Per the discussion about how wealth improves your chances of becoming an author and staying an author, watch any documentary about children's ballet schools. The kids that are "too late" because they couldn't afford classes at 3, 4, 5. The scholarship kids who only get one pair

of new pointe shoes a week, even though they could easily burn through three, because they can't afford more. The kids who don't have parents who can afford to take off work to shuttle them back and forth to rehearsal 6 days a week, the kids with raw talent who fall behind

because they can't afford intensives and extra pilates and secondary lessons. (Never mind the kids who just never made it because their bodies are wrong, their hips are too tight, they grew breasts, they got tall, they live in Indianapolis instead of Queens.)

Being wealthy doesn't make you a principal dancer. But being wealthy opens the doors, makes the opportunities, provides the extras that give the extra edge... and then gives these young artists the *time* to try and fail in one place, to try and succeed in another. Wealth also

makes it possible to bridge the gap from injury to health, for example, because wealth means these dancers aren't struggling to eat, balancing 18 hour days with two jobs they need for rent and insurance. Wealth means they had a chance to develop the interest in the first place.

If Time = Money, wealth gives you so much more time to discover your passion, to nurture it, to turn it from an intense hobby into a career... and it's worth noting that with dance, at least, most people expect you to get paid. There's no one who thinks dancing with a company

isn't a job, that the dancers should just be grateful to have a chance, that it's okay to make them dance The Nutcracker in December, and pay them for it in March (probably. Eventually. In two or three payments.) If Time = Money, then Money = the time to wait when you're

an author on submission, a dancer on audition. And this is only about the m o n e y-- it's not about all those things that make becoming an artist of any kind exponentially harder when you're BiPoC, queer, neurodivergent, disabled, because m o n e y has barred the door for so

long that the tastemakers now think that those "other" people just don't want to come through. Wealth is putting together a puzzle when you have all the pieces and guides to help you find corners. Poverty is having to find the pieces before you can start. Poverty times "other"

means teaching yourself what a puzzle is, then building the pieces, then solving the puzzle to reveal a falcon, then finding out that only pictures of bluebirds really count when you've never even seen one. That's art, that's writing, when you're poor.

and music and writing and