In a recent TheatreFace post, I wrote about my personal arts budget: the amount of money my wife and I spend on the arts in a given year. An astute comment by Scott Bloom, however, got me to thinking: I give a lot more to the arts than I realize.

I work as a playwright and theater commentator at least five days a week for a total of roughly 20-30 hours. Over the course of, oh, 48 weeks in a year (allowing for vacations), it adds up to approximately 1,250 hours of work. The amount of money I earn for all that labor... well, let's just say that the folks who did the Outrageous Fortune study weren't wrong when they suggested playwrights can't make a living at what they do. I haven't even come close to earning a minimum wage salary.

But I don't care. I mean, I do care; when all is said and done, I genuinely believe we should find a way, as a country, to put at least 5,000 playwrights on a half-time salary (with basic benefits) of, say, $20,000. (Just pulling numbers out of my head.) But that's a longer, different conversation. What I mean to suggest is that I know full well that we don't have such a system in place, and I still choose to be a playwright. I do it because I'm more interested in being of service to the world with my work as a writer than in getting rich.

So... what sort of donation does that represent? It's hard to calculate. Should I be earning a minimum wage for the hours I put in? In the state of Maryland, where I live, that would net me just over $9,000, which is more than I've actually earned so far this year as a playwright. Is the difference between those two numbers my donation to the arts?

I think it's actually more complicated than that. The fact of the matter is that, by not working full-time in my other career (I work in the interactive industry), I've given up a far more significant difference in salary. I won't go into numbers -- let there still be a LITTLE privacy in our world -- but suffice it to say that I could be earning a LOT more than I've been earning if I worked full time at my day job. (Incidentally, I've written two articles about my employment situation here and here, both of which you might find interesting.) This larger number, I believe, represents my donation, in some sense, to the arts.

How do we, as a society, value choices like the one I've made? I won't call it a sacrifice, because I honestly believe I get more out of my time on this planet by living this way than I would by living any other way, but it is a financial decision with financial repercussions. And I'm obviously not the only person making similar choices -- there are probably hundreds of thousands of us doing similar things.

I don't have any answers here, but I do think it's worth at least one moment of reflection, don't you?