It might be spring. Be cool.

All of a sudden, Spring

Several years ago, at just about this time of the year, I was sitting in the Dubliner Pub wailing over my cheap whiskey about how the winter was just about to do me in. The bartender assured me that it was almost over by pointing at a group of white guys with dreadlocks in the corner and saying, "You know it's Spring when the hippies come back to St. Paul."

I haven't yet seen any guys that look like they're waiting for a Phish concert to break out, but I know that they're out there somewhere, because winter has suddenly hightailed it for the door. I stepped outside my door this morning and put my foot down not in a jagged patch of ice, but in a soupy bog of mud, and I could almost hear the drumming circle starting down the highway.

The signs of Spring are everywhere. The Fringe Festival lottery has happened, and as the buds come back to the trees and the grass in my yard turns a lighter shade of brown, everyone who didn't get in the Fringe right away will while away the hours refreshing the wait list to see if they've moved up a slot. Open Eye Figure Theatre is readying their annual Driveway Tour. Soon, In the Heart of the Beast will want you to help them build the strange assemblage of paper mache that makes up the MayDay Parade. Friends, we are barreling headlong into a full-blown seasonal change, and there's not a damn thing you can do to stop it.

Which also means it's time for an insufferable number of people to crowd into the open-air patios of the restaurants, bars and coffee shops of whatever neighborhood will be considered cool this year. A while back, I bought a house up in Northeast Minneapolis, at a time when people literally told me, "Why would you do that? There's nothing up there!" Now my beautifully unhip life has been compromised by Northeast being voted the best arts district in the nation. Thanks, Art-A-Whirl. Now I have to swim through a sea of ironic tattoos and lumbersexuals to get anything done.

I guess it could be worse. We could have been voted one of the "coolest" neighborhoods in America. I'm sorry, Warehouse District. I'm so, so sorry.

Is it cool to stay in school?

But maybe I'm just bitter, because I'm incapable, right down to the genetic level, of being cool: I can't grow a mustache to save my life, I hate the taste of coffee, my feet are too big to fit through skinny jeans, and the construction of my face is such that I do not readily display either the aloof ennui or the adorable big-eyed awkwardness that apparently makes people interesting.

Or maybe it's because I just found out that the college degree I spent four years working for was a lame waste of money.

Last week, I shared with you an article that purported to demonstrate how a fancy theater degree like mine is still valuable, even if you don't end up working in theater. My, how a week changes things. This week, even though we apparently have reached a crisis level of under-trained American actors, there's word going around that BFAs and MFAs are nothing more than an elaborate pyramid scheme. Just when I had started to appreciate the BFA that finally finished paying for a decade after I got it, I learn things like playwrights don't actually work much as "playwrights" anymore

Granted, the article comparing MFA programs to Herbalife was specifically kvetching about the dance world, but it's quickly entered into the conversation about the value of any of those fancy-pants specialized arts degrees. Joe Patti at Butts in the Seats tried to split the difference between "Arts degrees let you do anything!" and "Arts degrees are for chumps!" but I'm not sure if he arrives anywhere.

Even though tuition is much higher than when I was in college back in the distant past of the early 2000s, the Great Recession has actually been pushing more people toward college enrollment, and I don't imagine all of those poor souls that find themselves chasing a BFA in theater are helped much by MOOCs.

I make part of my living by doing (and occasionally writing about) theater. (Hooray for the BFA!) But I make a good chunk of my income from fixing people's houses in my dayjob as a freelance carpenter. (Boo for that BFA!) So, has that degree helped me or screwed me over? I don't know; but I can tell you that at no time in my working life, whether when auditioning for a role or bidding on a repair job, has anyone ever asked me what my degree is. At least I'm not one of those poor souls trying to be an actor while dragging around six figures in college debt.

Sometimes theater pays off

Sometimes it does, indeed. Ask Michael Feingold, the great theater critic who spent three decades at the Village Voice until he was unceremoniously dumped in 2013, when the paper eliminated its full-time arts critics. Instead of wallowing in a funk, Feingold jumped right into the online world that was supposedly at fault for the elimination of his job by starting the criticism blog "Thinking About Theater" at TheaterMania. Now, Feingold has been awarded the prestigious Nathan Award for Criticism for the second time. It's also only the second time that the winner was someone writing on the web instead of print media.

Or look at Minneapolis' own Michelle Hensley, Artistic Director of Ten Thousand Things. Her company has reached thousands of people who might otherwise never see a play and gained national attention in the process. Now she has a book about the first two decades of TTT. (By the way, how was the the big book launch celebration?)

But you don't have to win awards or get your book published to have your theater work matter. Just ask the kids at Blaine High School, where new technology is helping special needs students find their way on to the stage.

So, here we are. It's spring again. Soon a new crop of fresh-faced youngsters will finish high school and set off into the wild to collect another round of arts degrees. May they do something good with them.

F*** it Dude, let's go LARPing

Or at least something interesting.

I've been predicting for a long time that theater is going to start moving toward more being more immersive. The public at large still thinks of "immersive theater" as being incomprehensible shows in cold warehouses where you can't sit down, but it doesn't have to be like that. You could, for example, stage a massive LARP of Hamlet in the real Castle Elsinore.