about

This is Josh’s website.

Because you’ve gotta have a website.

Gotta sum up your life in a neat little bio so people know what it is you do. But there’s an awful lot of stuff you won’t find here too. Because summing things up in a nice neat little bio means you miss a lot of the life lived in the spaces between.

On a website like this one, there isn’t space for the stories. Stories like juggling twenty credit hours, a seat on the Studio Theatre Board of Directors, performing in five shows a semester, running a campus radio show, and completing a thesis presentation on John Mayer and race theory, which would later win the Outstanding Research Project of the Year.

There isn’t space for stories like founding a theater festival or leading a group of teenagers on a mission trip to rural Tennessee or writing and directing a web series while working eighty hours a week at a theater company.

The nice neat little bio skips over the details. Details like the smell in the basement of a Dayton punk house or the warmth of the overhead light on Broadway stage. Details like the gut-punch of having to fire one of your model employees for accusations of sexual assault or the elation that comes from winning grant money to fund a food kitchen in Cincinnati’s worst food desert.

Stick with the nice and neat bio and you miss the good stuff. Talking favorite movies over lunch with the former Board Chairman of a major film studio. The comedian from that show about nothing making a joke at your expense. Asking Broadway legends what fame does to their psyche. Holding hands with a popular music legend in the wings of a historic Hollywood theater. Standing in a movie star’s Broadway dressing room.

The nice neat little bio can’t quite capture the moments. Moments like the standing ovation the full-length play you’ve written gets at its first public reading. Seeing your signature on a licensing contract next to the signature of your favorite recroding artist. Seeing that short film you wrote and made with a bunch of friends in on screen at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

Summing up your life in a nice neat little bio means there isn’t space for any of these things.

Nope.

Instead, you’ve gotta tailor everything to fit a brand. Gotta sum up the whole arc of your life in a few tight paragraphs. After all, there’s only so much space on a website like this one.

And you’ve gotta have a website.

You’ve just gotta.