This section of Alex Wichtel's profile of Bart Sher leapt out at me when I read it Sunday. It doesn't exactly correspond to my life (I've zero desire to direct, and I run away from other people's chaos more often than not), but the recognition that one has to slog through acres of dreck to hit the high notes (or what Sher calls "pearly mist" - what separates art from proficiency) - yeah, that rings a bell.

"I just sucked in all the influences I could," he said, "and maybe only in the last 10 years processing all of these experiences, it's become what feels like my own voice."

Along with that comes the confidence to make mistakes. "When you've worked on something in rehearsal, you have to be brave enough to allow it to be pretty bad and not get overwhelmed by that," he said. "The thing about directing is it's really about managing a lot of very mostly damaged people. They're damaged in incredibly interesting and fantastic ways, including myself. But you have to have a very high level of love for how messy and screwy people are, and not be afraid to get messy when you're working with them. Everybody is going to have a moment of panic, anxiety and total terror, and the director has to be the sanest person in the room to help everybody through that. That may have been the mechanism I played in my own family. I would take everybody's chaos and help push through it."

He sighed. "I'm wondering now if I can trust how to find my way through it without taking in all that chaos. I am trying to change the emotional bed. But I also will say, I like having had it be so hard. I feel blessed in having had the upbringing I had because it was chaotic and difficult. I think that's made me a richer and more interesting person and gives me more insight and more compassion for the situations I'm in. I think that's an essential component of being a good artist."