speaker 2:If your vision is new, let others make that decision. They usually do. You keep moving on. Anything you do, let it come from you. Then it will be new. Give us more to see, and that just gives me goosebumps. Give us more to see. That just gives me goosebumps. That's he's talking to it. Actually, what's happening at this point is the characters on stage are George and his girlfriend, dot, from the first act. He's playing George, the great, great, great grandson of George Surratt the painter, but at this point he's talking to Dot, george Surratt's girlfriend. What he's really doing is having an internal dialogue with himself. That Dot's manifesting is subconscious. Just give us more to see. Just do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's excellent advice. What a great way to close. For now, the door is always open. I look forward to having you back for topic episodes down the road, hopefully, but in the meantime, if people want to follow you online so that they can see when you're going to be doing these things at different roundups, sir, how to get in touch with you? How could they do that?
Speaker 2:Oh, good question. I have a website, leoschwarzcom, and also I'm pretty good with Facebook. I like chatting with people on Facebook. As long as they're not catfish, I'm absolutely fine with that.
Speaker 1:I don't think any of my listeners are catfish, so I'm going to reach out to Leo. He's been great to chat with but leading up to this and it was great getting to know you on this deeper level. So thank you so much, Leo.
Speaker 2:I'm so grateful that you had me on, Steve. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Excellent. And back to the show. Hey, there, I'm super sober heroes. Thank you so much for listening to another great episode of gay hey, this super sober hero show. I hope you enjoyed hearing from Leo. It was a pleasure getting to hear from him and soak up all his experience, strength and hope, so I hope you enjoyed it as well.
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