Hello! Happy Spring!

This picture was taken a little over a year ago by my dear friend the brilliant Rubi Rose. It’s one of my favorite pictures of myself. It’s very moving to me. I look like my brother. It captures one of my favorite things about my brother and me which is that we are both little scamps.

I don’t really know what to do with this picture. It’s not the kind of thing I would normally think to use for Business Stuff, but who knows, maybe it’s my new professional headshot. For now, I’m just showing it to you.

Rubi also took the one on the About page of my website. I love that one too. Much more of a Cool Guy vibe, which is good for Business. Also good for Business is the part in the bio where I call myself a “noted practitioner” of something. I feel kind of silly about that but it’s true! I have been noted!

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Speaking of my website: What do you think of the text on the front page? Genuinely asking.

It’s kind of been bugging me since I put it there. I have like a magic eye poster thing with it where I can read it and be like “This person is spitting absolute bars” and then kind of switch my gaze and read it again and go “This person is so far up their own ass.”

Of course, anyone who knows me from back in the day knows that spitting bars while up my own ass used to be kind of my whole thing. But I’m different now! Really!

For the most part!

I think I’ll probably write something a little simpler and to the point for the front page and move that text somewhere else on the site. We’ll see.

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Last weekend, on Saturday, I had some folks over to my place for an informal reading of the new play I’m writing: the first of The Courier Plays.

We had a great time. The play is in its tender early stages, so the invite list was intentionally small, and three people from that short list ended up able to come. They’re real ones. Three wonderful people from three different social circles who hadn’t met before this. We had a gentle, quiet, cozy time with the play. Exactly what I was hoping for.

One friend, who had also seen my previous play Moss, remarked on how my work makes them feel like they are inside of the story and living it, rather than sitting Over Here while the play happens Over There, which is how theater usually feels to them. The other two firmly agreed. This was perhaps the best compliment they possibly could have paid me. That’s everything I want theater to be.

I’ve been thinking about my friends’ generosity and receptiveness to the play in relation to my upcoming months of revising it, rehearsing it, memorizing it, performing it.

There’s a lot of reasons I don’t currently have much of an acting career to speak of, despite people who see me do it generally agreeing I’m quite good at it.

These reasons include:

• The way my neurodivergence/mental illness is

• The way the acting industry is

• The way my neurodivergence/mental illness is incompatible with the way the acting industry is

• The fact I’ve gone on roughly 10 professional auditions, total, since graduating a well-regarded acting school with a BFA in Acting over a decade ago

• Various disasters that occurred to loved ones and myself throughout my 20s, which always felt more important to attend to than being a working actor

• My terminal lack of ambition

This past week I’ve been contemplating that last one. I feel a kind of Artmaking Ambition. I feel a drive and a hunger to practice storytelling all the time forever and get better and better at it until the day I die. But I’ve never really had much Career-Building Ambition.

And this is not a Money Is Evil thing! Sure, capitalism is fundamentally harmful and should be dismantled, but I don’t really feel that common millennial artist anxiety around asking for money for my art. My art is great and you should give me money for it.

The thing really is, since graduating that well-regarded acting school over a decade ago, whenever I have a new weird little play to share, I’ve consistently been able to get between 1 and 50 people to come see it. The median probably being about 10-15 people. And unfortunately, to my bank account at least, that’s always felt like enough.

I am very excited to get this play on its feet and travel around to all the cool kind people that have invited me to come perform it in their homes and businesses this year. But also, the feeling I felt after those three cool kind people came over to my apartment and liked the play last Saturday? That shit could sustain me for years.

And yet, here I am, intending to grow Thicket & Bramble into an actual robust company and quit my day job and tell stories full time. I’m wondering how I’m going to square that intention with the part of me that’s like “Wow! Three whole people liked my play! What more could I ask for? 😃”

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For those following along with me becoming a reader again after years of no books, I am now halfway through Acceptance, the third book in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series. I’m enjoying it quite a bit and have much to say. This newsletter is already getting long, so I won’t say much more here, but I am pleased to announce that this one has gay stuff in it.

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Happy belated May Day to you, fellow worker! You should unionize your workplace! Or help someone else unionizing theirs! If humans make it past the next 100-200 years, it’ll be because of the labor movement. That and mutual aid.

Okay??? Think about it. Unionizing is long, hard, frustrating work that often ends in failure. But also it is simply the case that if you get enough people at your job to say yes to a union, your boss legally has to let you make one.

Think about it!!

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I was ambling down a side street in my neighborhood at around 11 last night when I passed by a nice woman in about her 60s who stopped and struck up a conversation with me, there in the quiet dark. She was coming back from a screening of a documentary about the exact several block radius I’ve been living in the past four years. She’s lived in the area far longer. We talked about urban renewal and capitalism and community, then said goodnight.

It felt like a mystical encounter, but mostly it felt grounded and normal. This is the first time in my life where I’m starting to feel myself become a real member of a neighborhood. It’s good.

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That’s all for now, dear friends. Thank you for reading.

All of it is such a lot right now huh? I wish you moments of deep breathing tenderness, alone and with others.

Bye. Thank you for being here.

Gabriel Maria Rodriguez
they/them
Hudson Valley
5.3.2026
thicket-bramble.com